by Frank Wynne
The drawings were his secret. He spent all of his pocket money on pencils and paper. Pappa, he intuitively suspected, would not approve. He was ten years old when his father, livid that Han’s schoolwork seemed to be suffering, stumbled on the sketchpads. He ripped the drawings to shreds before the bewildered boy’s eyes.
‘I will not have a son of mine idling and dreaming his life away,’ Henricus spluttered with all the contempt he could muster. ‘What possible use do you think drawing will be to you when you become a man?’
Han shuffled his feet.
‘None! You will concentrate your energies on your studies.’
As punishment, his father had him write out a hundred times:
Ik weet niets, ik ben niets, ik kan niets
Ik weet niets, ik ben niets, ik kan niets
Ik weet niets, ik ben niets, ik kan niets
I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing.
Augusta Louise replaced her son’s sketchpad. She bought him crayons and pencils and encouraged his imagination. As best she could, she defended her children’s dreams against the thunderous pragmatism of his father. Each of the children developed their defences. Joanna, Han’s eldest sister, was devious and manipulative, constantly turning her father’s anger on her siblings. Hermann accepted his father’s will with a meek stoicism. Gussje, the youngest, tried her best to remain the baby of the house, cosseted and spoiled. Han channelled his frustration into practical jokes. It was he who inveigled a reluctant Hermann to break into the sacristy of their uncle’s church where the brothers got blissfully, riotously drunk on communion wine. Their crime went undetected until the following Sunday when, before church, their uncle realised the wine was missing. Han, eyes downcast, but with a flicker of a smile, confessed. Hermann was shamefaced.
It was a more daring prank that made Han a legend among the children of Deventer. Passing the local police station as he walked home from school one afternoon, he noticed the keys dangling in the lock, tinkling in the chill wind. The sleepy town was hardly a maelstrom of crime and calamity and the police were inside chatting and playing cards. Han crept up and silently locked the door. Slipping the key from the lock, he ran and tossed it into the canal. Then he crouched in a nearby garden and watched. Han knew, as everyone in the town did, that there was no other door. It was some minutes before one of the policemen tried to venture out on his rounds. Finding the door stuck, he cursed and swore and called his fellow-officers to help. A small crowd gathered, drawn by the commotion. For half an hour, the police hammered and yelled before an officer climbed out of a ground-floor window to find the door locked and the key missing. One by one, the embarrassed policemen emerged from the window. When a locksmith could not be found, they were forced to make a crude battering ram and break the door down.
News of the prank flitted around the playground, but no one knew the culprit. For Han, his triumph would not be complete until he was acknowledged; he boasted to his schoolmates. Word filtered back to Henricus, who marched his twelve-year-old son to the police station where Han confessed, a model of feigned contrition.
For all his bravura, he was a lonely child. He was awkward, gangling and fond of reading: philosophy, literature and history. He had little interest in sport and abhorred the rough-housing of other boys. When not compelled to be in school at prayer, he spent his time alone, sketching creatures from the vast bestiary of his imagination on the tablet his mother had given him. Time and again, he would give the fiercest lion in the pride the sullen, glowering features of his father and Hantje and pencil himself – a stick-figure with a chair and a whip – into the corner of the page, as if his father might be tamed.
2
THE ALCHEMY OF PAINTING
When my daughter was about seven years old,
she asked me what I did at work. I told her that
my job was to teach people how to draw.
She stared back at me, incredulous, and said,
‘You mean they forget?’
Howard Ikemoto
‘These,’ Bartus Korteling gestured to the wooden bench, ‘these are your tools.’ Han glanced up at his teacher, perplexed, then at his friend Willem who smiled, half-embarrassed by his father’s theatrical gesture.
Han had met Willem Korteling on his first day at the Hogere Burger School. Wim, too, liked to draw and to paint, and within weeks they were inseparable. Han would later admit that he was jealous of Wim, whose father, Bartus Korteling, was not only an art teacher, but a professional artist. When Wim boasted that he would grow up to be a painter too, Han believed him.
