I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  On a bright autumn morning in 1936, He took down The Raising of Lazarus and began. He gently removed the painting from the seventeenth-century stretcher, careful to preserve the original nails which secured it and the small leather squares which had protected the canvas from rust. Han’s next act was the most peculiar: he carefully cut a strip of canvas some twenty inches wide from the left-hand side of the painting, leaving the canvas almost square, forty-five inches by fifty. There was no artistic reason to cut down the canvas, since he had yet to begin his composition. Han later explained that he had cut down the painting so that, when the time came and he revealed his deception, he would have tangible proof. Lord Kilbracken sensibly suggests that if Han needed such proof, it would have been easier for him to buy a Box Brownie and photograph the work in progress. Why Han should make an already difficult task more complicated is impossible to say, but since there is no other plausible reason, we are forced to accept that Han had every intention of revealing himself as the author of the Emmaus.

  ‘As a result of cutting down the canvas,’ Han explained, ‘I had to cut down the old stretcher to the same extent, and so I also displaced to the right the corner braces on the left-hand side of the stretcher.’ This was a delicate and dangerous operation since the old wood would be dry and fragile and any obvious repairs to the stretcher would immediately arouse suspicion. None the less, he took a handsaw and, leaving the braces in place, carefully removing the corner nails, cut a twenty-inch section from the left-hand side of the stretcher, sanding it so the amputation was invisible before re-attaching the frame and the supporting braces.

  Han set the stretcher aside and mounted the canvas on a sheet of plywood to begin the laborious task of removing all but the priming layer of The Raising of Lazarus. Given the size and fragility of the canvas, the process may have taken him several days. Using soap and water and a pumice stone, and a palette knife or a coarse fibre brush to remove stubborn islands of the original paint, he neared the original ground; he had to be increasingly careful; the priming layer had to be preserved intact if the original age crackle was to come through. He had all but completed his tedious graft when he happened on a patch of lead white which refused to come loose. Despite patient scouring with his pumice, he could not detach it from the primer and became worried that he was about to destroy the priming layer or, worse still, rip the canvas. From de Wild’s The Scientific Examination of Pictures, he knew that lead white would glow brilliantly on any X-ray and so decided to incorporate the stubborn blot into his own composition. But there was another area where the canvas was sheer and the underpainting of a woman’s head clung to the ground. He removed everything he could, mentally rearranging his composition yet again, hoping he might incorporate the shape somehow into his porcelain jug whose lead white paint would obliterate the stubborn head on an X-ray. Exhausted and frustrated he stepped back and surveyed the canvas. The dull brown priming layer was intact, its crackle evident even in the poor light of his basement laboratory. Han decided that he had done all he could. Over the original priming layer, he painted a thin ‘levelling layer’ of gesso and umber, mixed with his phenol-formaldehyde resin. He took the immense canvas and placed it carefully in his oven and baked it. When he removed it, he was reassured to discover that the filigree of craquelure had appeared intact in his levelling layer. If Han could induce this crackle, layer by layer, right to the surface of the painting it would perfectly correspond to the underpainting of the original which he had all but stripped away. The two layers making up the pentimento were similarly lightly painted so that Han could induce the crackle in each. After baking he painted the surface with a thin layer of varnish which he allowed to dry naturally. What remained was easy, he had only to paint a masterpiece.

  That evening, chain smoking on his balcony, Han re-read the passage in the Gospel of Saint Luke:

  And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.

  There is no atheist like a lapsed Catholic: for years Han had raged against his father’s God, rebelled against this vengeful, dictatorial moralist, the God who had taken his brother Hermann, leaving him with a sick rage that had burned within him for two decades. Yet, as he read, his apostasy fell away. ‘And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.’

  Han spent six months working on The Supper at Emmaus and, for all its faults, it is perhaps his finest work. There is no hint of pastiche here, no slavish copying from Vermeer’s work. The painting is a van Meegeren through and through, similar in style and composition, in modelling and in sentiment to his own religious paintings. Han studied the sketches he had made in the Palazzo Patrizi and laid out the composition of his Emmaus such that any art historian would immediately recognise Caravaggio’s hand. It is a simple group portrait: Christ faces the viewer, his eyes half-closed in prayer, his right hand raised to bless the bread he is about to break. On his left sits Cleopas, who gazes in awe at the risen Christ. Facing him, an unnamed disciple, wearing a rough-hewn tunic, looks towards Jesus, his back to the viewer, his face a sliver of profile. Behind the disciples stands a serving girl, her face as serene and as simple as a Madonna, her hand reaching towards the jug of wine.

  Han brought the canvas, tacked now to a temporary stretcher, to his studio on the second floor where he had already laid the table for his Supper. The pewter plates gleamed on a starched linen tablecloth, the bluish sparkle of the seventeenth-century glasses sat reflected in the silver-topped porcelain jug. Han set fresh bread on the plate which would be before Christ. Here was the central still life of his composition.

