by Frank Wynne
Han’s new studio, he decided, would be in a sunny gabled room with a large gothic window. It took several months to replace the pigments and chemicals he needed, to build a new oven, and acquire genuine seventeenth-century Dutch paintings he could cannibalise for his work. It seems likely that the first forgery produced in his new studio was the Head of Christ, a study rather than a portrait; the face, like that in the Emmaus, is probably an idealised self-portrait: a study of God made Han: sorrowful and suffering, the sins of the world weighing heavy on his drooping eyelids.
Since Boon had fled, Han needed a new agent to represent his work: someone credulous yet credible, someone utterly unconnected with the Dutch art world. He settled on Rens Strijbis, a childhood friend working as an estate agent in Apeldoorn near Deventer. For the purpose, Han invented a new impecunious Dutch family, now living in The Hague, who were forced to sell off the family silver. He showed the Head of Christ to Strijbis who knew nothing of art and, he later admitted, ‘would not have given houseroom’ to the painting, but the promise of 15 per cent of the sale assuaged his aesthetic misgivings. Han wove an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain why he could not sell the painting himself. Vested interests in the Dutch art world were ranged against him, he explained. He had been despised and rejected for daring to print the truth in De Kemphaan. He impressed on Strijbis the need for tact: under no circumstances could he reveal the identity of the noble Dutch family battling to keep the bailiffs from the door. As an estate agent, Strijbis needed little coaching in the art of the lie, but he flinched when Han suggested that he should accept no less than half a million guilders for the Head of Christ – a painting barely nineteen inches by twelve.
At Han’s instruction, Rens Strijbis took the painting to Hoogendijk, who had handled the sale of the Emmaus three years before. As Han predicted, Hoogendijk immediately recognised in this minor masterpiece the hand of the great Vermeer of Delft. The dealer presented the portrait to D.G. van Beuningen who – having bought Interior with Drinkers – was keen to add a Vermeer to his prestigious collection. Van Beuningen offered 475,000 guilders for the painting of which Han received the equivalent of more than four million dollars in cash. Hoogendijk, Strijbis told Han, had suggested hopefully that he thought the Head of Christ might be merely a sketch for a major work yet to be discovered. He could not know that the major work – The Last Supper – was, in all probability, sitting half-completed in Han’s studio in Laren.
Han styled his Last Supper as an epic work. To the left of the painting a luminous strip of light serves as a window flooding the scene. At its centre, as Hoogendijk had predicted, is an exact replica of the Head of Christ for which van Beuningen had paid almost half a million guilders. On the right, a curiously androgynous Saint John sits, his face a copy of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (see detail plate 19), his hand covering Christ’s hand. It is altogether a less successful painting than the Emmaus. The composition is cramped, the space around the small table seems much too small to accommodate the crowded disciples, adoring, worshipful, intent on the fate of their Lord. In the background, Judas, swarthy and menacing, glances at the man he is about to betray. Since the Emmaus had not been subjected to extensive testing, Han was more slipshod in his technique. He removed only part of the original painting, A Hunting Scene by Jodocus Hondius. He was careless, too, in building the layers of pentimento, but the finished picture had the same air of authenticity, the same convincing crackle, the same glowing colour palette of the now-celebrated Supper at Emmaus, the painting which had been hailed by critics as Vermeer’s finest work.
It is surprising that when Strijbis appeared on his doorstep two months later bearing The Last Supper – the ‘major work’ for which the Head of Christ was but a preliminary study and which Hoogendijk had predicted must exist – the dealer was not in the least suspicious. ‘My first impression,’ he later confessed, ‘was that this was the most extraordinary work.’ A canny dealer – Hoogendijk never purchased a canvas without first assuring himself of a buyer – he accepted The Last Supper on consignment. He took the monumental work to van Beuningen, suggesting a price of two million guilders – some ten million dollars today. Despite his considerable wealth, this was more than van Beuningen could afford. But, taken by the beauty of the painting, he offered to pay for it in kind, giving Hoogendijk a dozen pictures – among them the Head of Christ (valued at some 1,600,000 guilders) which he had bought only two months earlier. Overjoyed with his purchase, van Beuningen set about building a country house in Vierhouten with a private gallery in which to display the work.
