by Frank Wynne
On 25 June 1938, as part of the celebrations for the jubilee of Queen Wilhelmina’s reign, the Boijmans unveiled an exhibition entitled Four Centuries of Masterpieces 1400—1800. It was to be a sweeping overview of Western art including works by Bruegel, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Watteau, Dürer and Titian. The poster to accompany the exhibition displayed as the exemplar of the achievements of classical art a detail from Vermeer’s The Supper at Emmaus: the face of the serving girl, mute, serene, Han’s portrait of Joanna.
Han and Joanna returned from Roquebrune for the exhibition. This was Han’s exhibition but though Han hurriedly phoned his old friends from the Hague Art Circle, no one could get him tickets for the vernissage. In the end, Han had to content himself with going to the Boijmans the following afternoon, where he and Joanna queued and paid their entrance fee like everyone else. Once inside, Han slipped through the first room and stood in the central hall of the exhibition. There, among the Vermeers on loan from the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum, he saw his masterwork set apart on a pale cream wall. In the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, the critic Adolph Feulner described the scene: ‘In the room in which the Vermeer hangs almost alone, it is as silent as a cathedral. A feeling of benediction spills out over the visitors, although there is nothing church-like about the painting itself.’
The Supper at Emmaus was besieged by admirers. Han had to elbow his way into the circle to gaze at his painting. Here, on a museum wall, resplendent in the magisterial frame, it looked every inch a masterpiece. Han stood listening intently, foraging for crumbs of flattery. Then, unable to restrain the urge, he reached out across the velvet rope which set the Emmaus apart and made to touch the canvas. In a moment he would delight in recounting for years to come, there was a flash of blue as a security guard seized Han’s arm gruffly.
‘Mijnheer, please do not touch – it is a very valuable painting, a national treasure.’
Han shrugged an apology and walked away.
In the days that followed, Han made a daily pilgrimage to the Boijmans to stand by the painting. The crowds never seemed to ebb, waves of them pouring through the hall to stand next to him. Now and then he would catch someone’s eye and say: ‘I can’t believe they paid half a million guilders for this – it’s obviously a fake!’ and was thrilled to hear himself contradicted.
It became something of a party-piece. In the evenings, he went drinking with Theo and Jan, and friends from the Haagsche Kunstring. Conversation would inevitably turn to the exhibition and thence to the Emmaus.
Han would always begin categorically, ‘Jo and I went to the exhibition. I must say I didn’t think much of this new Vermeer. It’s such an obvious forgery.’
Invariably someone would rise to the bait.
‘Han, you’re a complete philistine – of course it’s genuine.’
‘You simply don’t know Vermeer’s work – everyone knows he painted religious scenes when he was young.’
Han would draw out the conversation, expressing doubts about the composition or the theme. Often, he would bet a bottle of fine champagne that he could not be persuaded, then, slowly, as the assembled company discussed the precision of the brushwork, the brilliance of the palette, he would allow himself to be won over. He knew, as Ruskin did, that the true work of the critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him. The bottle of Krug was a small price to pay for such adulation.
Han invited his son Jacques to come from Paris. It had been two years since he had seen the boy, and he missed their long talks about art, his fatherly pride in his son’s maturing talent. He took Jacques to the Boijmans and silently watched as his son moved through the exhibition halls, pausing when Jacques stopped to linger over a painting.
Afterwards, they walked to a nearby café. Jacques talked animatedly about his life in Paris and Han attempted to steer the conversation back to the exhibition. In his unpublished autobiography, Jacques van Meegeren relates that after several beers, Han could no longer contain himself and asked what Jacques thought of the exhibition. Jacques enthused about a Rembrandt self-portrait, or a Bruegel, but his father interrupted to ask what he thought of The Supper at Emmaus.
‘It’s a masterpiece – but a twentieth-century masterpiece, not a seventeenth-century one,’ Jacques said emphatically.
‘Then who do you think painted it?’
