I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  Restoration is one of the surest

  methods scientifically to substitute

  new paintings for the old ones.

  Etienne Gilson

  Han nurtured his betrayal as a gardener might a delicate orchid. Although the last years of his marriage had been wretched, he missed his children whom he loved in a maudlin, desultory way. In the first months after their divorce, he was diligent in visiting Paris to see his Jacques and Inez but increasingly he embraced a dissolute bachelorhood. He painted little, dashing off commercial work to subsist, constantly failing to send maintenance to Anna. Han wallowed in his failure. Critics were corrupt and ignorant, art dealers were swindlers and philistines, women were treacherous and peevish. This he would tell anyone who would listen.

  Fortunately, his two closest friends harboured disillusionment and dissipation that rivalled his own. Jan Ubink was a poet with a number of slim volumes to his credit. That he made his living from tabloid journalism he attributed to benighted critics and readers who failed to recognise his talent. Theo van Wijngaarden, like Han, was an artist of the old school but he had failed to achieve even Han’s modest success and made his living as a restorer of old masters. Night after night, over endless cigarettes, wine and absinthe, they pooled their bitterness and their disappointment and revelled in the revenge fantasies of the impotent.

  Han suggested to Theo that they might work together. He was drawn to the idea of art restoration, to a fantasy of discovering and painstakingly restoring lost masterpieces of the Golden Age. Van Wijngaarden, who already knew Han’s work, was impressed by his knowledge of seventeenth-century techniques, his ability to analyse and create pigments, his attention to detail and his understanding of the brushstrokes of the masters. Theo’s contacts and his snake-oil charm coupled with Han’s exhaustive knowledge of the techniques and raw materials of the Golden Age made for an ideal partnership. They travelled together frequently – to Germany, Italy, anywhere in fact where Theo thought there was a bargain to be had. Han was fascinated by the work which allowed him to make use of the arcane alchemy he had learned from Bartus Korteling and transform the workmanlike canvases which Theo found in flea markets and junk shops into fresh and vibrant works of art.

  The profession of the restorer is an honourable one, but the line between restoration and repainting is slender and shifting and many a restorer has crossed it to censor or to ‘improve’. Even those works which are part of our cultural subconscious, works which we know intimately even if we have never seen them, are not immune to the restorer’s brush. When Michelangelo completed The Last Judgement, the monumental fresco for the altar of the Sistine Chapel, the figures were naked. Pope Paul Ill’s adviser Biagio da Cesena was shocked by this ‘shameless display of flesh’, sneering that the painting was ‘not for the chapel of a pope, but for a bathhouse or tavern’. After Michelangelo’s death, Pope Paul IV issued an edict forbidding the painted nude and commissioned Michelangelo’s apprentice Daniele da Volterra to primly cover the genitals. (El Greco, to whom he first offered the commission, disliked Michelangelo’s masterpiece and would accept only if he could paint an entirely new fresco.) As recently as 1993, when the fresco was last restored, it was decided to preserve da Volterra’s wisps of cloth and protect us from the naked truth. More famous still is the legend of the Mona Lisa’s eyebrows. When Vasari wrote his description of da Vinci’s portrait, he commented on her ‘uncommonly thick’ eyebrows. Since anyone who has been to the Louvre knows that La Joconde has no eyebrows, it has been suggested that the injudicious use of a solvent during seventeenth-century restoration removed them completely (though the competing theory that Italian women of the period commonly shaved their eyebrows and that Vasari wrote his description without ever seeing the portrait of Lisa Gherardini is more compelling).

  Prudishness and error, however, are as nothing compared to the damage done to paintings in the name of commerce. Over the centuries, hundreds of reverential studies of the Holy Family have been ‘restored’ by painting out the figure of Joseph and cutting down the canvas to create a much more saleable Madonna and Child. Often, a painting that is thought too crude, too visceral to appeal to a buyer may need the subject to be subtly shifted. When Lucas Cranach’s Salomé holding the head of John the Baptist was restored, the saint’s bleeding head on the salver was overpainted with gold and precious jewels. The canvas, now retitled The Goldsmith’s Daughter, quickly found a buyer. Even the patron who commissions a portrait is not safe: twentieth-century X-rays discovered that Sir Joshua Reynolds’s graceful study of the Payne sisters seated at the piano was in fact a portrait of Mrs Payne and her daughters. The rather plain elderly lady had been overpainted by a restorer to fashion a more saleable canvas. Mrs Payne mère has since been returned to her rightful place.