In November 1941, Han organised an exhibition of his own work at the Hotel Hampdorf in Laren to which the very critics and dealers who were appraising his Vermeers were invited. The paintings and watercolours in the exhibition were then collected and published at Han’s expense as Tekening 1. But there were more prestigious exhibitions too – in the Pulchri Studio and the Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, and in the august Boijmans Gallery itself (whose curator Dirk Hannema bought the van Meegeren drawing Fighting Peacocks). It seems astonishing that no critic who saw van Meegeren’s Christ with Bread and Wine noted the strikingly similarity to van Beuningen’s Head of Christ; or that between Han’s A Farming Family at Supper and the Last Supper.
In June, Strijbis turned up at Hoogendijk’s gallery once more, this time carrying Interior with Card Players. Hoogendijk barely listened to the ‘vague talk of an old Dutch family’. The painting was a classic de Hooch, beautifully signed in monogram PDH. It seemed to him a variant on the accepted Card Players in a Sunlit Room in the Royal Collection London. There seemed little point in offering the work to van Beuningen who already owned Interior with Drinkers, so Hoogendijk offered it – the third of Han’s forgeries in less than six months – to the benighted van der Vorm whose patronage had secured The Supper at Emmaus for the Boijmans three years earlier.
Since he dealt only in cash, Han’s embarrassment of riches was becoming difficult to manage. Though the villa in Laren was furnished with every luxury, and though Han spent extravagantly on genuine old masters – among them a Holbein and a Frans Hals – to adorn the lavish rooms, it was impossible for him to spend it all. He began to invest in real estate. He confided to his friend Marie-Louise Doudart de la Grée that he owned fifteen country houses in Laren and fifty-two other properties including hotels and nightclubs. His clandestine game of Monopoly was quickly to make him one of the largest landowners in the Netherlands. Even this did not exhaust his extraordinary wealth. He could not deposit such vast sums in a bank, since he had not declared a penny of his illicit earnings. He was too fearful to keep his millions in the villa in Laren, so began to hide large sums of cash in the various properties he had acquired. He hid tens of thousands of guilders in central heating ducts, under floorboards and in dozens of cashboxes buried in gardens all over the country. The alcohol and morphine haze in which he now lived aggravated his mistrust: he feared the tax man, the bailiffs, the critics – a shadowy, amorphous ‘they’ who would come and take his money and his paintings and so in fits of paranoia, he criss-crossed the country unearthing his fortune only to hide it somewhere else. Often, he could not remember precisely where he had hidden his money and it was to lie undiscovered for decades.
At the height of the war, Han suffered a serious setback. Faced with crippling inflation, the Dutch government recalled all 1,000-guilder notes. Those with substantial sums were required to furnish details of how they had come by the money. Han panicked. Much of his fortune was distributed in chimney breasts, pipes and conduits in the dozens of properties he owned. For months, he scrabbled to find the rolls of banknotes, mysteriously calling on his tenants to search for forgotten hoards. He eventually amassed 1.9 million guilders in 1,000-guilder notes. When presenting them at the bank to be converted into smaller denominations, he meekly explained that he was an art dealer and the money was the profit from the sale of a number of old masters. It was truth of a sort. But since Han had no documentati
on to support these sales and was unwilling to furnish the bank with details of the buyers and dealers involved, the authories sequestered almost a million guilders pending further investigation. It mattered little. Han was still enormously wealthy; besides, he could ‘discover’ another Vermeer.
16
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him
by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
The swastika is not visible to the tourists who crowd the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre for a glimpse of two of the most exquisite paintings in Vermeer’s oeuvre, The Lacemaker and The Astronomer, but it is there none the less. The plaque that accompanies The Astronomer explains that the painting, dating from 1667 or 1668, was bought by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild in London in 1886 and, passed down from father to son, donated to the Musée du Louvre in 1892. No mention is made of the years the painting spent, numbered among ‘European works of the highest historical and artistic value’, in the private collection of Adolf Hitler.
