I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  Han threw himself into a detailed research of letterpress and offset printing. Being intelligent and inventive, he was at first fascinated by the limitations of printing and went so far as to devise a method of his own which, he claimed, would obtain the same results from a two-colour process of blended inks, thereby saving publishers money on plate-making and printing. Taking a number of illustrations which demonstrated the invention, he returned to the editor who was impressed by Han’s determination, but doubtful that this ingenious twocolour offset process would work. He asked if he could show the samples to his printer. Han spent a week in excited anticipation of the commissions that would result from his discovery. He was stunned when the editor informed him that the printer had advised that the process was impossible; furthermore, that they doubted that Han had used only two inks in creating the illustrations. In the first year of his marriage, Han did not earn a single florin from his pen.

  Han cursed the entire profession of publishers and printers as charlatans and philistines. It had been a mistake, he told Anna, to ever prostitute his talent for the common coinage of commercial art. He was an artist, a great artist. Anna sighed; though heavily pregnant, she had done her best to support and encourage Han in his attempts to find work but in their short time together she had become accustomed to her husband’s mood veering between unbridled optimism and cavernous despair. She was in awe of his talent but frustrated that he seemed so impractical. He clearly had ambition but was too thin-skinned to deal with even the slightest criticism.

  When Han told her he had abandoned commercial illustration and was working on something for the Institute of Technology, Anna was relieved. ‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ she said gently, ‘you need to concentrate on your studies, you have your finals soon.’

  Han snorted. ‘I’m not worried about the exams – I’m quite sure I will pass. No, that’s not what I was talking about. I’ve decided to enter for the Institute Gold Medal.’

  The quinquennial Gold Medal awarded by the Technische Hogeschool, adjudicated by some of the foremost figures in fine art, was intended to honour a single work by a student, which in their considered opinion represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement. The prize had no monetary value, but the prestige and honour it conferred could launch an artist’s career. Graduates from the past decade were customarily encouraged to submit their finest work for the prize. If he entered, Han would be the only candidate with no formal training.

  ‘No, Hantje,’ she said firmly, ‘where will you find the time? The baby is due in November, your finals are in December and this masterpiece would have to be completed by January. It’s too much. How will we survive with a small child if you fail? Your father certainly won’t support us.’

  ‘I don’t need my father’s money, Anna. By the time the baby comes, I will have finished the picture and can concentrate on my finals. I’ll be an architect and an artist!’

  As his subject, Han chose something which was startling in its ambition: a watercolour of the interior of the St Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. The interplay of lines and arches allowed him to draw on the skills he had acquired in his architectural studies, tested his eye for detail and offered him ample freedom to display his dazzling near-photographic technique. He wanted to capture not only the restrained Brabantine gothic style, but also a sense of spirituality, of worshipful tranquillity. He quickly realised that mere architectural detail would overwhelm the picture and decided instead to work in the style of Johannes Bosboom, the nineteenth-century Dutch romantic realist famous for his church interiors. In fact, his composition was disturbingly reminiscent of Bosboom’s brooding, almost monochrome Choirloft of the Grote Kerk in The Hague which Han had seen in the Gemeentemuseum.

  The initial drawing was a tour de force, capturing in intricate detail the complex tracery of towering stone, but it was too meticulous, too formal, too cold. Han spent whole days in the magical half-light of the St Laurenskerk, sketching the choir loft, the high altar, the soaring nave of the cruciform basilica, struggling to catch some quality of light, trying – as he explained to Anna – to capture ‘the sound of a Bach chorale in light’.

  In November, when Jacques was born, the watercolour was still not completed and Han felt frustrated, trapped, overwhelmed. Abruptly, he abandoned his painting of the Laurenskerk, in a panic; Anna had been right and he would be neither architect nor artist. He settled down to study for his finals. In the evening glow of the attic rooms in Rijswijk, he watched Anna nursing Jacques, a tableau vivant of Madonna and Child, and prepared for his next examination. He felt happier now, more confident. Once he had passed his exams, he reasoned, he could work as an architect for a few years and slowly build his career as an artist. When the results were published, Han was crushed to learn that he had failed.

