I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  ‘Jolanthe?’

  He settled into his chair, lit a fresh cigarette and stared out over the Mediterranean dusk. Jo popped her head round the French windows, wearing a midnight-blue evening gown: the very gown in which he had painted her, serene and entrancing, a dove perched on her outstretched hand.

  ‘Han, aren’t you dressed yet? We’re having dinner with the Camerons tonight.’

  ‘Jo, come and sit down. Have a drink with me; we’re celebrating!’

  All through the formal dinner, Han’s mind was racing. Though his preliminary experiments showed potential, he would need to methodically test this new medium with each of Vermeer’s known pigments, and with every possible combination. Since the resin was fast-drying even at room temperature, he would have to find a way to mix batches of colour which did not congeal within a few minutes. Tomorrow, he would test the process on one of the genuine seventeenth-century canvases he had bought to see whether either the resin or the heat would damage it. Even if he could harden the paint without damaging the brittle canvas, there was, he realised, still the problem of inducing the essential craquelure in his ‘plastic paint’.

  In the weeks, perhaps months that followed, Han blended experimental batches of paint. He would first mix the resin with lilac oil and use the resulting concoction to make up his paints. The result still became claggy and unworkable after a short time. While it was sufficient to paint a small area, it would be impossible to do the detailed modelling on a face or the reflections in a silver bowl. He tried mixing small batches of paint using lilac oil as his medium, then, carefully, he dipped his brush first into the paint, then into the phenol-formaldehyde solution and applied smooth easy strokes. This succeeded perfectly: the paint on the brush was easy to work with, and that remaining on his palette did not solidify. Though working in this way changed the rhythm of his painting, after a few months the process was second nature to him. Brush, palette, resin, canvas, brush, palette, resin, canvas. With this small success came new worries. Han wondered whether traces of his synthetic medium might be detected by chemical analysis but, he reasoned, much of the phenol-formaldehyde solution evaporated during the drying process and besides, while a chemist might test an old master for contemporary pigments, he would hardly look for the presence of plastics.

  Before he could paint and fire a completed canvas, he needed a new oven. He had begun his experiments using a commercial oven; later he had created a small, flat makeshift oven with a crude regulator to control the temperature. If he were to risk one of his seventeenth-century canvases, he had to be certain that the temperature was constant so the new oven would need an accurate thermostat. More importantly, it had to be large to easily accommodate The Raising of Lazarus which was almost four feet by six.

  He built the new oven himself. It was a simple rectangular box measuring some sixty-five by fifty inches, with a letterbox opening. Although he had little aptitude for the sciences, Han pored over manuals and visited electrical suppliers to find heating elements and an accurate thermostat. He may have sought advice in wiring the curious device, though it would have been difficult to explain to an electrician what such a large and bizarre contraption was intended for. The new oven had a flue connected to the chimney of Primavera so that the billowing fumes of the resin did not permeate the house, and a glass door allowing Han to monitor any changes in the paint surface.

  Han refined his technique, painting a number of experimental canvases in the styles of Vermeer and Ter Borch. Though all were technically superior to many of Han’s later forgeries, he made no attempt to sell them – it seems clear that in his first heady days as a career criminal, he was holding himself to the strict amoral code he had devised whereby he did not want to win fame through mere pastiche.

  We cannot know in which order Han painted these practice pieces, but it seems likely that A Woman Reading Music was the first. It is delicate and beautifully executed, richer and more complex than Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet with none of the crude caricature of his first attempt, but it is based entirely on a painting Han knew intimately from his visits to the Rijksmuseum: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. For some, the painting is Vermeer’s finest achievement. Arthur K. Wheelock in his Johannes Vermeer writes:

  In no other painting did Vermeer create such an intricate counterpoint between the structural framework of the setting and the emotional content of the scene. A mere description of the subject – a young woman dressed in a blue jacket reading a letter in the privacy of her home – in no way prepares the viewer for the poignancy of this image, for while the woman betrays no outward emotion, the intensity of her feelings is conveyed by the context Vermeer creates for her.