  In the warp and weft of the tapestry of lies which constitutes Han’s life, the circumstances in which The Supper at Emmaus was conceived are the most contentious. Han and Joanna had lived together for almost ten years, she was his confidante and his lover, she came and went from his studio as she pleased. She was passionate about art and a fervent believer in Han’s talent – if indeed she knew nothing about his forgery, how did he keep her from his studio for the long months necessary to complete the painting?

  In a sworn statement, Han would later attest, ‘I sent my wife away for the whole period because I wanted no witnesses to my work. I knew that I needed perfect solitude if I was to create a work of art that would amaze the world and confound my enemies.’ How he convinced Joanna to leave the villa for the six months it took to paint The Supper at Emmaus he did not say, nor did he explain where she spent her enforced holiday. In his confession, Han even claimed that Jo turned up one day unannounced, convinced that he was having an affair and hoping to catch him in flagrante delicto. Jo scoured every room in the villa searching for some mysterious serving wench or society lady and when she found none, left, ‘Taking with her the swimming costume which had been the pretext for the sudden visit of a suspicious wife.’ Perhaps it was this detail which persuaded the Dutch authorities not to press charges, though they clearly did not inquire further. It is a charmingly manipulative story and worthy of Han’s talents as a liar, but there is no verifiable truth to it. Had the authorities interviewed the owner of the villa, Monsieur de Augustinis, he would have told them that Han was never alone at the villa for more than a day or two. Though de Augustinis did not live on the property, he had a house in the nearby Domaine du Hameau and knew the van Meegerens well. He occasionally made social visits and personally collected the rent once a month. Had Joanna been away for half a year, he would certainly have remarked on her absence.

  Further proof of Joanna’s presence at the villa during the period when the Emmausgängers was painted is provided by the local police who arrived unannounced one
morning in the early autumn of 1936.

  A young girl had disappeared from Roquebrune and horrified villagers were convinced that she had been abducted and murdered. Though Han had lived near the village for five years, he was still very much an outsider; his baleful face, even sporting the beret he affected during his years in France, had something of the deviant in it. His moustache, trimmed closely, looked a little too much like that of Adolf Hitler. On an uncommonly warm morning, a villager noticed smoke spilling out of the chimney at Primavera. Convinced that Han had murdered the unfortunate wretch and was disposing of the corpse, he contacted the local gendarmerie who had little trouble convincing a local judge to provide them with a warrant. They arrived at the villa as Han was carefully baking the levelling layer on to the prepared canvas. They were met at the door by Joanna. Han, emerging from the basement laboratory, was surprised and shocked to find two uniformed officers brandishing a warrant and demanding to search the property. Han had heard nothing of the missing girl and had no idea what they might be looking for. It may even have flickered across his mind that somehow ‘they’ knew what he was working on and were here to find evidence of his forgery. Few people could have been more relieved to discover that they were merely a suspect in a murder inquiry. Han took the officers on a tour of Primavera, and led them to the basement where he showed them the oven in which the canvas for the Emmaus was simmering gently. He was an artist, he explained, working on a delicate new experimental process. The oven was an integral part of his research. The curious contraption was much too small to contain the remains of a child, however young; none the less one officer dutifully peered through the glass door of the oven and saw what appeared to be a canvas. Han did his utmost to seem polite and unhurried; in fact, he was worried that if the officers stayed much longer, his precious canvas would scorch or burn.

  Legend shrouds the models used for the figures of Christ and his disciples in painting the Emmaus. Han contends that the figures of the disciples and the serving girl sprang from his fertile imagination. Only for the figure of Christ did he feel he needed a model. The focal point of his composition had to be a breathtaking portrait of God made Man, the risen Christ raising his hand to bless the bread, revealing the miracle of the resurrection to his disciples. Han did not want his Christ to be the tender handsome prophet of Raphael, but a labourer, his face weathered and aged by suffering and pain; a Christ with the compassion and vulnerability of a Rembrandt self-portrait. Providence, divine or secular, intervened to provide him with just such a man.

  One morning, according to Han’s account, as he was taking his morning coffee on the balcony, there was a knock at the door of the villa. Han leaned over the balcony and called down, and the face that looked up at him was Christ himself.

  ‘Signore, I don’t suppose you have a bit of work going? I’ve been labouring on a farm here, but the harvest is over and I need money to get back to Italy.’

  ‘Wait there a minute,’ Han said, and went downstairs. When he opened the door, he saw an unshaven, thickset man, his face weathered and lined by the sun, his clothes dirty, his hair dishevelled. In that sunburnt face, Han saw a stoic dignity, a nobility of spirit, a living Rembrandt portrait. He invited the man in and offered him something to eat.

  While the zoticone tucked into his breakfast, Han proposed that he might have some work for the man. The labourer looked up and grunted.

  ‘I’m not rightly sure what I can do – I’m a labourer and it doesn’t look like you have any fields need harvesting.’

  ‘I am an artist,’ Han said, giving the word all the solemnity he could muster, ‘a painter, and I need a model for a painting I am working on. You might stay here at the villa for, say, two or three days while I sketch you.’