  A week later, as meekly as his bristling anger would allow, he stood before Henricus in his father’s study in Deventer.

  ‘And what precisely do you expect from me?’ asked his father. ‘I agreed to sponsor your folly in studying architecture if you were prepared to work. Instead, you idle away your time drinking and carousing, you get a girl in trouble and – against my better judgement -1 give my blessing to your marriage. Now you expect me to support your wife and your bastard child?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to support my family,’ Han said, ‘I have been discussing the possibility of work as an illustrator for one of the newspapers in The Hague.’

  ‘I might have guessed you would be doodling again. Art is the root of all your troubles.’

  Han hung his head, feeling a queasy sense of déjà vu, remembering himself in this very room when he was ten years old, the ache in his hand as he scrawled, over and over: Ik weet niets, ik ben niets, ik kan niets; I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing.

  He babbled excuses and promised his father he would devote himself entirely to his studies if only Henricus would continue to pay his allowance for another year. His father demurred. He could not condone Han’s failure but he agreed to lend Han the money at the standard banking interest rate if he would agree to abandon the foolish notion of being an artist. The money was to be repaid immediately Han secured work as an architect. Han nodded and for the first time in his life he doubted himself – perhaps his father was right, perhaps art was nothing more than a trivial idiocy: look at the childish daubs that passed for genius nowadays.

  When Han returned to Rijswijk, it was Anna who persuaded him to finish the watercolour of the Laurenskerk. Taking it from his folio and placing it on the easel, Han could immediately see what was missing: sunlight. Suddenly animated, he explained to Anna and the baby as it burbled in her arms how he would warm the charcoal shadows of the stone with an umber wash and describe a torrent of sunlight from the stained-glass windows of the nave flooding the transept with a numinous golden glow.

  When it was finished, they stood and looked at it.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ murmured Anna.

  ‘Not perfect, no – nothing is ever quite as you imagine it – but I think it is complete.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she murmured again.

  A Study of the Interior of the Laurenskerk was unanimously awarded the Gold Medal by the judges of the Delft Afdeling Algemene Wetenschappen van de Technische Hogeschool in January 1913. Passing over entrants dabbling in the hazy waters of Impressionism, the coveted honour was bestowed on a resolutely traditional watercolour by a young man with no formal artistic training. Perhaps the judges were trying to shore up art against the rising tide of modernism and were overjoyed to see in Han’s watercolour the legacy of the nineteenth century.

  Though Han received no money with the award, the study – a genuine van Meegeren – sold for the extraordinary sum of a thousand guilders, the equivalent of almost six thousand dollars today. At last, he was officially an artist – the greatest Dutch artist of the last five years. Perhaps, after all, he was a genius.

  As soon as he had won, Han told his wife he was abandoning his architectural
studies. Despite his promise to his father, he had no intention of re-sitting his final exams, though he was shrewd enough not to inform Henricus of his decision since the family still needed the allowance. Anna, who had grown fond of her gruff father-in-law, was worried – especially as Henricus’s allowance was intended as a loan.

  Han sneered. ‘The man is a boor, he deserves everything he gets. Fleecing philistines by fair means or foul is common sense in my book. Father would never allow me to be an artist. Remember how he treated Hermann?’ Anna said nothing. She knew her husband would never forgive his father for forcing Hermann to return to the seminary; for his part, as Han saw it, in Hermann’s death.

  It may have been Anna’s misgivings or his increasing confidence in his future as an artist that eventually persuaded Han to confront his father. When Henricus learned that Han had no intention of re-sitting his exams, he was furious, but his rage turned to apoplexy when Han told him he intended to enrol in the Hague Academy to take the degree in fine art which would give him the standing and the recognition to earn his living as an artist. Henricus curtly informed him he would not get another penny in support.

  ‘I don’t need your money,’ Han snapped, ‘I shall sit my exams in my first year; after that I shall earn my living as an artist.’