Han looked around, confused by Korteling’s cryptic remark. He stared at the wooden bench in the centre of the studio, but could see no paints, no palette, nothing he recognised. On the bench was a large slab of scuffed glass. Beside it, plump and stately, gleamed a heavy glass pestle like an exclamation mark carved in ice. Laid out along the bench were small heaps of clay, dull irregular stones and hunks of metal ore.
‘But . . .’ Han stammered, ‘but where are the paints?’
‘Precisely,’ beamed Korteling. ‘If you are to be an artist, you must understand the tools of your craft, you must know how to make your paints.’ Korteling smiled now at the boys. ‘Colour is not something that can simply be squeezed from one of these buizen the English have devised. It is something to be crafted, something you can make and control as did the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Rembrandt van Rijn did not buy his paints, nor Pieter Claesz, nor the Master of Delft, Jan Vermeer. They worked with stone and clay, with the grinding board and muller.’ He picked up the glass pestle; ‘They understood how the intensity of colour fades once paint has been mixed, how it dries to become unworkable, how it blanches in the light.’
He glanced at his new pupil. Han, a frail, slim boy, looked younger than his twelve years, but his eyes were large and expressive. The boy glanced around the studio. The light which poured in through the high windows illuminated several canvases stacked by the walls. On the easel sat a half-finished oil painting of a still life so real it seemed as though Han could reach in and touch the silver jug.
‘Do you know the paintings of Johannes Vermeer van Delft?’ Bartus asked.
Han nodded – though he knew little about artists, he had heard the name.
‘Have you been to the new Rijksmuseum? Have you seen The Milkmaid?’
Han shook his head. He had seen few paintings and had never been to Amsterdam, though he had heard of Pierre Cuypers’s complex of gardens and galleries which had opened a mere four years before he was born, whose soaring gothic towers incorporated fragments of historic buildings from all over the Netherlands.
‘The Milkmaid is perhaps the masterwork of the greatest Dutch master, and yet it was painted with perhaps ten colours – no more than a dozen. Vermeer’s skill was in combining few colours, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life.’
Korteling ran his finger along the bench, picking up the various ores, sifting the clays through his fingers.
‘Massicot, prepared from lead and tin, gave Vermeer his radiant yellow, ochres raw and burned for browns and reds gave warmth to his shadows.’
He picked up a shard of animal bone.
‘Bone black, made of the charred turnings of ivory. Green earth ground from celadonite. And this . . .’
Korteling held up a piece of jagged blue stone shot through with a filigree of gold.
‘Ultramarine, the costliest of colours, is ground from this stone. It is called lapis lazuli, worshipped by the ancient Egyptians and found only in rare mines of the Orient. Artists throughout history have used it sparingly because of its expense, but Vermeer preferred it over azurite and used it not only as a jewel but for the everyday raiment of the poor and dispossessed. This is the colour of his genius.’
Han stood spellbound, listening to the man recite names that seemed magical, trying to understand what strange alchemy might transform these dull lumps of clay
and stone into the brilliant colours he had seen in Korteling’s paintings; wondering how they might transform his own childish sketches into wonders.
Bartus Korteling was an autodidact whose training in art was limited to a number of night-school classes at the age of forty. Now, he was a moderately successful painter who had exhibited and even sold some of his work, achievements which Han found romantic and thrilling. As a painter and a teacher, Korteling was a traditionalist, in awe of the painters of the Dutch Golden Age; he had little time for contemporary artists, except for the romantic realism of Johan Jongkind and Jozef Israëls. Korteling was impressed by the facility of Han’s draughtsmanship, the intensity of his passion, his dawning realisation that art was an important part of Dutch history. Han already declared, with as much wistfulness as determination, that some day he would be a great artist.