‘You, Papa.’ Jacques smiled. ‘I can see it in the elongated form of the faces. The eyes are just as you always paint them, you’ve even used your own hands as a model like you always used to do!’
In the margin of his manuscript, Jacques added in pencil – And I’ve seen the wineglasses and the jug in your house.
Father and son would not speak about the subject again until 1945.
If he was proud of his son’s keen eye, Han must surely have been worried that if Jacques had recognised his father’s technique in the Emmausgängers – a style Han had done nothing to conceal – it was only a matter of time before others noticed it. Though he was hardly a major artist, Han’s work was well known in Dutch art circles. If he was to come forward and announce his magnificent hoax, step into the spotlight and declare his genius to the world, now was the time: he had the strip of canvas cut from The Raising of Lazarus and the sections of the original stretcher as evidence, he could explain his technique and show the critics his sketches. He would repay the money and sell the Emmaus as his own work, then he could paint again under his own name and the whole world would know it.
Within a month, he was working on a new forgery.
15
GROSS HABITS/NET INCOME
All progress is based upon
a universal, innate desire on
the part of every organism
to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
Revenge is sweeter far than flowing honey. For a decade Han had nursed his suffering and plotted the humiliation of his critics. He had dreamed of the day when he would confess to committing a masterpiece and contemptuously hurl half a million guilders at the feet of the bigoted critics he had duped. Now that he had money, he abandoned such grandiloquent notions.
Within weeks of returning to the Côte d’Azur, Han and Jo terminated the lease on Villa Primavera and spent the greater part of the proceeds of the Emmaus on a majestic house in Cimiez, an elegant suburb of Nice, where Henri Matisse was among their neighbours. The Villa Estate was a fantasy in Italian marble with twelve bedrooms and five reception rooms overlooking the sea. A separate wing housed a private gallery in which Han had a permanent collection of opulently framed van Meegerens. There was a music-room, a sewing-room and a splendid library, to which Han brought his materials – his canvases, his pigments and his oven – converting the polished, panelled room into his studio-laboratory.
For a year, the van Meegerens lived like the princelings they invited to a seemingly endless series of parties. Friends and acquaintances came to visit from Holland and Roquebrune and their hosts entertained them lavishly in the extensive gardens where streams bubbled through rock pools, and an army of bronzed workmen tended the small vineyard, the olive grove and the rose gardens.
The money trickled away almost as soon as it was earned. Han’s drinking had become compulsive – he would have a bracing shot of jenever in the morning with his staple breakfast of coffee and cigarettes, something which merely whetted his thirst for the revelries to come. He was increasingly dependent on the morphine tablets which were now indispensable to steady his hand when he painted. He seemed to smoke even more heavily than before, often lighting a cigarette while another was still burning in the ashtray, his fingers now ochre and umber.
In the golden year the couple spent in Nice, Han had little time and certainly no need to work. Even so, among the handful of canvases we know he painted were two forgeries in the style of Pieter de Hooch, signed in monogram PDH, paintings which despite his considerable technical skill are little more than pastiche. Interior with Card Players (plate 15) is a minor variat
ion on Card Players in a Sunlit Room (plate 16) in the Royal Collection at Windsor. Han has reproduced the room in almost precise detail and the party as they sit beneath the great paned window have shifted only slightly. A map replaces the painting and the coat rack in de Hooch’s painting, the cavalier on the right has doffed his hat and placed it on an empty chair, the floor is copied from another painting by de Hooch and outside the window is the building painted by Vermeer in The Little Street. Han’s second forgery, The Drinking Party with Card Players (plate 13) is cribbed directly from de Hooch’s The Visit (plate 14), now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Though Han has opened a door in the rear wall to show a scullery maid at work, the room itself and the people it depicts are almost unchanged from the original.
He experimented with the styles of other artists too, painting a portrait in the manner of Ter Borch and, from the sketches he had made in Berlin, an impressive variation of Frans Hals’s Malle Babbe (plates 10 & 11), but the crude cut-and-paste technique of such forgeries bored him and he left these last unfinished, unsold.
