by Frank Wynne
The problem with Lot number eight is one of attribution. Baron Frédéric (Freddie) Rolin fell in love with it when he first saw it in a London gallery window in 1960. Previously, it had been the property of Sir Albert Beit, inherited from his father, the distinguished Irish collector who bequeathed Vermeer’s famous Lady Writing a Letter to the National Gallery in Ireland. It has been impossible to trace its provenance before that date. Yet Sotheby’s seems content to assert that ‘The whereabouts of the present picture has, however, been securely documented since 1904.’ When Baron Rolin first saw the painting, it was no longer thought to be by Vermeer, having been dropped from the second edition of A.B. de Vries’s catalogue raisonné of Vermeer’s work in 1948 as part of an extensive purge. The painting was omitted from the first major Vermeer retrospective in 1996, and two years later the Vermeer scholar Benjamin Broos rejected it as a ‘tasteless mishmash’ of two Vermeers in the National Gallery and argued that its advocate ‘Christopher Wright cannot be taken seriously with his continuing presentation of this and other pseudo-Vermeers as the genuine article’. The painting was hastily included in ‘Vermeer and the Delft School’ at the National Gallery in London in 2001, though Axel Ruger, the curator, made no claims for its authenticity, and it did not appear in the catalogue.
Sotheby’s catalogue glosses over the murky history of the painting, focusing instead on the fact that the painting has recently been re-attributed. Re-attribution, like a magical incantation, can turn a worthless forgery into a priceless old master.
Sotheby’s has set a ‘conservative’ reserve price of £3 million, but if the committee’s attribution is to be believed the reserve is not conservative but laughable, since even insignificant works by Vermeer are considered ‘almost like minor relics of a saint’. ‘In making an attribution,’ the art historian John Conkin observes, ‘a critic or dealer is not only adding a footnote to the history of art, he or she is also adding or subtracting zeros from the eventual price that will be paid for it.’ Sotheby’s chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, when he took over the august institution, commented: ‘Selling art has much in common with selling root beer . . . People don’t need root beer and they don’t need a painting, either.’ The observation is somewhat disingenuous since root beer routinely sells for a dollar a can, but collectors will pay more – much more – for genius. ‘Art,’ in the words of the critic Robert Hughes, ‘is no longer priceless, it is priceful.’
There is an unexpected flurry of bidding for Lot number seven, Study of the Head And Shoulders of an Old Man, a dark, brooding portrait in which the artist has masterfully captured the human frailty, the intimation of mortality in his subject. Even the onlookers are caught up in the excitement, bidding quickly tripling its estimate to top £1 million and finally selling to the respected London dealer Johnny Van Haeften for £1.8 million, setting a record price for a work by the artist Jan Lievens. Though those in the hall are probably unaware of the irony, Lievens’s portrait has also been re-attributed. And attribution – which is no more than an expert opinion – can cause the value of a painting to go down as well as up. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the painting was attributed to Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Lieven’s mentor and teacher. It was a Rembrandt when last exhibited at the National Gallery. If the portrait were still attributed to Rembrandt, the auctioneer would not have countenanced £1.8 million as an opening bid. In a more cruel irony still, Study of the Head and Shoulders of an Old Man is listed as ‘The Property Of The Late D.G. Van Beuningen’.
In art, then, attribution is everything. This is why we are here, craning to get a look at the tiny painting now being held aloft by a handsome blond Sotheby’s official wearing regulation white gloves. There is a theatrical hush, and the auctioneer clears his throat and invites bids.
‘Lot number eight: A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, by Johannes Vermeer, oil on canvas, in a fine French Louis XV carved and gilt wood frame, property of the heirs of the late Baron Frédéric Rolin.’