Over the weeks and months, Han and Willem spent hours learning the arcane knowledge of the seventeenth century from Bartus. Korteling taught them how to prime the glass mortar using a paste of carborundum grit and water to provide sufficient traction or ‘tooth’. Only then could they begin to prepare pigments. Korteling taught the boys how ores and metals were heated and clays roasted, how lead could be oxidised in jars of weak vinegar and the white powder collected to make a dazzling pigment. Han and Willem spent their after-school hours grinding pigments, watching as the stone or ore yielded up its colour, adding alum or clay as a base to ‘lakes’ – paints which did not have enough bulk to be used directly. They learned how to roast cobalt ore to produce an oxide, melt it with quartz and potash, then pour the melt into cold water where it disintegrated into blue powder which was ground to make a pigment that could be used as a substitute for costly ultramarine. Bartus taught them that some pigments had to be ground for as much as an hour or more; others if ground too much would lose their brilliance and intensity. Every afternoon as he walked home, Han repeated this new rainbow like an incantation: vermilion, madder, carmine, weld, azurite, smalt.
What the boys were learning belonged to a tradition that had all but disappeared. Since 1842, when Winsor and Newton had patented the re-sealable paint tube, artists had increasingly bought their paints premixed. Industrial rollers ground pigments to a finer, more consistent powder and new colours like zinc white and cobalt blue, made possible by industrial chemistry, had replaced poisonous lead white and expensive ultramarine. Korteling admitted to his pupils that artists now bought their basic raw materials from chemists and artists’ suppliers but, he insisted, the ability to make his own paints was one of the great skills of a true artist. As Han would later discover, it is a tool invaluable to the forger.
In Han, Bartus Korteling quickly recognised an impressive talent. The boy was inquisitive and learned quickly but he was jealous and competitive, constantly vying with Willem. Han’s sketches were technically dazzling, but Korteling noticed that there was something superficial about his technique. Han always seemed to have half an eye on Willem’s work and if he was not consciously copying it, he was certainly using it as a model for his own.
‘You must begin to look beyond the surface,’ Bartus chided him, ‘you are a fine draughtsman, but you are too dazzled by your own technique.’
‘But I simply draw what I see . . .’ The boy was stung by even the mildest criticism.
‘And you have a keen eye and a confident brush, but you must not allow technique to be your master. To draw, even to draw well, is not enough – you cannot compete with the camera for sheer mechanical accuracy: nor should you. To be great, an artist must paint not simply surface light but what is inside, what he sees within his subject.’
‘But how will I know if I am great?’
‘Hard work, discipline and a respect for your subject. It is something you can feel, something you can sense in the portrait of even the most unworthy of Rembrandt’s subjects.’
Han tried to think like an artist, tried to see beyond the everyday to what was within. When he was fifteen, he brought a pastel drawing to Korteling which he thought captured everything his teacher had taught him. Like Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, his subject was a steam train; it came hurtling from a tunnel across a summer meadow of wild-flowers and grasses in a fury of energy and power. The pastel was crude, almost impressionistic: smoke erupting from the chimney, an angry glitter of sparks spraying from rails which glowed white-hot. This was technology at its crudest set against the raw simplicity of nature. Korteling, aware that Han was keenly sensitive to criticism, was kind.
‘It is a powerful piece – it has . . . energy, passion, perhaps some originality: but it is crude. You must control your passion.’
Han’s smile faded, and he looked down at his drawing, embarrassed now by its childish rawness.
‘You’ve allowed yourself to move away from perspective, to draw things as a child might . . .’ Korteling went on.
‘You said I should paint what I feel . . .’
‘Indeed, indeed – but it must be tempered with intellect, you must be master of your emotions and not they of you. I’ve no doubt you are tempted by these new artists, by the superficial dazzle of these “Impressionists”, but it is a passing fashion.’
Han did not argue. Korteling was his only ally and over the years the teacher had become a friend and mentor whose support and encouragement went some way to compensate for his father’s scorn and contempt. It was in Korteling’s books of monographs and reproductions of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age, that Han found the space to dream that the spark of talent within him might grow into something.