Sometime in the spring of 1939, he visited Boon in Paris, taking with him Interior with Drinkers which he claimed to have discovered among Mavroeke’s cornucopia of treasures. While Boon sought an expert to authenticate this archetypal de Hooch – something he found all too easy, despite the murky provenance of the painting – Han returned to the bars of Pigalle in search of the lithe Swedish beauty he had met some months before. She was still dancing at the same nightclub and Han paid for two bottles of champagne to have her visit his table. As he confessed to Boon after the encounter: ‘When I took her back to my hotel, I realised I only wanted her if I didn’t have to pay. Afterwards, of course, I would have happily showered her with presents.’
‘And did she?’ Boon prompted.
‘It’s strange,’ Han said. ‘When I had no money, I thought I could never have a girl like that. Now that I do, I don’t seem to need it. She said yes and I was so surprised that I almost cried.’
‘Perhaps she genuinely likes you,’ Boon suggested.
‘I don’t think so,’ Han stubbed his cigarette emphatically, ‘I think she recognised in me a fellow-whore.’
Boon took Interior with Drinkers to the prominent Dutch art dealer P. de Boer, who quickly sold the work to Daniel George van Beuningen for 220,000 guilders. Han, as always, insisted that his share of the monies be paid to him in cash.
Han returned to Nice richer than before, to his magnificent villa and his glamorous wife, but the gilt had begun to pall. His experiments forging de Hooch, Ter Borch and Hals bored him; he longed to paint another Vermeer. The imaginary middle period he had conjured for the great artist had allowed him to paint entirely in his own style. The Supper at Emmaus had been a quintessentially van Meegeren masterpiece, it had required only the fillip of another man’s signature to make it priceless.
Han had been more surprised than anyone that his Vermeer, with an undocumented provenance that was no more than fantasy, had not been subjected to rigorous scientific testing. But Bredius and the art world elite had so longed for a new Vermeer, for a middle period which would bridge the void between The Procuress and The Milkmaid, that in their writings, they conjured new paintings. The critic P.B. Coremans felt able to state confidently that biblical Vermeers ‘once adorned the premises of a secret religious society in the seventeenth century’. So it was that Han came to devise a new Vermeer. In July 1939, he wrote to Boon:
Amice,
Last Monday, Mavroeke appeared unannounced with letters from her daughter, of which one will prove very important. She wrote that Mavroeke’s cousin, Germain – the one with the château in the Midi – had asked to see her. He is 86 now, and dying of cancer, Mavroeke is one of his heirs. In her letter, Mavroeke’s daughter said she had seen a photograph of the Emmaus . . . and remembered having seen a similar biblical painting, but much bigger and with a lot more saints in Germain’s collection (which, as I told you has the same provenance as Mavroeke’s). On Tuesday, I went there with Mavroeke: we spent two days searching and found no saints, only paintings from much later periods – until on Saturday, one of the servants told us there were some rolled-up canvases in the attic. It was there that we discovered the finest and most important painting ever created. It is The Last Supper painted by Johannes [Vermeer], much bigger and more beautiful than the Rotterdam painting [the Emmausgängers]. It is inspiring in its composition, noble and dramatic, more beautiful than any of his other paintings. It is probably his last work and is signed on the tablecloth. Approx 2.7 × 1.5 metres.
Having rolled it up again, we took a walk in the mountains like a couple of fools. What should we do now?
It seems to me almost impossible to sell it – though it is fresh from its mother’s womb – not recanvased, undamaged, with no frame or stretcher. Having thought about it for a long time, I reluctantly rolled it up again.
Imagine a Christ of extraordinary sorrow, gazing with half-closed eyes over a wine goblet; a melancholy Saint John, Saint Peter – no, it is impossible to describe – this a masterpiece such as was never painted by Leonardo, Rembrandt, Velasquez or any other master who painted The Last Supper.
