by Frank Wynne
Joseph Duveen, who had also been contemptuous of The Supper at Emmaus, accepted two further Vermeer paintings, Laughing Girl and a variation on The Lacemaker, which he sold to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Both are now declassified and exhibited as ‘Imitator of Johannes Vermeer c. 1925’. They are thought to be the work of Theo van Wijngaarden.
In 1975, the eminent Vermeer scholar Albert Blankert, in his book Johannes Vermeer van Delft 1632–1675, proposed purging four further Vermeers:
• Girl with a Red Hat, National Gallery, Washington.
• Girl Interrupted at her Music, Frick Collection, New York.
• Woman with a Lute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• Young Girl with a Flute, National Gallery, Washington.
All but the last are still considered by most scholars to be genuine.
Since 1949, only two works have been proposed as new attributions to Vermeer: Saint Praxedis, a copy of a Florentine painting by Felice Ficherelli, known as ‘Il Riposo’, which was first tentatively attributed to Vermeer in 1969, and ‘definitively’ attributed in 1986 by Arthur Wheelock, a senior curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who included it in a major Vermeer retrospective. It remains disputed, with few scholars sharing Wheelock’s enthusiasm.
In 2004, after ten years of scholarly research, A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal rejoined the canon of Vermeer’s oeuvre. Sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 2004, it is now in the collection of Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn. Despite the categorical attribution made by a host of respected Vermeer scholars following this decade, the authenticity of the painting is still disputed.
APPENDIX II
THE TWO LAST SUPPERS
At Han’s sentencing, the greatest joy, the most profound relief was felt not by defence or prosecution, but by the Belgian art historian, critic and collector Jean Decoen:
The moment of greatest anguish for me was when the verdict was being considered. The court might, in accordance with ancient Dutch law, have ordered that all the paintings be destroyed. One shudders at the thought that two of the most moving works which Vermeer created might have been destroyed. During his summing up, the public prosecutor stated that there was in the court a man who claimed that a number of the paintings were not by van Meegeren. He made this statement because, since 1945, he must have realised that my perseverance had not faltered, that my conviction was deep and that I have never changed my original statements in any respect whatsoever. Perhaps my words may have influenced the decision of the Court with regard to the application of the law. If this be so, I should consider myself amply repaid for my efforts and pains, for my tenacity may possibly have ultimately rescued two capital works of the Dutch school of the seventeenth century.
Decoen approached D.G. van Beuningen, who owned The Last Supper, asking to examine the painting and explaining to van Beuningen that the prosecution’s case conflicted with Han’s account of how the painting came to be created: Han claimed to have painted over a large canvas depicting two children in an ornate carriage being drawn by a goat, whereas X-rays indicated fragments of a hunting scene under The Last Supper.
With van Beuningen’s financial support, Decoen set about systematically refuting each of the major findings of the Coremans Commission. On a forensic level, it seemed a powerful case. At the trial Coremans testified that traces of phenolformaldehyde had been found in each successive layer of the forgeries. Trials carried out at Decoen’s request by the director of the Meurice Institute of Chemistry in Brussels proved such tests elicited numerous ‘false positives’ on genuine old masters.
The Commission’s conclusion that the canvases were painted with synthetic resin by van Meegeren is a hasty one since
(a) a large number of old paintings produce a similar reaction and
(b) the reaction is not specific to phenolic resins, which prove nothing under these conditions, but of products mixed with phenolic resins, which divests the test of every value
Coremans further testified that tests carried out by the commission had found that caustic potash, known to desaponify centuries-old paint, had no effect on Han’s creations. Decoen’s tests performed at the Institut Meurice, however, proved that ‘while the greater number of old masters do not withstand the action of hydroxide of potassium, the fact is far from general.’
He offered as evidence that the paint structures of undisputed paintings by Rubens and Fabritius were completely impervious to caustic potash.
