Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  Also in 1816, French soldiers confiscated a second complete, full-size copy of The Ghent Altarpiece that had been painted by an anonymous artist in 1625 for display in the Ghent Town Hall. This copy, now on display in Antwerp, had been in Paris since 1796. As a copy, it was not considered important enough for the Louvre to retain and so was sold off in 1819 to a German collector based in England, Carl Aders. Aders’s purchase coincided with the acquisition by the London National Gallery of van Eyck’s Portrait in a Red Turban and The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, launching van Eyck mania on the island.

  So many forged or misattributed van Eycks circulated at this time that at an 1830 exhibit of Flemish painting in Manchester, England, of five “van Eycks” on display, none was real. A contemporary article in the Manchester Guardian admitted as much but did not seem fazed by it: “Of van Eyck’s genuine works we really cannot feel satisfied that the Old Trafford Exhibition contains a single specimen.” The nature of the art trade, like other economic markets, requires that supply meet demand—and when dealers run out of authentic pictures, demand may be met through forgery, misattribution, and theft.

  Nieuwenhuys engaged in all three.

  The difficulty in navigating the art market without the strong hand of an experienced dealer such as Nieuwenhuys indicates that Vicar-General Le Surre acted on Nieuwenhuys’s orders. Le Surre was the inside man. Taking advantage of a moment when the bishop was out of the city, he stole the altar wings and passed them to Nieuwenhuys for the paltry sum of 3,000 guilders (around $3,600 today).

  Le Surre may have taken only the altar wings because there was a greater likelihood that they would go unrecognized as having been recently stolen. The central panels, back from Paris only one year prior, were at the forefront of everyone’s mind. But the wings had remained in the cathedral archives since 1794.

  There also seems to have been an odd consensus within the diocese that the wings were of only peripheral importance to the work as a whole and that it was the central panels that were critical emblems of Saint Bavo and of Ghent. This sense might have been heightened by the fact that the French soldiers had only seen fit to steal the central panels for the Louvre, even though Denon reacted swiftly when he saw the error in seizure, attempting to reconstitute the entire altarpiece in Paris.

  That Adam and Eve were spared may have been a simple matter of logistics, of what Le Surre had access to, and how difficult it would have been to smuggle more panels out of the city. Regardless of the reason why, the tiny sum Le Surre received for the stolen wings suggests that this was a fee for services rendered, not a sale price hard-won through negotiation, further indication that Nieuwenhuys commissioned the theft.

  When the sale of the wings was discovered, it caused a huge uproar in Ghent, but the damage had already been done. Remarkably, Le Surre was not punished for his action, at least not publicly, outside the confines of the diocese. He claimed that the diocese considered the wings to be superfluous and that he had not stolen them but rather sold them on behalf of the bishopric.

  There was a suggestion of collusion within the diocese, particularly when Le Surre retained his position even after the sale came to the attention of the public. When the bishop, Maurice de Broglie, was appointed to his position in Ghent, Le Surre was the one man he brought with him from his previous appointment. The two were friends and longtime colleagues. Could the pro-French bishop have approved of the sale? Motive is lacking for the Bishop de Broglie’s involvement. If Le Surre had permission, why would he have sold these panels of international renown for only 3,000 guilders? If it was an ideological theft, a pro-French, pro-imperial statement that what Napoleon stole should remain the property of France, then the panels would not have been sold to a Belgian dealer who would pass them on to an English collector in Germany.

  This scandal also raised a question, discussed in newspaper articles in the years to follow, as to whether The Ghent Altarpiece belonged to the nation that was soon to become known as Belgium or whether it was the property of the bishopric. This was long before the establishment of international legal action to repatriate cultural heritage. Today, both the private owner and the nation would have claim to a work deemed officially to constitute cultural heritage. In most countries the work would remain the property of the private owner, but it would not be permitted to leave the nation, either on loan or for sale, without the approval of the nation’s government. But in 1816, once a work was out of its country of origin, even if its location was known, there was little to be done.

  Today there are requirements in place, however frequently evaded, that oblige proof of due diligence and good faith in order to avoid culpability, should a purchased artwork be found to have been stolen. Due diligence means that the buyer (and also the merchant) must prove that they sought out lists of stolen works and checked with authorities to ensure that the artwork in question is not of known illicit origin. Good faith means that the buyer must show that the artwork was bought under the genuine belief that it had no illicit background.

  Neither obligations such as these, however, nor international laws on the preservation of cultural heritage were enforced at this time. Nor was provenance carefully maintained on objects, once they were looted. With the added difficulty of disseminating information in the pre-electronic age, it was all too easy to buy and sell stolen art.

  Italy tried to institute the first preservation laws in the early nineteenth century. In 1802 the Vatican, in an effort to preserve what remained of the papal collections after Napoleon tore through, forbade the export of old artworks or quality contemporary ones. But due to the chaos of the time, the first enforcement of this decree did not come until 1814. Even then, little could be done to catch illicit exports.