  Wittingly or unwittingly restorers down the centuries have ‘improved’ upon works of art. The Barberini Venus, one of the most famous sculptures in the world and said to be ‘so beautiful that she inspires love in all who see her’ is a Roman copy of a Greek original. When it was bought by the bankercum-art dealer Thomas Jenkins, the head, the right arm and left forearm were missing. The goddess of love had even lost part of one buttock. The statue is a cut-and-shunt: Jenkins had the sculpture ‘restored’ by the leading Roman restorer of the day, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who attached a corseless head to the headless body. Unfortunately, the only suitably sized head he had in stock was a representation of Agrippina wearing a veil. Cavaceppi had to chisel away the veil to reveal the face, and trimmed the neck to fit the torso. He grafted the missing limbs on to the statue, coyly placing Venus’s hand over her pudenda (an unlikely pose in Roman times). Thomas Jenkins brought the Venus back to England where he sold it to William Weddell of Newby Hall as an original. When Christie’s offered it for sale in 2002 (happily admitting the extent of the restoration), it almost quadrupled its estimate to fetch $11,800,000, the highest price ever achieved for any antiquity at auction.

  But if restoration is the handmaiden to Fine Art, she is also the midwife to forgery. In Drawn to Trouble, the forger Eric Hebborn recounts his apprenticeship working for the art restorer George Aczel at Haunch of Venison Yard. Hebborn proved an excellent student, quickly mastering the art of restoration, learning to gently ‘improve’ on mediocre daubs, to discover beauty in muddy shadows, even a signature where none existed. One morning, Aczel arrived with a dealer who placed a canvas on Hebborn’s easel. The dealer was enthusiastic about his find.

  ‘Aczel, old boy, I’ve made an exciting discovery – what do you think of this Van de Velde?’

  ‘Very interesting,’ replied Aczel, ‘very interesting indeed. I think it’s a job for Mr Hebborn here. What do you say, Eric?’

  ‘Van de who?’ asked Hebborn.

  ‘It is a Van de Velde, Eric, and a very fine one I should say, wouldn’t you?’ He turned back to the dealer.

  ‘Not too fine, not too fine, something for the small collector I imagine. After all it needs fairly extensive restoration and the museum people might be finicky. Then there’s the problem of attribution. On the other hand, if the signature should appear during the cleaning . . .’

  Hebborn stared at the canvas. It was completely blank.

  Han’s foray into restoration was not without incident. In 1923, Theo acquired two remarkable seventeenth-century paintings in an advanced state of disrepair: one depicted a young cavalier, the other a boy smoking a pipe. Like art dealers throughout the ages, van Wijngaarden saw only the worst in what he bought and the best in what he sold: if a seller arrived with what appeared to be a Rembrandt sketch, Theo would disparage the piece, suggest it might be a copy – anything, in fact, that might drive down the price; if, on the other hand, a buyer expressed interest in purchasing a genre piece in the manner of Pieter de Hooch, Theo had no compunction in telling the credulous soul that in his professional opinion it was indeed a de Hooch – and, after all, perhaps it was.

  The Laughing Cavalier and The Satisfied Smoker, though mu
rky and badly damaged, were clearly in the style of Frans Hals, and Theo was convinced they were by the master himself and he trusted that Han’s deft brushwork would restore the paintings to their former glory.

  Han carefully removed several layers of tinted varnish and a number of clumsy previous attempts at restoration. It was a difficult and fastidious process. The Laughing Cavalier was painted in oil on panel and the board had split with centuries of wear. When he stepped back to assess the painting, he realised that there were large areas where almost all of the paint had flaked or disappeared over the years. Sections of the portrait would have to be almost entirely remodelled.

