I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  If Han was daunted by the sheer scale of his criminal enterprise, his fears were allayed when, returning home, he discovered an article in the Burlington – by Abraham Bredius – entitled ‘An Unpublished Vermeer’ detailing his ‘discovery’ of Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet. Han glanced fearfully at the opening paragraph: ‘. . . the splendid harmonious colouring, the true Vermeer light and shade, and the sympathetic theme proves it to be one of the finest gems in the master’s oeuvre’.

  Han’s heart quickened – Bredius’s attribution was fulsome and categorical. Han smiled to himself as the august critic enumerated the similarities to extant works by Vermeer. ‘The curtain on the left,’ Bredius wrote, ‘is the same as that which appears in his large picture, now in America, The New Testament.’ But he felt a surge of gratitude when Bredius informed him that the pupil had surpassed the master, underscoring the psychological nuances Vermeer brought to his subject. Bredius was rapturous about the girl’s expression: ‘timid, and yet inwardly well-pleased with herself. It is not often that we find such a delicacy of feeling on a Vermeer face.’

  His hands trembling, Han put down the magazine just as Joanna came into the room.

  ‘Han, what is it? Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s nothing, nothing . . . I’m fine. It’s just. . .’ He smiled at her, suddenly flushed with confidence. ‘I’m ready to start a new life.’

  9

  A SUPERIOR PICASSO

  The world, they say, is a

  thought in the mind of God.

  When the Almighty conceived

  Roquebrune-Cap-Martin,

  He must have been joyous.

  Louis Nucera

  In Han’s only drawing of the Villa Primavera, it rises like one of Mad Ludwig’s follies from a barren crag, with flights of steps cut into the living rock. Behind this citadel, misty mountains recede into the distance. Perhaps this is how he saw the yellow stucco villa at number 10, Avenue des Cyprès. Certainly, there was a tower with a winding staircase, though it did not soar into the clouds as Han dreamed, there were spacious balconies overlooking the mountainside and the lights of Monte Carlo to the west, and the Italian hills to the east. For a couple with no children, it was a palace.

  Han set up his studio in a second-floor bedroom, which the blaze of sunlight from the south illuminated all afternoon. In the basement, he established a laboratory where he could experiment with the technical problems of creating a genuine seventeenth-century Vermeer. His bread and butter, while he worked on the dish he planned to serve cold, was portraiture. The Côte d’Azur was teeming with expatriates: wealthy merchants from England, actresses and musicians, bankers from America, and minor princes from inconsequential European countries, all of whom needed a portrait which would display their ego to its best advantage.

  In The Hague, Han could command a thousand guilders for a portrait – here, he could charge two or even three thousand dollars. The portraits were traditional, obsequious, often thunderously melodramatic. In his gloomy portrait of the concert pianist Theo van der Pas (plate 4), the assembled spectres of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin et al. loom over the rapt performer more like executioners than muses.

  Han and Jo had found a small paradise here. They entertained lavishly at Primavera and Joanna was always eager to go dining and dancing in nearby Monte Carlo and Menton. Old friends from The Hague, the Quateros, the van Wijngaardens and the van Genderen Storts were regular visitors and, when Anna returned from Sumatra so that Jacques could pursue his studies in Paris, Han’s children often spent their holidays in Roquebrune. The gifted Dutch artist, known by the honorific Maître, and his devastatingly beautiful actress wife were welcomed into the community. Han might easily have echoed Albrecht Dürer when he said, ‘How I shall freeze after all this sun! Here I am acknowledged as a gentleman, at home a parasite.’

  Han would spend as much as half of his working day on his lucrative commissions or at his serious painting. The rest of the time he spent in his makeshift laboratory in the basement of Primavera learning the rudiments of chemistry.

  From his study of A.M. de Wild’s The Scientific Examination of Pictures, Han knew that he had four crucial problems:

  • Prepare only those pigments and paints Vermeer would have used, since chemical analysis could be used to test for anachronistic pigments.

  • Remove all of the original seventeenth-century painting, so that nothing could by detected by X-ray.

  • Contrive a method of hardening the paint so that it was impervious to alcohol testing.

  • Reproduce the craquelure which is the hallmark of a genuine old master.