  The woman, thought to be Vermeer’s wife, is heavily pregnant. She stands, head bowed, by an escritoire reading a letter. She is framed by the tranquillity of the room: in the foreground gloom a blue chair echoes the blue of her dress; behind her, an indecipherable map hangs on the shadowy wall. She alone stands washed in a flood of sunlight from an unseen window on the left. She seems to be reading intently, her lips parted, her fingers seemingly tensed, since they appear to crease the letter as she holds it. There is no further narrative: we do not know what news the letter bears, or how it will affect her in the moment after she has read it. She is captured in a frozen moment that may change her life.

  Han’s imitation, A Woman Reading Music, brings together many of the same elements, but it affords no such suspense. The woman is now seated at the desk. The tilt of the head, her clothes, her hair are almost indistinguishable from the original save for the fact that she now wears the pearl earrings which lay on the desk. The map which hung on the wall has been replaced by a painting. What is missing from the painting is a narrative, a frozen moment on which the woman’s fate may turn. She seems to be reading a musical score. Like Vermeer, Han left the painting unsigned.

  This was Han’s first attempt to use the techniques he had devised to create a completely convincing old master. First, he had to remove the seventeenth-century original from his two-hundred-year-old canvas. This he did using only water and a pumice stone, leaving untouched large sections of the ground, the original priming layer, for fear of damaging the canvas.

  Using gamboge and umber, Han sketched out the pentimento – the preliminary outline of his composition. He fired the canvas for two hours at a steady 105°C and, when he removed it, the paint was hard, and some of the original crackle had come through. In those areas where he had painted thickly, the crackle did not reappear. The results were promising, but his technique would have to be refined if he were to produce a canvas which genuinely appeared to be three hundred years old. Finally, he began work on the painting itself. It may have been because he did not intend to sell the work or submit it for attribution, but he was loath to waste his limited supply of costly ultramarine and so used cobalt blue in his composition. Once finished, he fired the painting again and after two hours removed a brilliant, intense genre portrait of the woman in blue. It may have sat on his easel for several days and each time he stepped into his studio he would be struck by a detail which rang true or some error of style or substance he had made.

  To create the craquelure, Han rolled the canvas gently over a cylinder, bending and warping it to crack the hardened paint. The result was superficially impressive, but it did not truly resemble the crackle of centuries: it was too uniform in its distribution and penetrated only the surface layer of the paint. There was, he realised, another serious problem: the craquelure in his new Vermeer seemed too fresh, too recent. Even after a coat of tinted varnish, the colours seemed too vivid, the light almost searing. It took him some time to realise what was missing: dirt. The dark russet tracery of centuries of dust and debris which marks a painting out as old.

  Han’s third Vermeer was a departure. A Woman Playing Music is not based on any extant work, nor like Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet is it a composite of several. This was van Meegeren’s first ‘original’ old master and his finest ‘ge
nre’ painting. It portrays a woman with a lute, her gaze turned to an archetypal Vermeer stained-glass window which floods the room with light. Subtle cues to other Vermeers replace the ripe plagiarism of Han’s earlier attempts. The woman’s hair is covered by a white scarf like that worn by the girl in Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine, her blouse is modelled on that worn by the woman in Officer and Laughing Girl, but Han had gained in confidence and felt no need to slavishly copy: the composition is his own, and the woman’s face, her distant gaze as she tunes the lute capture the stillness and restrained narrative of a true Vermeer. Han felt a nervous elation, fuelled by the success of his technical discoveries. He was painting easily and fluently now, he sensed that he had grasped the essence of Vermeer’s brushstrokes, the serenity of the master’s interiors, the delicate layers of lakes and washes which orchestrated this symphony in light. With A Woman Playing Music, the final piece of the puzzle – the craquelure – had been solved. Han had discovered that the crackle from the original seventeeth-century painting would spontaneously reappear if he was careful to paint in thin layers, baking each layer before continuing with the painting. A coat of varnish applied to each layer while still warm forced the craquelure, preserved like the tracery of centuries in the original ground, to re-emerge in each succeeding layer as it dried. The resulting network of fine lines was utterly convincing. Excited now, Han abandoned his work on A Woman Playing Music. He had perfected his technique and was aching to make a start on the painting that would make or destroy him, yearning to create a work which would overturn centuries of received wisdom, force the world to reconsider Vermeer’s oeuvre and, in doing so, allow him to slip into the canon of Western art unobserved. He had only to find a subject.