  Han worried about the extent of the repainting. Although oil paint is dry to the touch within three days, it takes as long as fifty years for the medium to completely evaporate and the surface to truly harden. Han knew that any prospective buyer would use the standard test, swabbing an inconspicuous corner of an old painting with cotton wool soaked in alcohol, or holding the wad above the surface of the canvas where the fumes would cause any new paint to soften. He showed the painting to Theo and explained his concern; Theo assured him that he would explain which areas had been restored to any prospective buyer, but suggested Han use oil of lavender rather than linseed oil as a medium since, being more volatile, it would mask the extent of the restoration.

  Han quickly and easily identified the pigments he needed and created small, hand-ground batches indistinguishable from the original paint layer. His long years studying the Golden Age and his passion as an apprentice for imitating the works of the masters gave him an understanding of Hals’s rapid brushstrokes, his dramatic shading and the characteristic silvery sheen of his work, so different from the golden glow of a Rembrandt. Slowly, the portrait took shape again, as if instead of applying paint, Han was gently lifting a veil. When it was complete Han felt oddly elated: it was as perfect a recreation of the Lachende Kavalier as he could imagine. It was his work, and yet it was a genuine painting of the Golden Age.

  Theo had the picture taken for authentication to one of the foremost art historians, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, former deputy-director of the Mauritshuis and a critic instrumental in defining the oeuvre of both Rembrandt and Vermeer. De Groot authenticated the painting and offered a certificate praising it as an ‘exceptionally fine Frans Hals’. Based on this categorical attribution, it was offered to Muller & Co, a reputable auction house, who bought the painting for 50,000 florins – more than $160,000 today.

  The auctioneers took the unusual step of having the painting re-authenticated by Abraham Bredius, the great expert on Dutch baroque painting. Bredius immediately dismissed the painting as a forgery, citing the fact that large areas of paint surface reacted to the alcohol test. Alarmed, the auctioneers returned to de Groot, insisting that he assume one-third of their losses. De Groot refused to accept financial liability, and restated his conviction that the painting was genuine. A panel of experts was convened to study the painting and detected extensive recent repainting; in the surface layer, they also discovered traces of artificial ultramarine, cobalt blue and zinc white, pigments which were not produced until the nineteenth century. In addition, two of the nails which held the circular panel together were clearly nineteenth-century. While de Groot accepted that these were merely evidence of recent restoration, the committee determined that The Laughing Cavalier was a forgery and de Groot bought the painting for his private collection.

  Two years later, in 1925, when de Groot published Echt of Onecht (Genuine or Forgery), he was still convinced that the Hals was genuine. He argued that though the original blue in the painting would have been ultramarine, the cobalt blue was the result of later restoration; he insisted that zinc white, far from being an invention of the nineteenth century, had been used by the ancient Greeks and that an artist like Hals would have known how to make it himself. The two nails, he suggested, had been replaced by the restorer who had revarnished the painting. As to the panel itself, de Groot maintained: ‘It is perfectly in keeping, the parquetry is the result of a repair carried out years, perhaps centuries, later. Most old masters painted on board show signs of parquetry of old and newer wood.’

  Theo was furious that Bredius’s denunciation had cost him a lucrative commission, but Han was devastated; the public wrangling confirmed his belief that the ‘expert opinion’ of critics amounted to little more than a certified hunch. A critic might be fallible, and yet there was no recourse against his judgement. The fate of a painting, of an artist, could rest on one man’s instinct.

  Though Karel and Joanna de Boer divorced in 1923, it was not until 1927 that Han finally married his mistress. She was beautiful, famous, intelligent and artistic and her faith in Han’s talent was unshakeable. Like Anna, Jo could make Han believe in himself, but she was also happy to indulge Han’s whims. She did not nag him when he went drinking with Jan and Theo, did not question him about the pretty girls her friends said they had seen on his arm. In the words of Han’s friend Van Genderren Stort, Joanna was the perfect muse for Han: ‘She was his mother, his daughter, his friend, his lover, his secretary, his protector and his model.’ He began to see more of his children. Jacques, now fifteen, often came from Paris to spend the holidays with his father. The boy was a promising artist and Han was overjoyed that he could encourage and support his son. Jacques came with him to the bars and cafés, where Jan and Theo, the poet manqué and the restorer, listened as his father held forth persuasively on the decadence of modern art and the ills of critics and dealers. The faithful snickered and grunted their agreement, but the art world seemed to move on inexorably without them.