Hitler, who had twice failed to pass the entrance examinations to the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, would make art and aesthetics central to the Third Reich. As late as 1945, on the eve of his suicide and with Berlin under siege, his thoughts were of the art collection he had begun to amass almost twenty years earlier. His last will and testament states, ‘The paintings in my collections, which I purchased over the course of the years, were not assembled for any personal gain, but for the creation of a museum in my native city of Linz on the Danube. It is my most sincere wish that this legacy be duly executed.’
It was Dr Hans Posse, appointed head of acquisitions for the Linz museum in June 1939, who had stressed the importance of obtaining a Vermeer. Reviewing the collection of nineteenth-century romantic realists which the Führer had already acquired, Posse rejected the sentimental paintings of artists such as Euard Grüntzer as unworthy of the museum he had been appointed to curate. The collection was swelled during the war through the work of the ERR – the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg – which organised the looting and confiscation of art works. The Astronomer, seized as part of the flawless Rothschild collection, was declared ‘Property of the Third Reich’, and a small black swastika was stamped on the reverse of the canvas. The director of the ERR wrote to Martin Bormann, ‘I am pleased to inform the Führer that the painting by Jan Ver Meer of Delft, to which he made mention, has been found among the works confiscated from the Rothschilds.’
Hitler’s collection was rivalled only by that of his second-in-command, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The Reichsmarschall’s collection, housed at his magnificent estate, Carinhall, was curated by Walter Andreas Hofer, who scoured Europe for important works of art. Göring, who regularly visited the ERR warehouse at the Jeu de Paume, hand-picking the finest works for his collection, boasted to Albert Rosenberg, ‘At the current moment, thanks to acquisitions and exchanges, I possess perhaps the most important private collection in Germany, if not all of Europe.’ Göring, however, did not yet own a Vermeer.
Of Han’s last three Vermeers, his biographer Maurice Moiseiwitsch would later write:
It is true that the Emmaus, the first inspired expression of homage to the Master, is more exquisite of detail, more intense of feeling than most of the others; but the others remain first rate technically and tremendously authoritative, all excellent examples of mature talent. . . By the standard of Vermeers these were good Vermeers; by the standard of seventeenth-century paintings, these were great paintings.
In fact, even Han, in a rare moment of sobriety, confessed that he was ‘not as proud’ of his later forgeries: ‘They were neither conceived nor executed with the same care (Why should I make the effort? They sold just as well!)’ But even this is to understate the sheer wretchedness of Isaac Blessing Jacob, The Adulteress and The Washing of Christ’s Feet, which were painted and sold in a single year, earning Han the equivalent of twenty million dollars.
Isaac Blessing Jacob is a stilted, clumsy piece whose only allusion to the seventeenth century is the ubiquitous tableware Han routinely used as props. Nevertheless, when the steadfast Strijbis took the canvas to Hoogendijk, the dealer immediately accepted it as a Vermeer and sold it for 1,250,000 guilders to the hapless W. Van der Vorm, now the unwitting owner of three van Meegeren forgeries.
It might be charitably assumed that it was alcohol and morphine, hypochondria and paranoia that caused Han’s talent to plummet, for his next work, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery – which would one day take pride of place in Göring’s collection in Carinhall – is an ugly, poorly crafted work. None of the poetry and serenity that Han hoped to bring to his biblical Vermeers is in evidence. The space, as in all of Han’s biblical Vermeers, is cramped and the composition unwieldy. Two Pharisees loom menacingly over the young Christ’s shoulders as he placidly absolves the remorseful reprobate. Only the face of the sinner, copied once again from Vermeer’s Lady in Blue Writing a Letter, gives even the slightest hint that this might be the work of the master on a supremely bad day. Han’s later claim that he continued with his forgeries because he had grown to love the technique he had discovered is belied by the careless way in which the painting was created. He made only a desultory attempt to remove the scene of Horses and Riders from the canvas and the resulting craquelure is therefore poor and inconsistent. Though he lavished a king’s ransom in ultramarine on Christ’s robe, which takes up almost half the surface area of the canvas, when the painting was later examined it was discovered that the ultramarine was adulterated with cobalt blue. Even his technical skill, until then the one fixed point in his waning talent, failed him here. He carelessly left The Adulteress too long in the oven and the resin blistered, leaving a patchwork of craters like acne scars over the surface of the painting. Han so disliked the finished painting that he considered discarding it. In the end, he salvaged the piece, restoring the damage as best he could and unleashing his monster on an unsuspecting world.