  The first was easy for Han, who had always prepared his pigments by hand. When working on his own paintings, he had not needed to worry about the pigments he used, but he had discovered how easy these were to detect when he had used cobalt blue in his restoration of The Laughing Cavalier. He had bought his own raw materials, since the industrial cylinders used to make commercial pigments created a fine, homogeneous powder utterly unlike the often coarse grain of genuine seventeenth-century paint.

  For the yellows, he would use gamboge from the resin of the garcinia tree, yellow ochre, an easily obtained mineral oxide which simply needed to be washed, ground and sieved, and leadtin yellow, the characteristic luminous yellow of the erminetrimmed shawl in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace. For his reds he had obtained mercury oxide to make cinnabar, burnt sienna and carmine, which he could make from the powdered bodies of the cochineal beetle. Since Vermeer’s shadows were rarely true black but deep umbers, he would make bone black but use it sparingly. He would add a little green earth to the flesh tones, an anachronistic quirk even in Vermeer’s time when most artists had abandoned it in favour of umber. All that remained was the blue: though Vermeer had been known to use smalt and indigo, both of which were easily prepared, Han had already acquired a supply of natural ultramarine which he, like Vermeer, intended to use extensively.

  Han’s second challenge was to remove all traces of a painting from a seventeenth-century canvas. From his reading of de Wild, he knew that it had become commonplace to subject a painting to the Röntgen ray. Though Han had never seen an X-ray machine, he knew its quasi-magical properties were capable of revealing an artist’s tentative sketches beneath the surface of the paint and occasionally unmasking the forger who had left another artist’s work beneath his own.

  Han first experimented with solvents. While alcohol affected only fresh paint, caustic potash (potassium hydroxide) was known to break down even centuries-old paint, but he discovered that it ate into the brittle fabric of old canvas. Han determined that he would have to remove the paint by hand, layer by layer. The many layers of varnish could be carefully removed using artist’s grade turpentine. Then, using soap and water and a pumice stone, he would begin to loosen the topmost layer of paint. Inch by laborious inch, he discovered, he could remove each layer, sometimes with the help of a palette knife. If he were to cheat the all-seeing X-ray, it would not be enough to remove the visible painting, he would have to remove the pentimento, or underpainting, with which the artist had sketched out his composition. Eventually, he would come to the ‘ground’, or priming layer, usually a thin layer of umber and gesso. To remove this – even with the most meticulous care – risked tearing or splitting the canvas, and Han decided it was safe to leave it as it contained no hint of the original artist’s intention.

  The two remaining problems: how to harden the paint making it impervious to alcohol and how to induce a believable craquelure were intimately related. It is the centuries of slow hardening of the paint which also produces the cracking: as the oil evaporates, the paint shrinks, forming minute islands. With changes in temperature and humidity, the wooden stretcher expands and contracts, increasing the appearance of the crackle. Though it was simple to cause hardened paint to crack simply by rolling the canvas over a cylinder, the result was limited to the surface layer and the crackle too homogeneous to pass for that of an
old master. Genuine craquelure varies according to the pigments used: areas of lead white generate broad, deep cracking, thinly layered paints – particularly lakes – produce hairline cracks.

  The problem of crackle would have to wait, however, until he had found a way to harden the paint. There seemed to Han only two possible ways to cause oil paint to harden quickly: either by replacing linseed oil with a more volatile substance as a medium for the oil paint, or by applying heat to dry the surface artificially. In his restoration work for Theo, Han had experimented with essential oils, in particular oil of lilac and oil of lavender, both of which are more volatile than the linseed oil traditionally used. The results – as Bredius had proved – were unsatisfactory: the paint did not withstand an alcohol test, and would certainly not create a crackle as it dried.

  Han’s first experiments using heat to dry the paint proved no more successful. He used scraps of canvas, painting a thin spectrum of Vermeer’s palette on to each. For the firing, he used a commercial electric oven. It was difficult to regulate, but it was enough to discover what he had already guessed: at high temperatures, the paint dried quickly but the colours were distorted: a halo of violet appeared around the ultramarine, yellows and whites caramelised to a rich brown, the paint surface blistered and the edges of the canvas were singed. Heated at lower temperatures for periods of hours or even days, the paint never truly hardened and the colours blanched, losing all their brilliance and intensity.