  It was Jan Ubink who suggested that they redress the balance by publishing a monthly journal which would offer the traditionalist a forum in which to coolly appraise fashionable ideas of modern art. Despite the slings and arrows he had endured as a poet, Ubink still had a touching faith in Bulwer-Lytton’s maxim: ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.’

  The first issue of their art review De Kemphaan (The Gamecock) was published in 1928. Han’s cover illustration depicted the art critic as a sneering Fascist wearing a monocle. Jan wrote the impassioned editorial: ‘One of the tasks we have set ourselves is to draw attention to the great guiding principles. Obviously, we will lay ourselves open to spiteful comments, because we shall not hesitate to call to order everyone who mistakes his slum for a metropolis or his garden path for a transcontinental highway.’

  A dozen or more columnists (in fact the triumvirate wrote all of the articles using numerous noms de plume) derided every artist who had put brush to canvas since Delacroix and Géricault almost a century earlier. To the first issue, Han contributed an ugly, sneering caricature of ‘modern artists’:

  Their posturing has created a recognisable stereotype with an intense, lingering gaze, ditto handshake and a curious gait. Though they vaunt their objectivity, they kowtow to the snobs and the nouveaux riches they meet among the plebs. They are surrounded by acolytes, parasites, and proselytes; writers of introductions, assistant governors of lunatic asylums, prophets of painting, necromancers, ersatz philosophers and hypocrites. They are protected from the meddlesome public by idiots, racketeers, impresarios and opportunists.

  The slimy little group of women-haters and negro-lovers (the avant-garde of pan-European style) is a little too immoral to be discussed here.

  De Kemphaan was published to general indifference for less than a year. That his barbs failed to rock the foundations of the art establishment surprised only Han. The small Dutch art community was accustomed to his jeremiads and interpreted them as the maunderings of a second-rate artist, a fogey and a drunk. His very public affair with the wife of an esteemed critic had cost him valuable allies and his reactionary and often racist views won him few friends. Most worryingly, his ideas were now out of step with the Haagsche Kunstring which was beginning to clamber into the twentieth century. In April 1932, when Han, who had been secretary at the Hague Art Circ
le for some years, suggested he might run for the position of chairman, thirty of the younger members threatened to resign, arguing that Han would ‘not be objective and give due recognition to all opinions’. Han withdrew his candidacy and tendered his resignation from the society. To his surprise, it was accepted. In their letter, the members of the committee unwittingly rubbed salt into the wound: while they congratulated him on his abilities as a fundraiser, they regretted his resignation because Han ‘represented a spirit in the art world that is dying out’. Not yet forty, Han contemplated the ruins of his career. His solo exhibitions barely drew, in the glorious Dutch expression, ‘anderhalve man en een paardekop’ – one and a half men and a horse’s head. Discouraged that peers and critics who had once seen in him a promising young artist, now dismissed him as a fogey, and outraged by the art of his time, he looked about him and, life being what it is, he dreamed of revenge.

  THE RENAISSANCE MAN

  7

  THE FORGER’S ART

  Forgeries are an ever-changing

  portrait of human desires. Each

  society, each generation, fakes

  the things it covets most.

  Mark Jones, Fake? The Art of Deception

  The artist arms himself only with talent, the forger is a true Renaissance man. This is not to contest the genius of the former, who with oil on canvas or hewn marble, in metal or with the embalmed bodies of dumb beasts can conjure something that evokes pity and terror, awe and admiration. The forger’s apprenticeship is somewhat more difficult.

  Every forger hungers for recognition, for a place in the canon, a scrap of wall in some illustrious gallery to call home. Though there are doubtless forgers who are content to churn out immediately recognisable copies or pastiches, the accomplished forger is a perfectionist. In order to succeed he (as in many criminal careers, women are under-represented) must become a skilled art historian, a restorer, a chemist, a graphologist and a documentalist if he is to exploit his talents as a charlatan. It is not a vocation for the indolent.