The conclusions of the Coremans Commission accepted Han’s account of how he had cut down The Raising of Lazarus before painting the Emmaus. The evidence, they testified, was that years of strain exerted by the tacks holding the fabric causes canvas fibres to acquire a slight but distinct wave of between five and twenty centimetres. While three of the edges of the Emmaus exhibited such characteristic warping, the fibres of the left-hand edge were straight.
Decoen disagreed. ‘Being a chemist,’ he scoffed, ‘Mr Coremans has probably never mounted a canvas on a stretcher.’ The Emmaus, Decoen insisted, had never been cut. New tests seemed to bear him out:
On December 15, 1949 Monsieur Jean Decoen gave a demonstration in the presence of the restorers H.G. Luitweiler, M. van Grunsven, H.J. Schrender, C.J. Snoeijerbosch and Charles Meurice of the Institut Meurice in Brussels.
Mr Decoen’s presentation was limited solely to showing unequivocally that the canvas of The Supper at Emmaus had never been cut down.
The aforementioned restorers concurred with his assessment, with Monsieur Meurice vouching for the accuracy, from a chemical viewpoint, of the arguments used by M Decoen in support of his thesis.
In witness whereof, the four restorers, the chemist and M Decoen have signed this attestation.
Increasingly convinced by the work of Jean Decoen, a few short months after Han’s death D.G. van Beuningen contacted the Boijmans and offered to buy The Supper at Emmaus for 520,000 guilders – the price originally paid by the gallery in 1937. The Boijmans declined the offer.
P.B. Coremans addressed Decoen’s concerns on 27 September 1948, when he presented ‘a most important document’: a black and white photograph of a hunting scene by Jodocus Hondius, sent to him by Dr van Schendel, the curator of the Rijksmuseum, a painting which Douwes Brothers, an Amsterdam art dealership, claimed they had sold to Han van Meegeren in May 1940. The painting was intriguingly similar to the underpainting of The Last Supper. Furious, Jean Decoen, publicly accused Coremans of hiring an unknown artist to paint a scene which would coincide with the underpainting of The Last Supper. It was a serious accusation, charging both Coremans and Douwes Brothers with a criminal conspiracy. Coremans, however, did not seek legal redress to clear his name.
Decoen further argued that even if the canvas had been sold to Han, the sale took place in May 1940, while Han’s letter to Boon offering a detailed description of The Last Supper had been written in 1939. Coremans blithely suggested that Han had painted two versions of The Last Supper – one in Nice in 1939 and the second in Laren in 1940–41. There was little to support such a far-fetched hypothesis: Han’s villa in Nice had been painstakingly searched and four unsold forgeries found. It seemed unlikely that officers would have missed a canvas measuring nine feet by six.
In the spring of 1949, van Beuningen asserted that he had heard rumours that another version of The Last Supper was being fashioned to the specifications of P.B. Coremans; in fact he claimed to know the identity of the artist working on it. He confided this to Jean Decoen, who visited the villa in September 1949 and searched the basement on two separate occasions during which he saw no sign of an unknown masterpiece.
Two days later, on 26 September, Coremans arrived to search the derelict property again. It was a quixotic venture. More than a decade had elapsed since Han and Jo abandoned the Villa Estate and in addition to the searches made by French and Dutch authorities, Coremans himself had twice before searched the villa.
During the whole morning and part of the af
ternoon, I turned over and over the objects in the two basement kitchens and the corridor leading to them. This was where the gardener had stored most of van Meegeren’s paraphernalia after his departure. I was beginning to despair when, all at once, the miracle occurred and I suddenly noticed two sheets of plywood stuck together, measuring no less than 146 × 267 cms. On separating them I found – not the piece of canvas I was seeking – but another version of the Last Supper.