Han had previously relied on friends and acquaintances ignorant of the art world to act at his intermediaries, making it possible for him to control the sale. This time, however, he took the risk of offering Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery to a genuine dealer, P.J. Rienstra van Strijvesande, who had a small gallery south of the Vondelpark. Han would later claim that he had been adamant that the painting should not be allowed to fall into German hands. If this is true, then Strijvesande ignored his instructions, immediately taking the painting to Alois Miedl, a scout for Walter Hofer, who had acquired the art dealership N.V. Kunsthandel J. Goudstikker on the Herengracht with money obtained directly from Hermann Göring.
Alois Miedl immediately recognised in The Adulteress something of the qualities of the celebrated Supper at Emmaus in the Boijmans Gallery. If the painting was a Vermeer, then it was a rare and valuable find and one that he knew would be of interest to his superiors. He brought the painting to the attention of Hofer.
Rienstra van Strijvesande, however, had been suspicious of the tale Han had spun, and began to investigate van Meergeren’s background. It did not take long before someone in the close-knit circle of the Haagsche Kunstring eagerly related the rumour that van Meergeren had somehow been involved with the forger Theo van Wijngaarden in the sale of a forged Frans Hals in 1923. Concerned, Strijvesande withdrew from the sale and passed Han’s details directly to Alois Miedl. Han had no wish to deal with the occupying powers, but by now it was too late. Miedl had shipped the painting to Walter Hofer. It is easy to believe that Han was innocent of the charge of collaborating with the enemy: had he been a traitor, he would never have allowed a dubious Vermeer – let alone one adulterated with cobalt blue – to be offered to a high-ranking Nazi official, since even a cursory examination would have revealed it as a forgery. He had little to fear – Göring was in awe of the painting, and readily accepted Walter Hofer’s opinion that it was a genuine Vermeer. As with all
of his Vermeers, no X-rays were taken, no microchemical analysis performed.
Much has been made by critics and commentators of the fact that Han’s forgeries were sold in secrecy to private collectors – only the Emmaus was publicly exhibited. Under the German occupation, they argue, it was impossible for experts truly to study the forgeries, comparing them to Vermeer’s acknowledged work, thereby explaining how such truly terrible paintings came to be accepted as the work of Vermeer. The sale of The Footwashing is enough to refute such a simplistic theory.
Han’s last forgery, The Washing of Christ’s Feet (plate 21), completed in 1943, is by far the worst of his deteriorating efforts. He took as his inspiration Luke, Chapter 7, verses 37–38:
And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.
Two unidentifiable disciples lurk in the background, one gazing mawkishly at Christ, who is presumably blessing the kneeling figure of the unidentified sinner, often said to be Mary Magdalene. His gesture, however, is ambiguous, since the crude anatomy makes it seem as though he is waving away a plum pudding offered by a serving girl. The composition is improbable and the modelling shoddy and offhand – only Vermeer’s signature, as perfectly executed as ever, demonstrates even a whisper of talent. Han approached a childhood friend to organise the sale. Jan Kok, a former civil servant in the Dutch East Indies, had never heard of Jan Vermeer. None the less, when Han offered him a sizeable commission, Kok agreed to negotiate. Han suggested he take the painting to P. de Boer and offer it for sale for some two million guilders.