  The Hague Academy was bewildered and dismissive that a student wished to enrol merely to sit his final exams, but having interviewed this curious young man and reviewed his portfolio they agreed that he would be permitted to sit the exams the following summer. In the meantime, the Delft Gold Medal ensured a steady stream of commissions, but Han was surprised and disappointed that his work commanded so little in comparison with the fortune paid for the Laurenskerk study. His first painting, a portentous portrait of a prominent businessman in the style of Rembrandt, earned him barely sixty guilders. It was enough, if Han were diligent, to make a living. At first, Han was excited by the opportunities that portraiture offered; he wanted to explore his subject’s character, bring to light the timorous or injured soul of the sitter. But his patrons were not interested in his psychological insights – as a plain but affluent burgher informed him in no uncertain terms: ‘My husband is not paying you to paint me as I am, but as I ought to be!’

  ‘I don’t know what the woman expects,’ Han fumed to Anna. ‘Doesn’t she realise I’m an artist? No – not an artist, the finest Dutch artist of the last five years. I’m not some hired sycophant.’

  As the months passed, Han, disillusioned with the work, began to spend his days wandering the canals, sketching the flower barges and the carts, the fishermen at the port. He refused to go back to the Institute of Technology and study for his exams and twice became so distracted by his sketching that he forgot that there was a sitter waiting for him in his Rijswijk studio.

  Anna became desperate. The couple had little money, the accounts with the grocer and the butcher went unpaid and months passed without a commission. Local shopkeepers began to refuse her credit. Finally, she was forced to borrow money from her grandmother to tide them over. When she told Han, he seemed unconcerned.

  ‘We have to eat, Anna. I am an artist – the least I can expect is to be able to eat as well as a stevedore. In fact, I deserve to live at least as well as the bourgeois fools I’m forced to paint.’

  Seeing her glare at him, her sensuous lip quivering with humiliation, he smiled. ‘Don’t worry – we will pay her back soon enough. I am working on a commission which will pay off all our debts and leave us with money to spare.’

  Anna looked at him questioningly, but Han simply smiled and shook his head, touching his finger to his lips. He had never been secretive about his work. In fact, he had always admired the fact that his wife had a degree in fine art and could discuss his work intelligently. So it was that, some days later, Anna crept into the studio to see what Han was working on. She was surprised to discover a watercolour almost identical to his prize-winning Interior of the Laurenskerk on his easel.

  It is not a crime to copy a work of art. For centuries, artists have learned their craft by imitating the works and the techniques of great artists until they have absorbed the lessons of the masters. Into old age Rubens copied and improved on the work of those he admired. Delacroix, despite his meteoric career, numbered more than a hundred copies of paintings by Raphael and Rubens among his work. Nor is a copy necessarily a lesser painting than an original: in 1976, Christie’s auctioned two near-identical paintings. Approaching Storm by Willem van de Velde, an artist whom Turner had complained was a better painter than he could be, fetched £65,000; Approaching Storm, in the manner of Willem van de Velde the Younger, by J.M.W. Turner, sold for £340,000. Artists copy the pictures of those they admire, those they aspire to, acknowledged masters whose work embodies everything they hope to achieve. Han’s acknowledged master was himself.

  When Anna confronted him about the painting, Han was short-tempered and defensive. ‘It’s hardly unknown for an artist to revisit a subject,’ he quipped dryly, ‘besides, the study of the Laurenskerk earned me twenty times more than the fawning portraits I’ve been forced to paint.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ Anna said gently. ‘Of course an artist often returns to the same subject, but this is more than that: it looks almost identical to your first study. Is it a commission?’

  ‘Of a sort,’ Han said equivocally, ‘it’s for a foreign collector who is passing through Delft. He was very impressed by my original.’

  ‘But you’re not selling it to him as the original, surely.’

  ‘What if I am?’ Han was indignant now. ‘It’s every bit as good as the original – better in my opinion, my technique and my ability are greater now than when I won the Gold Medal. He’s getting a better painting and I’m not charging him a guilder more.’

  ‘Han, you can’t – it’s dishonest – it’s a forgery.’