  For more than a year, Han experimented. He built his own oven – little more than a narrow letterbox with a heating element and a thermostat to adjust the temperature, but the results were the same; the trial paintings either melted and burned or became sun-bleached and anaemic.

  Han was not initially worried about his technical failures. If he were to succeed, he realised, the technical aspects of his forgery had to be perfect. In the meantime, Joanna and Han were captivated by this lush life of alternating indolence and excess. They attended lavish balls and exquisite dinners at which Jo could flaunt her finery. In return, the van Meegerens threw sumptuous parties in the gardens of Primavera at which Han humbly accepted the adulation that, as an artist, he felt was his due.

  He loved to take guests on a tour of his studio, a private glimpse of the artist at work. Here were potboiler portraits, their dramatic shadows and heightened nobility cribbed from Rembrandt, watercolours of whores and sailors in seamy nightclubs borrowed from Toulouse Lautrec and crude symbolist works like Grain, Petroleum, Cotton which aspired to the elliptical masterpieces of Odilon Redon Henri and Jan Toorop half a century before. Solemn biblical tableaux vied with sentimental portraits of Joanna, a dove perched on her outstretched hand, and the graphic fantasies of I Have Summoned Up the Depths.

  For the most part, the procession of bankers and businessmen, actresses and aristocrats admired Han’s no-nonsense realism and delighted in the sheer craftsmanship of the work, so Han was shocked when Joseph Cameron, an American businessman whom Han was eager to impress, proved disappointingly unforthcoming during the tour.

  Cameron was a disciple of the ‘moderns’. He already owned a captivating Chagall and had recently acquired a painting by Giorgio de Chirico; he admired Picasso and solicited Han’s advice on whether he should make an offer on a Salvador Dalí phantasmagoria.

  Han was surprised and alarmed to discover this viper in his own backyard and passionately restated his antipathy to the moderns. Han and Cameron often argued good-naturedly but animatedly over a bottle of Margaux on the balcony of Primavera. Han was haughtily dismissive of the ‘techniques’ of cubism and surrealism and mocked what he called the ‘primitive infantilism in art from the ancient negro, supported by the idiotic notion that the straight line is “stronger” than the curve’. Architects dating back to the ancient Greeks, he opined, knew better. Cameron was quietly scornful: art, he argued, was in a constant state of flux – to paint like a Renaissance artist today was to ignore how much the world had changed. The artist had a duty to react to the camera, to industrialisation, to question the very nature of art itself.

  During one such spat, Han stomped from the balcony into his studio dragging a reluctant Cameron with him. He took a primed canvas and sat it on his easel and, as his guest watched, took a palette knife and with brash strokes began to anatomise and dissect a woman’s face in primary colours. He set the eyes at curious angles, flattened the nose and placed both ears on one side of the head. Then, with a broad brush he took pure carbon black and outlined the portrait with angular lines. Cameron was astonished at the emerging painting. After a bare twenty minutes, Han stepped back, lit the cigarette which had been hanging from his lips throughout his frenzied work and said coolly: ‘A superior Picasso, I think you’ll agree.’

  Cameron picked up the canvas and admired it. It was, he would later admit, an excellent pastiche of a Picasso Tête de femme. The colours had the vibrancy and the tumult of the master, the incised lines of thick impasto chiselled into the canvas with the blunt end of the brush were uncannily exact. He handed the painting back to Han.

  ‘You see?’ Han sneered. ‘It’s the work of a child.’ He tossed the canvas into a corner.

  ‘May I borrow it?’ Cameron asked. ‘I’d like to hang it with the genuine moderns I have in the villa. I’m interested to see what my cultured friends think of my new “acquisition”.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Han said testily, ‘I have no wish to have a third-rate cartoon displayed anywhere.’

  ‘I’ll buy it, then,’ Cameron said, ‘I’ll pay whatever you usually charge for a commission, and if my friends decide it is a Picasso, I’ll double it.’

  ‘I’m not in the business of forgery,’ snapped Han, ‘but if I were, I wouldn’t forge an inferior artist’s work.’ He picked up his palette knife and slashed the canvas. ‘The man has no technique that could not be mastered by a backward child – what is something like this compared, say, to the genius of Vermeer? Let’s have another drink . . .’