Whether Boon replied, whether in fact he ever received Han’s letter we do not know. While the Munich treaty between Hitler and Chamberlain a year before had briefly allayed fears of war, the inexorable march of the Third Reich had continued apace, occupying the Sudetenland before the ink on the treaty was dry. The Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and Hitler’s poisonous address to the Reichstag in January 1939 on the subject of ‘The Jewish Question’ understandably unsettled Europe’s wealthy, educated Jews, and those who had the means to do so fled to Switzerland and to the United States. Though we cannot know for certain whether G.A. Boon was among their number, we know that in the months between their meeting in the spring of 1939 and Han’s arrival in Amsterdam in September of that year, the lawyer and former member of parliament fled the Netherlands and was never traced.
Han, too, was gripped by war and rumours of war. After the signing of the Pact of Steel’ with Mussolini in May 1939, France seemed an increasingly perilous place to be. Han’s decision, when it came, must have been sudden, for when the van Meegerens left the Villa Estate to return to the Netherlands, they abandoned almost everything they possessed, leaving the villa like a ghost ship, as though they had been spirited away.
Though no war had been declared, by the time Han and Jo arrived in Amsterdam in August 1939, civilian evacuations were already under way in London. Barely a week later, the German army marched into Poland and two days after that, on 3 September, France and Britain declared war. The van Meegerens decided they would stay in the Netherlands for the duration of the war. Since Germany had respected Dutch neutrality during the First World War, Amsterdam must have seemed like a safe haven in a Europe on the brink of chaos.
Han and Joanna arrived unprepared, and at first found it impossible to find a house. They spent five months living in a hotel in Amsterdam while Han searched for more permanent accommodation in the suburbs. It is perhaps because of this that he made no attempt to return to Nice to have his most valuable – and most incriminating – belongings shipped to Amsterdam. Aside from the opulent furniture and the paintings, four unsold forgeries lay propped against a wall in Han’s basement laboratory and another, barely begun, sat on his easel. Somewhere, safely stowed in the basement, were the strip of canvas and the fragment of stretcher from The Supper at Emmaus – the evidence he had carefully preserved when he had intended to reveal his scam. By May 1940, when Han had finally found a house, the Netherlands was under Nazi occupation and the war on France under way. It was impossible now to retrieve anything from Nice and the Villa Estate would lie abandoned for a decade, commandeered briefly as an Italian military hospital. One mysterious shipment was made, however. On 6 October 1939, Han arranged for a Paris removals firm to collect ‘Two crates containing pictures (260 × 190cm and 160 × 100 cm) and two crates containing
various objects’ from Cimiez. His arrangements with the shipping company are not known, but it is likely that it was the occupation which meant that the crates were held in Paris until 1941, when they were collected by the occupying powers – a note scrawled in German on the docket reads: ‘Taken away, May 22nd, 1941’.
If Han was happy to abandon a fortune in furniture and genuine old masters, what treasures were contained in these crates he was so eager to ship to Amsterdam? The smaller canvas may have been a de Hooch, but the larger – measuring nine feet by five, must surely have contained the masterpiece which Han had described in such fulsome terms in his letter to Boon. Whether this second crate contained The Last Supper was to trouble experts and critics for a decade after Han’s death.
In the search for a new home, money truly was no object and Han settled on the exclusive suburb of Laren in the hinterland of Amsterdam. There, early in 1940, he bought De Wijdte, at 46 Hoog Hoefloo. The villa was a soaring modernist edifice designed by the noted Dutch architect Wouter Hamdorff. The immense, high-ceilinged living-room had floor-to-ceiling windows which looked out over the heather-strewn moorland of Laren to the hills of Hilversum beyond. In time, it would come to be the room that Han loved most. Draped in costly oriental fabrics, the great space would house Han’s nascent collection of genuine old masters. A magnificent Jacob Maris landscape would hang above the east window, a portrait by Frans Hals by the arch of the doorway.