As adolescence began to course through his shy and awkward body, Han, who had never summoned the courage to speak to a girl, discovered he could create his own. His classmates, who had always teased him about his art, suddenly noticed that every sketch he drew seemed to be a nude. Han always pictured these girls from behind, lavishing much care and attention on the curve and heft of their buttocks. When one boy asked to ‘borrow’ some of Han’s drawings, Han hesitated. Though Korteling had always impressed upon him that the nude was an entirely respectable subject in art, Han was in no doubt that what his friend intended to do with them was far from respectable.
‘I–I don’t think so . . .’ Han mumbled.
‘OK, then – I’ll buy them from you.’
Han was stunned. It had never occurred to him that anyone might want to buy his work.
‘I’ll give you five florins.’
Though he worried that his friend’s parents might not approve, the sheer pleasure of being offered money for his work outweighed his fear and Han sold the sketches. Suddenly his love of art, for which he had always been teased and bullied, was in constant demand. His finest hour was one he would never tire of telling to his own children.
‘One day one of the seniors came up to me – Walter, his name was, he was tall with ginger hair and was a fine footballer. He was one of the most popular boys in school. He’d never even spoken to me before. He had seen some of my drawings and offered me a week’s pocket money if I would draw some sketches of his girlfriend and leave them unsigned. He wanted to take the credit for the drawings himself.
‘I thought it was amusing, but I was flattered that he wanted to pretend to have my gift to impress his girlfriend. So I sketched her – she was a pretty girl with a freckled face. I had kissed her once at a Christmas party.
‘After he had shown her the drawings, I even thought about telling her that I was the artist – but I never did.’
Thirty years later, still proud of his role as Cyrano, Han would say, ‘You know, she married Walter in the end.’
Han’s own first love was a pretty girl named Thea who worked in a restaurant overlooking the Ijssel and lived on a barge on the river. Han watched her from afar, sketched her and showed the result to her. She was impressed; she even let him kiss her once or twice. Han asked if she would come and sit for him on Sundays so that he could paint her portrait. She should wear her blue and white dress, he suggested, with her hair l
oose over her shoulders. He prepared his materials, bought a small canvas, and even managed to steal some lapis lazuli from Korteling’s studio to make ultramarine. Han was more in love with the portrait than with Thea. She sat for him only once, quickly bored by the monotony of holding a pose. Han tried to complete it from memory but failed. Twenty years later he would still speak of the Girl in a Blue Dress as his first rejection.
One day during their final year at the Hogere Burger School, Wim asked Han where he was going to study art. ‘Maybe we could study together. My father says I should study in Delft, maybe you could go there too.’ Han was touched that Wim had assumed that they would both be students of art. In fact, Han had given his future little thought. He knew that everything had already been decided. Henricus had always insisted that Han would study mathematics and qualify as a teacher.
‘I don’t know – I mean, I’d like to. I’ll have to talk to my father.’
Han did not even know how to begin such a conversation. His brother Hermann had already left home for a seminary, browbeaten into studying for the priesthood. It was folly to think of talking to his father about studying art. Henricus had made no secret of his distaste for Han’s vain, frivolous pastime, and had been as good as his word, destroying Han’s paintings and sketches whenever he happened on them.
In the spring of 1907, Han steeled himself and told his father that he wished to study art. Henricus, marshalling his most thunderous glare and spluttering bombast, refused even to consider the idea. Han tried to stand his ground but withered in the face of his father’s fury. It was only when his mother interceded that Henricus – uncharacteristically – suggested a compromise: while there was no question of Han studying fine art, Henricus agreed that the boy might put this idle talent for drawing to good use and study architecture, a profession which just met Henricus’s threshold of respectability. He would finance his son’s studies only if Han would commit to finishing the six-year course in five. Han eagerly agreed. It was Bartus who suggested that the boys could still study together. Han could take architecture at the Technische Hogeschool – the Institute of Technology in the cradle of the Dutch Golden Age: Delft.