It is an unprepossessing painting. Barely ten inches by eight – hardly bigger than a family photograph – and utterly dwarfed by the ornate gilt frame. The subject is a rather plain girl, awkwardly posed at the virginals, wrapped in a huge, graceless yellow shawl. She gazes wanly at the viewer. Somewhere, off the canvas to the left, an unseen window lights the featureless, almost monochrome interior of greys and flesh tones; only the yellow of the girl’s shawl provides a visual focus. There is nothing else, none of the signature shadow-play on the wall, no maps or linens or brocade, no foreground furnishings – a repoussoir - to frame the scene. This is unusual in a Vermeer, even more so in one which is dated around 1670, the period of his mature style, in which he painted The Lacemaker, A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal which hangs in the Royal Collection, in that his paintings are never simply portraits, he uses the details of a room to tell us silent, intricate stories about his subjects.
None of this, however, makes any difference to the bidding, which from the outset is brisk but discreet. The bidders present eschew what is called ‘lighthouse bidding’, where a bidder sticks his paddle in the air and leaves it there, indicating s/he is in it for the long haul. Instead, once the bidders are established, a simple nod of the head suffices to add another hundred thousand pounds, another half-million. Incongruous in the elegant eighteenth-century splendour of the auction room is the customary bank of telephones manned by some two dozen Sotheby’s officials taking bids from those who wish to remain anonymous. Among the onlookers there is feverish speculation as to the identity of these ‘anonymous bidders’. Steve Wynn, Las Vegas millionaire and owner of the Bellagio, may be keen to add an old master to the twenty-five Picassos which give one of the hotel’s seven restaurants its name; billionaire collector Ken Thomson is surely a strong possibility, and the leviathan of all bidders – at whose name public galleries and private collectors tremble – the J. Paul Getty Museum, is unlikely to miss this unique opportunity. The officials manning the phones nod, pushing the bidding higher and there is an almost audible sigh of relief when the painting quickly breaks the ten-million-pound barrier.
An inexperienced bidder might trust to the reputation of the auction house in such matters. Such a person would be wise to read the general terms and conditions common to every auction house: ‘All property is sold “as is” and Sotheby’s makes no representations or warranties of any kind or nature, expressed or implied, with respect to the property . . . nor be deemed to have made any representations or warranties of physical condition, size, quality, rarity, importance, genuineness, attribution, authenticity, provenance or historical relevance of the property.’ An additional clause is pertinent to the case of A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. ‘In addition to other exclusions described in the catalogue, we cannot guarantee the authorship of paintings, drawings and sculpture created before 1870.’
But those bidding this evening, all but one of whom are anonymous, are experienced in the ways of the auction house. They know that in art there are no guarantees, only hunches. Of the remaining bidders, only one is present in the hall: Robert Noortman, a respected Dutch dealer, finally concedes defeat when the bidding reaches £14.5 million. Some minutes later, George Gordon, a Sotheby’s Old Master expert who has been manning one of the phones, takes the winning bid, £16,245,600 ($27 million) including commission. At the back of the hall, a Spanish journalist collects his winnings: eighteen pounds for guessing the price paid for the painting.
Though there are more than fifty lots remaining to be sold this evening, the onlookers, reporters and media pundits begin to file out. Journalists rush to file their copy. The bidders and the auctioneers resume their earnest work. Later that evening a striking Night Scene by Rubens (listed simply as ‘The Property of a Lady of Title’) will fetch £2.4 million. Saint John Preaching in the Wilderness by Jan Breughel the Elder will sell for less than £350,000 and a fine Tintoretto, The Deposition, for a trifling £151,200. The media care only that the world is officially one Vermeer richer.
Two days later, Brian Sewell, the august art critic of the London Evening Standard, challenges Sotheby’s assertion that A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal is ‘an extremely important addition to our understanding of Vermeer’s artistic development’, preferring to suggest that ‘this nasty little picture’ is a forgery. ‘The history of Vermeer in the twentieth century,’ he writes, ‘is littered with false attributions and downright forgeries enthusiastically attested by the experts of the day, and I confidently predict that the Sotheby picture will join them as an object of derision – £16.2 million is monumental proof of folly, not authenticity.’