Decoen immediately dismissed this ‘first’ Last Supper as a forgery masterminded by Coremans himself and planted in the villa. What other explanation could there be for the fact that repeated searches had failed to turn up a canvas the size of a small car? There is one further oddity: if, as he claimed, van Beuningen had heard of Coremans’s plan to plant evidence, why send Decoen to search the villa when, as Lord Kilbracken suggests, a private eye might have been hired to keep the villa under surveillance. A heavyset man lumbering towards it with a huge sheet of plywood would have made a perfect photo opportunity.
Decoen’s theory was that Han had discovered The Last Supper in a château in the Midi, just as he had recounted in his 1939 letter to G.A. Boon and set about tracing the shipment to Han from Nice later that year. On 6 June 1950, Decoen finally tracked the shipment to Tailleur et Fils in Paris who issued an attestation to this effect:
Tailleur et Fils, 6 June 1950
By this document we hereby certify that we received four crates from Monsieur van Meegeren in Nice, two of which contained one painting each measuring 261 × 190 cm and 155 × 95 cm. The two others contained porcelain and earthenware. These four crates were taken away by a German lorry on May 22 1941 for transfer to Holland.
This, Decoen believed, was proof that The Last Supper had been shipped from Nice in 1939 and taken by the German occupying forces to the Netherlands in 1941. In his book Terug naar de waarheid: Vermeer-van Meegeren,* published in Rotterdam a year later, he wrote: ‘[The affidavit] of June 6 1950 alone would have been enough to prove that the whole Hondius affair was a sham. In fact, the document makes it possible to prove beyond any doubt how The Last Supper arrived in Holland.’
Decoen ignored the fact that the painting Han described in his letter to Boon was approximately 150 × 270 cm – measurements which coincide with the canvas discovered by Coremans (146 × 267 cm), but are significantly different from The Last Supper bought by van Beuningen in 1941 (174 × 244 cm). He also conveniently disregarded the fact that the Nice consignment was shipped from Paris in May 1941, while at the trial van Beuningen testified that he had bought The Last Supper in April 1941.
With his uncanny knack for belatedly discovering incontrovertible evidence to undermine Decoen’s thesis, P.B. Coremans produced one further rabbit from his hat: a receipt dated 1938 from a Paris art dealer for a painting by Govert Flinck sold to Han van Meegeren. A photograph of the painting was attached, clearly showing two children in an ornate carriage drawn by a goat – the image Han had claimed of the underpainting. Han, Coremans argued, painted his first attempt at The Last Supper over the Flinck, the second over the Hondius he bought from Douwes Brothers. Decoen blustered that van Meegeren ‘could not be so despicable nor show such little respect for a work of art that he would have deliberately destroyed a beautiful work’, forgetting that Han had desecrated dozens of works of art in order to create his forgeries.
Frustrated, D.G van Beuningen hired the Krijnen Brothers, art dealers from nearby Utrecht, to find conclusive evidence that The Last Supper was genuine. In a three-year investigation which ranged as far afield as Canada and Italy, the brothers searched for some historical reference to the painting. They found not a whisper of the work before it emerged into the light in the hands of the greatest forger of the century.
Undeterred, van Beuningen, whose faith in his painting had taken on a totemic certainty, sued Professor P.B. Coremans seeking damages of £500,000 ($13,000,000 in 2005), alleging that Coremans’s flawed judgement had harmed his reputation as a connoisseur and collector. A judicious magistrate would have thrown the case out, but in the hectic years after van Meegeren’s trial, any claim had to be heard. But in June 1955, before he could have his day in court, Daniël van Beuningen died of a coronary.
Though advised against pursuing the claim, van Beuningen’s heirs pressed to have the case heard. The judge found for the defendant; P.B. Coremans was exonerated and awarded costs and punitive damages.