  ‘Can’t think why anyone would want to paint me.’ Han’s guest laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right, then . . . But you’ll pay me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Han, ‘I’ll give you whatever you usually earn for a day’s work and you won’t have to lift a finger. And you’ll get your food and wine besides.’

  The labourer shrugged again, the deal was done. Han fetched his pad and began to sketch the man’s face: the high forehead, the deep-set eyes, the sunken cheeks and the slightly melancholy mouth.

  According to Han’s account, the tramp stayed at Primavera for three days. On the first day, he sat fidgeting in Han’s studio as the artist completed several charcoal portraits and sketched the man’s gnarled hands. Han offered him whatever he would like to eat, but in Han’s words, ‘All he would eat was rye bread and garlic washed down with wine.’ On the second day, he had the man wear a makeshift tunic and sit for him in his studio as he began to block in the face of Christ on his canvas; eyes downcast, one hand holding the loaf, the other poised to bless the bread and wine. He spent several hours trying to sketch in as much detail as possible while he had his model.

  When they had finished for the day, the man asked if he might see the painting. Knowing that his guest had probably never set foot in a gallery in his life and never would, Han waved a magnanimous hand.

  ‘Of course.’

  The Italian stood for a moment in silence before the half-finished painting.

  ‘Who am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Who am I meant to be?’ the man asked. ‘And who are these other folk?’

  ‘It is a painting of the risen Christ. In the Gospel of Saint Luke, Christ appears to two of his disciples as they are walking to the village of Emmaus. but they do not recognise him. It is only at this moment,’ Han gestured to the painting, ‘as he blesses the bread and breaks it, that they realise they are in the presence of Our Lord.’

  The man turned pale and quickly blessed himself. ‘I don’t know as you should be painting a sinner like me as Our Lord.’ For a moment, the man hesitated about staying on, but Han placated him, assuring him he was as worthy a model as any man. Even so, Han was woken in the night by whimpering and went downstairs to find the itinerant worker sobbing in his sleep. On the third day, as Han pressed several hundred francs into the man’s horny hand, the tramp, Han maintained, could not shake his ‘fears of unworthiness’ and asked if Han would pray for him. Watching from the balcony as the figure of the labourer shuffled down the steep hill towards Roquebrune, Han insists that for the first time in twenty years he offered up this prayer: ‘God – if there is a God – please don’t blame this man for his part in my work; I take full responsibility. And if You exist, please do not take it amiss that I’ve chosen a religious subject for my “Vermeer”. No disrespect is intended, the choice is purely coincidental.’ A lawyer would have been hard pressed to frame a more circumspect act of contrition.

  Lord Kilbracken, in his biography, writes: ‘Van Meegeren was an inveterate liar, but I hope this particular story is true and can think of no reason why he should have invented it.’ The simple reason is that Han was indeed suffering from pseudologia fantastica, a personality disorder now usually known as ‘factitious disorder’ in which the patient tells complex and intricately detailed stories about his life, both present and past. Such stories are usually on the edge of plausibility, deftly weaving fact and fantasy and if confronted the subject will admit that they have lied, only to offer some new explanation riddled with more convincing fabrications. In the words of the psychologist Charles Ford, ‘Attempting to determine the “truth” from these persons is like trying to catch a greased pig.’

  A wholly different tale accounting for the models in The Supper at Emmaus is provided by Frederik Kreuger, whose biography is based in part on the unpublished autobiography of Jacques van Meegeren. Kreuger offers what he calls ‘a much simpler scenario’:

  In that scenario Jo posed for each of the four characters in turn. Jo was an actress and well knew how to hold a pose, it was something she had done all her life . . . The three male figures he painted without a face, which he could fill in later. Only the serving girl bringing in the wine has Jo’s face, sufficiently
altered so as not to be recognisable. A simple task for an experienced artist like van Meegeren.

  While it cannot be proven that this is how it happened, it is certainly plausible. Experts from the Rijksmuseum and the Boijmans who have considered the scenario agree that it could well have happened this way.

  ‘The Supper at Emmaus is even more of a fake than we thought,’ Kreuger adds. ‘These are not the disciples at Emmaus, but a quadruple portrait of Jo.’

  It is a colourful but unlikely theory. The worshipful Cleopas, his face turned towards Christ, his arm resting along the table is too similar to the head and arm of Vermeer’s The Astronomer to be coincidence. It is likely that in painting a Vermeer so radically different from any known subject, Han wanted to provide a ready allusion to an undisputed Vermeer. Han did not need a model for the face of the disciple facing Christ, since there is only the intimation of a profile and a shock of black hair falling on to his simple grey tunic. As to Christ’s countenance, the high forehead, the sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks are so similar to Han’s self-portraits that he is unlikely to have needed anything more than a mirror and a beatific gaze. As for the bodies, there is little suggestion of solid flesh beneath the folds of the disciples’ tunics. As several critics have remarked, Cleopas’s arm is so contorted that it would have to be broken in two places to adopt the pose.