  The wing panels of The Lamb in hand, L. J. Nieuwenhuys found a buyer in Edward Solly, the influential Berlin-based English collector. Solly would surely have known the illicit origins of this prize, but either this did not matter to him, or the trophy was too good to turn down. He bought the six two-sided wing panels of The Lamb for 100,000 guilders (around $120,000 today) in 1818. They instantly became the most valuable and important works in his collection. In one year, and in one sale, Nieuwenhuys made a tidy profit of 97,000 guilders ($116,400).

  Having made his fortune in the timber trade, Edward Solly fed his love for art by collecting and eventually dealing. Along with a good many art dealers of the time, he settled in Berlin. After the fall of Napoleon, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was revitalized and set about reclaiming the art looted from it, as well as expanding its imperial collections. Italian paintings, which France had flushed out of Italy during its occupation, flooded the market and were snapped up by ravenous English and German collectors. It was during this period that most of the Italian art that fills England’s museums today made its way to the island. So much excellent Italian art crossed the English Channel that for the first time scholars began to travel to England in order to study Italian art.

  In Berlin, Solly profited mightily from the shakeup of the art collections of Europe during and after the French Republic and Empire. The magnitude of the trade in art at this time is indicated by the quantity of works in Solly’s possession alone. By 1820 Solly had purchased over 3,000 paintings and works on paper, the largest percentage of which comprised the art of Italian Renaissance masters, including Bellini, Raphael, Titian, and Perugino. The collection was housed in Solly’s massive residence at 67 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. His Italian pictures occupied seven galleries in his home, which also served as his warehouse. Solly admitted to a friend that his trade in Dutch and Flemish paintings was never his passion. He said that it was “only a means of providing the wherewithal to satisfy my real desires”: Italian paintings.

  In 1821 the Prussian king, Frederick William III, bought Edward Solly’s entire collection. His plan was to accumulate a Prussian National Gallery that would rival the glory of the Louvre. The prize of Solly’s collection was the six wing panels of The Ghent Altarpiece.

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bsp; Solly negotiated for the sale of his collection to the Prussian state over a period of three years. Both Solly and Prussia wished to keep the details of the sale secret for as long as possible. Though Solly did not want word to get around, his business had slowed, and his acquisitions outran his sales. For its part, Prussia did not want known, either internally or abroad, the vast sum of money it was spending on art during this period of social turmoil. Too many voices would weigh in that Prussia should be spending on infrastructure, not the accumulation of an art collection to outdo the Louvre.

  King Frederick Wilhelm III had seen the looting under Napoleon, had felt the threat to his own cultural patrimony, and had suffered losses. On the advice of the renowned German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the Prussian king began to build a royal collection. As many of the stolen works housed in the Louvre were making their way back to their places of origin, and the European market was a snowstorm of fine art, Frederick William III saw a great opportunity for the glorification of his kingdom through the acquisition of masterpieces.

  Solly’s collection was eventually sold to Prussia in two batches. The first group consisted of the 885 most important paintings, for which Prussia paid £500,000 (approximately $55 million today). The second group, of less important works but all still of museum quality, involved 2,115 paintings and drawings, sold for a further £130,000 (around $10 million today). Solly was aware that he was selling these works for a fraction of their actual value, and indeed a fraction of what he himself had paid for them. But he was pleased to see the collection remain together, a legacy that would outlive him. He viewed his discounted sale as a graceful gesture en route towards his retirement.

  Not even the panels of The Ghent Altarpiece that remained in Ghent were exempt from danger. In 1822, a fire broke out inside Saint Bavo Cathedral, damaging and destroying many of its artworks. Only through the rapid intervention of the cathedral staff and the local firefighters were the panels that remained in the cathedral preserved from harm, suffering only minor smoke damage.

  In 1823, under Gustav Waagen’s supervision, the panels were given a harsh cleaning, which revealed the hidden inscription referring, for the first time, to a “Hubert van Eyck.” This sent the art world into fits and further catapulted van Eyck, and now the van Eycks, to the fore.

  The territory that had begun as Flanders (and which then became the Austrian Netherlands followed by the French Netherlands, and then the United Kingdom of the Netherlands) officially seceded from Holland and became the country of Belgium in 1830. The name Belgium was selected in reference to the Celtic tribe originally from the region, dubbed “Belgae” by the conquering Romans.

  The occupational history of this small territory is long and dense. From Celts to Romans to the Counts of Flanders, who had yielded the parcel of land to the Burgundian Empire, which fell to the Hapsburgs, it passed through centuries of religious conflict and power shifts, before the French Republican and then imperial armies made it their own. Since 1830, it has been known as Belgium. But throughout its existence, through many names and many occupying powers, its greatest treasure has always been The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. And now that treasure was dispersed, its limbs stolen, smuggled, and sold off to crown the Prussian royal collection.

  In 1830 the Prussian king built the Königliche Gallerie in Berlin to house the fruits of his labors. The collection of Edward Solly joined the relatively small but precious Giustiniani collection, 157 paintings, which had been also purchased by Prussia to form the seedling of its new museum in Berlin.