  ‘How can it be a forgery? I’m not deceiving anybody. It’s my own work, a genuine van Meegeren. Is it aesthetically inferior to the original? Will he derive less pleasure from it? If you put the two side by side, no critic alive would be able to tell which was the original and which the copy. The man is buying the painting not the medal – in any case, he’s only here for a few weeks, so he’ll never know.’

  Anna was forced to agree that the new study was as beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than his original. Why then, she asked, would he wilfully misrepresent it? It was dishonest, worse, it was unworthy of him. Here was a collector who was truly an admirer of his work. Surely, Anna argued, he would not balk at paying a thousand guilders for a more brilliant work by the same artist. Embarrassed that he had doubted himself, and encouraged by his wife’s unshakeable faith, Han eventually agreed.

  Anna offered to negotiate with the buyer, but Han insisted on going himself. Even then, he felt compelled to lie to save face, telling the buyer that he had made the second study because he could not bear to be parted from the original. The buyer nodded sympathetically but amended his original proposition: rather than the thousand guilders agreed, he offered Han eighty.

  In the summer of 1914, Han confidently took his seat among the veteran students in the magisterial examination hall at the Hague Academy. This, he thought, was his final rite of passage. With a degree from the finest academy in the land, he would command the attention of critics and dealers, he could apply to join the Hague Kunstring, and finally begin to carve out a career for himself. He was stunned and angered when, after his first exam, the adjudicators awarded him an ‘insufficient’ for his portraiture.

  Han was at his best when indignant. His final exam was to be a still life. He arrived in the academy library to find an antique vase and silver candelabrum set out on a small table. It was a subject he had painted a dozen times in the styles of Pieter Claesz, of Jan de Heem, of Willem van Aelst. He quickly sketched the outline of the painting then, looking up, he focused on the invigilators. Here were the men who had thought his portraiture ‘insufficient’. In accordance with regulations, all of
the academy professors were required to invigilate, sitting behind a long oak table under the vaulted ceiling like a tableau vivant. Han set aside his sketch and began again.

  It was a tour de force: at the centre, the requisite still life, daylight gleaming on the candlestick, the labyrinthine cracks in the porcelain of the antique ewer. Behind it, he had painted full portraits of each of his professors, some attentive, others indolent, each a miniature in the grand Dutch style. Behind his judges, the great library itself: the magnificent stone archway flanked by walls of scholarly tomes of leather and gilt. It was a magnum opus, a prank, an act of insolence, a plea for acceptance. The astonished examiners awarded Han a prize for his audacious ‘still life’, and hung his painting prominently in the halls of the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten.

  On 4 August 1914, Han graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He barely noticed that it was the very day that Germany invaded Belgium and Britain declared war.

  5

  THE DRINKING PARTY

  Painting: the art of protecting

  flat surfaces from the weather

  and exposing them to the critic.

  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  Han watched as the last still life was hung, stepping back to gaze at the gallery walls. On the far wall, a splinter of sunlight picked out a graceful charcoal sketch of Anna, half-turned, sultry and exotic as on the first day he had seen her. As tradesmen carried in crates of wine and beer, he paced the elegant, intimate corridors of the Kunstzaal Pictura, where for a month his work was to be displayed. In a few short hours, the rooms would be filled with friends and family, prospective buyers, critics from the national press. A wave of dread thrilled through him: the opening night of his first solo exhibition.

  Anna had arranged everything in a desperate bid to save their foundering marriage. In the months after Han’s graduation more than two years earlier, he had disdainfully turned down the offer of a professorship at the Hague Academy – a position which would have offered the family financial security. Europe was at war and though Holland was neutral, thousands of young men, some much younger than Han, signed up to fight. Han’s only interest in the war was artistic: he dreamed of being sent to the front line, like a modern-day Goya, to catalogue the horrors of war, but photography had robbed him of that imagined glory. The commissions he expected to crown his success failed to materialise – in wartime, art was a frivolous extravagance – and some months later Han was forced to go cap in hand to the academy for a part-time position. Though the salary was poor, it was enough for Han and Anna to move out of her grandmother’s house and finally set up a home of their own in Han’s beloved Delft.