  11

  THE HOBO WHO WAS CHRIST

  Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

  Salvador Dalí

  Han and Jo took a long-planned holiday in the summer of 1936, attending the Olympic Games in Berlin. Some have seen his decision to attend the games as a political one, evidence of an ideological sympathy with Nazism, but though Han’s views on art were reactionary, and echoed fascist notions of the degeneracy of modern art, it is likely that Han, like most of the ingenuous West, simply did not realise the enormity of what was to come. Though there had been a campaign to boycott the games, supported by Lee Jahncke, the American member of the International Olympic Committee, Jahncke was expelled from the committee for his pains and replaced by Avery Brundage, a former American Olympic athlete who steered the vote of the Amateur Athletic Union to a narrow victory. In 1935, in a chilling echo of what was to come, Brundage accused a ‘Jewish-Communist conspiracy’ of attempting to keep the United States out of the games.

  In Berlin, Han and Jo were met with an awe-inspiring spectacle of Nazi propaganda at full throttle. Fluttering banners bearing swastikas vied with the Olympic flags on every public building, painting the sky over Unter den Linden an ominous red. All over the city, they saw large mysterious booths – ‘viewing rooms’ set up to allow the citizens their first glimpse of ‘television’. Han and Jo attended the opening ceremony in the vast neoclassical stadium where the Canadian Olympic team, alone among non-Fascist countries, gave the Nazi salute ‘in a gesture of friendship’. No one, it seemed, had listened to the minister for propaganda, Joseph Göbbels, in 1933: ‘German sport has only one task: to strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle for its existence.’

  In reality, the van Meegerens’s holiday had little to do with politics and nothing to do with sport. Han preferred to spend his time wandering the deserted halls of the Charlottenburg Palace and the Gemäldegalerie while Joanna went shopping. They spent their evenings at sumptuous restaurants or at the Berlin Staatsoper. In the Gemäldegalerie, Han passed several hours sketching Frans Hals’s Malle Babbe, the crazed, drunken ‘witch of Haarlem’ with an owl perched on her shoulder (the Dutch, eschewing skunks and newts, favour the expression zo beschonken als een uil – ‘as drunk as an owl’). The painting Henry James described as ‘dashed upon the canvas by a brush superbly confident’ would one day offer Han another subject for his forgeries.

  Arriving back in Roquebrune, Han leafed through a newly published history of eighteenth-century Dutch painting. It was a detailed and comprehensive account of the Golden Age by two of the leading experts in the field: Dr D. Hannema, the director of the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, and Dr Arthur van Schendel, later director of the Department of Paintings at the Rijksmuseum. Han immediately turned to the chapter on Vermeer and was rewarded with a myth he could make his own. Since de Groot’s 1907 catalogue raisonné, Vermeer’s reputation had continued to soar, but no more was known about his life and the true extent of his work than Thoré/Bürger had discovered almost a century before. History, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and on this barren terrain speculation and fable had flowered. In the chapter on Vermeer in Noord- en Zuid-Nederlandsche schilderkunst de XVII eeuw, Hannema and van Schendel advanced a theory which would provide Han with the subject for his forgery. Though Vermeer’s output was small, there was, they argued, a glaring disparity of style and subject between Vermeer’s earliest painting, Diana and Her Companions, and his first mature work, The Milkmaid. Vermeer’s early paintings were large sweeping Italianate canvases, with the broad brushstrokes and characteristic chiaroscuro of Baburen and the Utrecht Caravaggisti, utterly unlike the ‘serenity of heart and nobility of spirit’ which characterised his late work. In this void, Hannema and van Schendel imagined a missing Vermeer which would one day unite the two: Vermeer, they stated confidently, had clearly painted several religious subjects in his youth, only one of which had survived.