Coincidentally, Sewell’s article appears on the very day that Sotheby’s is forced to admit it withdrew the star item in its Russian sale, having been informed that the work is a forgery. The painting, attributed to Ivan Shishkin, had been estimated at between £550,000 and £700,000. In truth, it was a crude hack-job. The forger had purchased a minor painting by an obscure Dutchman, Marinus Koekkoek, only a few months earlier in Stockholm and, making no attempt to imitate Shishkin’s style, simply contented himself with overpainting some details and appending Shishkin’s signature. When the catalogue was published, Sotheby’s was fulsome in its praise for this profoundly atypical ‘Shishkin’: ‘Landscape with Brook is a rare example of an important piece by a major artist’. Citing a Shiskin specialist that the artist was a ‘delicate and profound chronicler’ of pastoral life, Sotheby’s added, ‘Looking at Landscape with Brook it is difficult to disagree.’ Faced with photographic evidence of two almost identical paintings, Sotheby’s withdrew the picture from the sale, blustering that it was ‘not yet convinced that its authentication was wrong’.
Matthew Bown of the Izo gallery in Mayfair commented to the Guardian: ‘Hopeful attributions are common in the art world and are not confined to Russian painting. However, it is startling to see a misattribution estimated at over $1m in a Sotheby’s catalogue. Most of the people who buy at Sotheby’s Russian auctions are not professionals but collectors who rely implicitly on the accuracy of Sotheby’s statements.’
Meanwhile, the head of Sotheby’s Russian department, Joanna Vickery, insisted that she had not yet seen evidence to prove that the Shishkin was a forgery. In her words, ‘The jury is still out.’
A shudder of panic rippled through the art world, but quickly dissipated. The Shishkin returned to deserved oblivion, and no voices came to join Sewell’s attack on the Vermeer. On the latter, Sotheby’s stood by its attribution. The painting had, after all, been authenticated by a committee which included luminaries from the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum, although to those who know how to read an auctioneer’s catalogue, the attribution seems full of caveats: the experts are ‘Almost certain . . .’ the work is by Vermeer, although they admit that the painting was ‘to some extent reworked by another hand . . .’ More damagingly, they suggest that ‘part of the picture was brought to completion after the rest of the composition, perhaps as much as a few years later’. They are certain, however, that the picture is ‘unquestionably seventeenth-century’. It has taken them ten years to reach even this, qualified, certainty.
The canvas, the committee concluded, matched that on which Vermeer painted The Lacemaker so exactly that it ‘made it likely that the two pieces of canvas had been cut from the very same bolt of cloth’. But this is a specious argument – The Lacemaker is barely eighty square inches and A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal smaller still. A bolt of canvas would measure some two yards wide by fifteen to twenty yards in length and could accommodate Vermeer’s life’s work ten times over. As Brian Sewell notes, ‘If Vermeer’s lifetime’s work on canvas were measured against a single bolt, I suspect that 90 per cent of it would not have to be unrolled.’
The pigments in A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal were analysed and found to correspond with the ‘unusual, expensive, and often extremely rare’ pigments typical of Vermeer’s work. Of these, the committee focused on three pigments: leadtin yellow, green earth and the most expensive colour available to seventeenth-century Dutch artists, ultramarine, the colour quintessential to Vermeer. None of these have been in use since the mid-nineteenth century, when cheaper, factory-produced colours supplanted them. The committee, however, seem to have forgotten the simple advice set out fifty years ago in a small pamphlet published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York: ‘Valuable as chemical analysis is, the check which it offers must not be considered as foolproof, because forgers also know the correct dating of pigments and prepare their frauds accordingly.’
Furthermore, the lead-tin yellow in the painting is principally to be found in the shawl, which even the experts admit may be a later addition; and though there is ultramarine in the shadows, there is a curious absence of visible full-strength ultramarine compared to contemporaneous paintings by Vermeer.