  He had already retired to the balcony and was sipping his Margaux, flushed still, partly from the exertion but mostly from anger and frustration that Cameron should take this work so seriously.

  ‘You know that Dalí is a devoted admirer of Vermeer’s work?’ Cameron attempted to mollify his host.

  ‘Really?’ Han thought as he lit another cigarette. ‘It is hardly surprising, I suppose – he is the only one of the moderns with any technique – but his subjects: rotting birds and Freudian symbols and clocks with the consistency of ripe Camembert.’

  ‘But you will admit that no child could fake a Dalí.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Han, ‘but any artist could do the same with a random assortment of nonsensical symbols. Just set it all against a rolling desert plain, add some decomposing wildlife . . .’

  ‘Perhaps we could make it a commission?’

  For half an hour, they idly discussed what such a hypothetical Dalí might look like. Though initially Han seemed tempted by the challenge he later laughed it off. It would, he realised, require extensive study of a painter whose work he barely knew and heartily despised; the result might be a technical tour de force but Han had other, more pressing, technical problems to attend to.

  10

  THE PLASTIC VIRTUES

  In the Bakelite house

  of the future, the

  dishes may not break,

  but the heart can.

  J.B. Priestley

  It may have been the moment when he first picked up the receiver of his newly installed telephone, or when he reached out to turn on his Marconi wireless set; it could have been something as routine as sharpening a pencil; all we can know is that one day Han van Meegeren realised he was surrounded by an intriguing substance known as plastic – specifically the first commercially made plastic, Bakelite. It is likely he lived with the substance without ever wondering what it was or how it was made. Now, suddenly, he was curious about this ‘plastic’ which Leo Baekeland promoted with the slogan ‘The Material of a
Thousand Uses’.

  By the 1930s, Baekeland’s synthetic solid was being used in everything from ashtrays to lampshades; it was even carved by craftsmen to create jewellery. All Han knew was that, somehow, simple chemicals could be combined to create a resin which would harden to a solid mass: what if this plastic might replace plant oil as a medium in paint?

  Though Han had no scientific training, he was curious to see whether some aspect of Baekeland’s research might prove useful in his search for a medium. The chemical composition of Bakelite, he discovered, was nothing more than phenol and formaldehyde which, when mixed together and heated, hardened perfectly if allowed to cool and dry. Phenol he knew as carbolic acid; formaldehyde, a water-soluble gas, was used to preserve biological specimens and as an embalming fluid. Both, Han discovered, could be obtained from any chemist and the process for hardening the resulting resin required no more than a steady heat (special ovens known as Bakelisers had been produced since 1909).

  Han procured small amounts of the chemicals and began to experiment. The formaldehyde had a particularly noxious smell and, working in the basement laboratory, Han was regularly forced to surface for air – or more often cigarette smoke. Initial trials seemed promising. Han mixed the chemicals in equal quantities to produce a resin which, though somewhat sticky, could easily be worked with a brush or palette knife. At first he was worried that the resin had a dull brownish tinge that might alter his pigments, but the final effect resembled that of antique varnish.

  Han initially prepared batches of colour, mixing the raw pigment with lilac oil and the phenol-formaldehyde solution, and began painting short strips of new canvas to see how they would react to heat. He quickly discovered that it was necessary to mix very small quantities and work in rapid strokes or the resin and paint mixture became viscid and unusable. For his first samples, he painted short strips of single colours and heated them in his crude oven at 95°C for an hour. He was excited to find that when he removed them, the colours remained brilliant and true, but the surface was not entirely hard. He tried another batch, this time painting a rainbow of seventeenth-century colours on each, and fired the strips at a steady heat of 105°C for two hours. When he removed the canvas it was hard to the touch and the colours, as before, were as brilliant and intense as when he had applied them: they had not bled into each other, there was no sign of scorching or blistering. He allowed the strips to cool and then, taking a swab of cotton wool soaked in a solution of one part alcohol to two parts turpentine, held it above the surface of the paint. The fumes had no effect. He took a new swab, this time with two parts alcohol to one part turpentine, but it too had no effect. Even when he rubbed the paint surface with pure alcohol, the paint did not desaponify. Dizzy, as much from the formaldehyde fumes as from his elation, he went upstairs to his balcony, stopping, perhaps, to grab a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé from a newly imported Williams Ice-O-Matic.