Scientific testing performed in 1967* clearly proves that Han did indeed paint The Last Supper found by Coremans in Nice and a similar, rather better forgery two years later when he was quietly installed in his villa in Laren. But this does not explain what was contained in the huge crate which Han shipped from Nice in 1939. We can be certain that the shipment arrived, since the porcelain and other items contained in the smaller crates were later found among his effects. Han would only have shipped a forgery, since a painting signed in his own name would not even have recouped the cost of transport. There may be another biblical Vermeer waiting in the wings.
APPENDIX III
THE APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE
In 1967, The Artists Material Centre at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, was asked to examine the evidence of the Coremans Commission. A team of researchers under the direction of Dr Robert Feller and Dr Bernard Keisch examined The Supper at Emmaus and a number of other paintings to test whether they were products of the twentieth century. The dating of objects was to be done based on radioactive decay; specifically that of the lead contained in lead white.
In genuine seventeenth-century paintings, white is invariably lead white. Han knew this, and so oxidised lead, grinding the resulting white powder to create his paint. However, while the Dutch lead in Vermeer’s time was acquired from mines in Central Europe, from the mid-nineteenth century, lead was imported from Australia and the United States. It was this which Han used to make lead white for his paintings. Seventeenth-century Dutch lead was unique in containing quantities of silver and antimony, whereas in twentieth-century lead such elements are separated during the smelting process.
In addition, the paintings themselves can be dated using the Lead 210 method. Lead oxide is not pure but also contains elements which are unstable:
• 210Pb: (Radioactive lead-210) which decays rapidly into polonium 210. Half-life: twenty-two years, that is, in twenty-two years half the initial quantity of lead 210 will decay to polonium 210.
• 226Ra: (Radioactive radium-226) which decays slowly to become lead-210. Half-life: 1,600 years
When lead oxide is formed, most of the radium is removed, with the remainder beginning to decay very rapidly. The process of decay continues until the lead 210 in the white lead is once more in equilibrium with the small amount of radium then present.
If a painting is a genuine seventeenth-century Vermeer then the time span of 300 years is considerable compared to the twenty-two-year half-life of lead 210, and the amount of radioactivity from lead 210 will almost equal the amount of radioactivity from the radium 226. On the other hand, if the painting is a twentieth-century forgery, the amount of radioactivity from the lead 210 will be much greater than the amount from the radium 226.
By calculating the imbalance between these, researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University were able to determine categorically that the Emmaus and The Last Supper had been painted with lead white manufactured in the twentieth century and could not therefore be genuine Vermeers.
The role of chemistry in determining the authenticity of van Meegeren’s forgeries and the Shroud of Turin is now taught as part of courses such as The Chemistry of Art: Teaching Science in a Liberal Arts Context at Huntingdon University, Pennsylvania.
APPENDIX IV
VAN MEEGEREN’S FORGERIES
APPENDIX V
WHERE TO FIND YOUR NEAREST VERMEER*
In 1866 when Théophile Thoré published the first catalogue of Vermeer’s work, he detailed sixty-six paintings, including works now attributed to Jan Vermeer of Haarlem, and the cityscapes
of Jacobus Vrel. By the beginning of the twentieth century, their number had dwindled steadily to about forty-three. To this A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal was added in 1904, and Abraham Bredius added Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in 1907. The catalogue ballooned in the 1940s to include van Meegeren’s forgeries but in 1948, de Vries, the curator of the Rijksmuseum, weeded out the forgeries and misattributions to leave only thirty-five undisputed Vermeers.
* Challenged by one or more Vermeer experts
** No longer considered to be a Vermeer
*** Probable forgeries
*
Austria
The Art of Painting, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
France
The Astronomer, Louvre, Paris
The Lacemaker, Louvre, Paris
Germany
The Glass of Wine, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Woman with a Pearl Necklace, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Rustic Cottage,** Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (now attributed to Derk van der Laan)
Head of a Boy,** Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin
The Glass of Wine, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick
A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
The Procuress, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
The Geographer, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main
City View,** Kunsthalle, Hamburg (now attributed to Jacobus Vrel)
Ireland
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
The Netherlands