  Art lovers expanded their travels to include this new Berlin Museum and to see its highlight, the wings of The Lamb. An English critic, George Darley, noted during his 1837 visit that the change of scene seemed to do wonders for van Eyck’s painting, which displayed “the most refreshing transparency, after the foul and ferruginous atmosphere which in Ghent rolled over them for four hundred years. Their azures, greens, and crimsons, like the richest jewels reduced to pure and many-colored water, which swam and stayed itself in lucid mirrors on the various parts of the surface, seem rather waved thither by the magician-painter’s wand.” Darley went on to write that an examination of the surface of van Eyck’s painting reveals no trace of brushstroke: “scarce a touch rises from the general level to betray that the tints were successive: yet no work can have less of the licked appearance so usual and so hateful in smooth execution.” Darley’s lyricism is indicative of the level of admiration for van Eyck’s paintings during this period. As the most expensive painter of the nineteenth century, van Eyck was the most desired artist by the English, French, and Germans.

  The Berlin Museum evolved into the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904, when it was moved to a grand new space on what is now called Museum Island in Berlin. It was only then, with the press that accompanied the opening of the new gallery, that the full significance of Solly’s collection came before the eyes of the general public at an international level. The London Times published in 1905 a confirmation of both Solly’s prowess as a collector and the success of his shadowy dealings, calling him “one of the most remarkable collectors who ever lived, and one of the most conspicuously in advance of his time.”

  At the Kaiser Freidrich Museum, the six wooden wing panels of The Lamb were split vertically, so that both sides, recto and verso, could be displayed and seen from one angle. This sort of severe surgery would never be sanctioned today, and indeed the dismemberment of a masterpiece, even at that time, was something drastic. It shows a prioritization of presentation value above respect for, and conservation of, the work. This critical alteration would aid the theft of both sides of one of the vertically split panels in 1934. The wing panels would remain on display in Berlin until 1920.

  The final intrigue in the story of The Ghent Altarpiece before the First World War came in 1861. The Belgian government persuaded the staff of Saint Bavo Cathedral to sell them the Adam and Eve panels for display in the national gallery in Brussels and for safekeeping. The sale price was set at 50,000 francs (around $115,000 today), a badly needed cash influx for the underfunded diocese. The Belgian government also gave Saint Bavo the copies of the wing panels that had been painted by Coxcie in 1559, the only panels in their possession from Coxcie’s copy, to replace those that had been stolen and currently resided in Berlin. As the final part of the deal, the government paid the Belgian artist Victor Lagye to paint copies of the Adam and Eve panels to be displayed in situ, replacing those that would go to Brussels. These new Adam and Eve panels did not depict their subjects naked, as in the original. Rather, taking the cue from Emperor Joseph II eighty years earlier, the Belgian government asked Lagye to cover the nudity with strategically located bearskin garments. These new Adam and Eve panels, adapted to satisfy the Victorian prurience of the era, were placed in the cathedral in 1864.

  With the Homeric twists and turns of The Lamb’s journey, it is understandably difficult to remember which panels were where at any given time. From 1864 until the First World War, the locations were as follows.

  On display in the original location, the Vijd Chapel of Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, were the new copies of the Adam and Eve panels by Victor Lagye, the wing panels copied by Michiel Coxcie in 1559, and the original van Eyck central panels, returned from Paris.

  The Belgian government had the original van Eyck Adam and Eve panels. They remained in the Brussels Museum, save for a few months in 1902, when they were on loan as the centerpiece of an exhibit of Flemish masters in Bruges.

  The Berlin Museum, inheritor of the Prussian royal collection, owned the six original van Eyck wing panels. In 1823, the museum acquired the Coxcie copy of the central panels of The Lamb, which had been on display in the Munich Pinakothek, after having been acquired from L. J. Nieuwenhuys. Therefore Berlin now displayed a semblance of the complete Ghent Altarpiece, with nearly as much original material as Ghent could boast.

  The far-flung panels of the altarpiece could rest—briefly.

  Then came the
First World War.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Canon Hides the Lamb

  Ghent was the site of the 1913 World’s Fair: a brief respite before the tumult of the First World War, and the next installments in the illicit whirlwind tour of Jan van Eyck’s masterpiece, which is, in itself, a journey through the history of art theft.

  Germany’s 1871 victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to an influx of income, fueled initially by the French indemnity payments, much of which was spent on enriching German state art collections. Led by the charismatic new director of the Berlin Museum, the successor to Gustav Waagen, Wilhelm von Bode, Germany began to purchase not only individual pieces but entire collections. This art harvest included the financing of archaeological excavations, such as Heinrich Schliemann’s famous excavation of Troy, the findings of which filled German galleries. A competition to purchase the artworks of the increasingly impoverished European aristocracy arose between the German state museums and American private collectors.

  The onset of the First World War saw an entirely new approach to how art should be handled in wartime. For the previous few thousand years, the rules of engagement had been simple: The conqueror plunders the conquered. Artworks and monuments were first seen as icons of the defeated to be destroyed. Then with the ancient Roman love affair with art collecting, initiated most overtly after the 212 BCE capture of Syracuse, which introduced Rome to the wonders of Hellenistic art, artworks were trophies to be seized by conquest, even to the point of altering military strategies in order to abscond with the art of the enemy.