  The idea was not a new one. Hannema and van Schendel were merely lending weight to a theory first proposed by Abraham Bredius when attributing a controversial ‘early Vermeer’. Bredius’s epiphany had come in 1901 on a trip to London where ‘in the window of a London art dealer I saw a painting. I recognised Vermeer in it.’ It seemed an unlikely attribution. The painting was a brooding, shadowy work reminiscent of the Caravaggisti, the canvas was much larger than anything Vermeer was later to paint, the figures almost life-size. Most importantly the painting was a religious piece, depicting Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in a setting similar to the contemporaneous work by Erasmus Quellinus. Only one other Vermeer is religious in nature, The Allegory of Faith, a curiously atypical late Vermeer, commissioned by a Catholic patron, whose style – polished and theatrical – is more reminiscent of Dou and van Mieris than of Vermeer’s work.

  When Han first saw a reproduction of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, he doubted it was a Vermeer at all; and yet something in the tranquillity of the scene, the basket of bread that Martha holds, the oriental rug which seems to echo that which appears in Maid Asleep, evoked the work of the Sphinx of Delft. The signature IV Meer – small but easily identifiable – is inscribed on the stool on which Mary sits, though Bredius would have known that the signatures on The Astronomer and on The Geographer had already been dismissed as forgeries.

  Bredius’s attribution was vehemently disputed. Many critics believed – some still believe – that the painting was painted by the Utrecht artist Jan van der Meer, but Bredius was unshakeable in his conviction that it was an early work by Jan Vermeer van Delft. For Bredius, the painting was incontrovertible proof that Vermeer’s early work had been strongly influenced by Italian painting and, he argued, it was very likely that Vermeer had travelled to Italy in his youth and been inspired by Caravaggio himself. If so, surely there were other religious paintings by Vermeer which had yet to come to light.

  It was an appealing theory. After all, barely fifty documented works by Vermeer were known to exist, and none offered even the intimation of a transitional period between the early style of Diana and Her Companions and The Procuress and the tranquil domestic studies of Lady Reading a Letter or The Lacemaker. If Christ in the House
of Martha and Mary were genuine, it was extraordinarily unlikely that Vermeer, a devout Protestant who had converted to Catholicism to marry Catharina Bolnes, would have painted no other religious subjects. Now, the foremost curators of Holland’s heritage had joined Bredius and the critic P.B. Coremans in wishing a new Vermeer into existence. No critic would be able to resist discovering a painting which substantiated some long-cherished theory. The forger need only uncover the critic’s deepest desires and make them real; now that they had told him what they most desired, Han had only to make their dreams come true. ‘The world,’ as Thomas Hoving admits, ‘wants to be fooled.’

  Han thumbed through his sketchbooks and found those he had brought back from his trip to Italy four years before. He scoured page after page before lingering on a charcoal sketch. Han remembered the drawing. He had spent an afternoon in the Palazzo Patrizi sitting in front of Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus trying to capture the subdued drama of the moment. It was the perfect subject; other than Rembrandt, no artist had painted The Supper at Emmaus, and it was inescapably linked to Caravaggio who had returned to the subject on three separate occasions. In this transcendent moment when the risen Christ reveals himself to his disciples, Han could see beyond the tenebrism of Caravaggio to the stillness at the heart of the painting, the central still life: a table, a beaker of wine and Christ breaking bread for his companions. Here was a Caravaggio Han could imagine being painted by Vermeer.