It is precisely because there are so few Vermeers that we do not get to see the master on a bad day, but what is most striking is how curiously defensive the arguments for the painting’s authenticity sound. As John Haber points out, ‘They stake an artist’s signature on his materials, as if he held the Dutch monopoly on paint supplies.’ No one – not the experts, nor even Sotheby’s – suggests that this is a beautiful painting; certainly not a great Vermeer. Instead, in an attempt to date the painting, a cultural historian asserts that the hairstyle worn by the girl was in fashion ‘only between 1669 and 1671’. Art historians comment on the striking similarity between the young woman’s pose and that of the lady in Vermeer’s A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal in London’s National Gallery. But the paintings, which according to the committee’s findings would have been painted at much the same time, have nothing else in common. The painting in the National Gallery has the subtle cues and restrained narrative of a mature Vermeer. While the young girl’s innocence is emphasised by the name of the instrument favoured by young ladies, behind her on the wall, Baburen’s The Procuress reminds the viewer that all is not courtly love. The instrument itself is beautifully rendered, as is the abandoned cello (another sexual symbol, critics maintain) and the scene is framed in classic Vermeer style. By contrast, this new Vermeer is all but monochrome. It has no space to breathe and little light, the instrument is dark and muddy, the wall behind the sitter bare and the anatomy unsophisticated. It is a painting unworthy of Vermeer, unworthy even of the man to whom it was attributed for the past half-century: Han van Meegeren.
APPENDIX I
THE DWINDLING VERMEERS
Han van Meegeren’s true legacy to the world of art is doubt. More than that of any other forger, his work rocked the foundations of an art world reliant on the authentication of experts. The work of Jan Vermeer of Delft has never been so discussed, so admired, so fêted as in the aftermath of Han’s trial. Newspapers and magazines published feature articles extolling this modest, unassuming artist so long unsung, whose serene interiors and minimalist narratives seemed extraordinarily modern compared to the theatre and bombast of the Romantics. But if the downfall of the man who made Vermeers brought a new audience to the work of his beloved Sphinx of Delft, his skill as a forger made it even more difficult to assess the authenticity of works attributed to Vermeer. Within months of Han’s trial, Arie Bob de Vries hurriedly published a revised edition of his catalogue of Vermeer’s oeuvre. The first edition, published in 1939, had proudly included The Supper at Emmaus. Now, de Vries took a scythe to the mediocre and the insipid. ‘It was only after the war that this bewildering forgery business came to light,’ he wrote. ‘It opened my eyes completely. I now feel that I have to remove every doubtful work from the artist’s oeuvre.’ Together with the Emmaus, he downgraded Dutch interiors and crude copies by unknown hands, many bearing the elegant signature of Vermeer, whittling the number of genuine Vermeers from forty-three to the thirty-five canvases most scholars acknowledge today.
Two years later, the number of genuine Vermeers seemed once more under threat when the critic P.T.A. Swillens dismissed Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
, which had been attributed by Abraham Bredius, and Diana and her Companions as unlikely Vermeers, though other Vermeer experts have not agreed with his censure.
In January 1951, Jacques van Meegeren further muddied artistic waters when, at a press conference in Paris, he announced that his father had forged four further paintings:
• The Laughing Cavalier (Frans Hals), in the collection of Cornelis Hofstede de Groot.
• Young Girl with a Flute (Vermeer), in the National Gallery, Washington.
• Head of a Young Woman (Vermeer), in the Mauritshuis.
• Young Man with a Pipe (Vermeer), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
However, Jacques was unable to provide any evidence – sketches or writings by his father - to support these allegations and when quizzed by journalists at the press conference he quickly became confused and began to contradict himself. Consequently his allegations were not believed. Significantly, however, of the four paintings, Head of a Young Woman is now considered a forgery, possibly the work of Han van Meegeren’s erstwhile colleague Theo van Wijngaarden. Young Man with a Pipe, though a seventeenth-century Dutch painting, was never a secure addition to Vermeer’s work. Young Girl with a Flute, though still exhibited in Washington as ‘attributed to Vermeer’ is not accepted by all Vermeer scholars.
A legacy, advertising executives assure us, is a gift that goes on giving. Han’s legacy goes on taking. In 1974, John Walsh, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reclassified Vermeer’s A Young Woman Reading as a forgery. The attribution now reads ‘Style of Johannes Vermeer (first quarter 20th century)’. It may very well be the work of Han van Meegeren, and was sold to Jules Bache by Georges Wildenstein, who would later dismiss the Emmaus as a fake.