H
an van Meegeren’s artistic career, which began with prizes and one-man shows, quickly lost its early promise. But the disdain of the critics had nothing to do with commercial success, and in The Hague in the 1920s, Van Meegeren became the portrait painter for Holland’s swells. As home to both the government and the royal court, The Hague abounded in judges and politicians and elegant spouses who wanted to commemorate themselves in oils, and Van Meegeren prospered.His personal life was hectic, too. He fell in love with an actress named Jo de Boer. Jo was married to an art critic, one of those who, early on, had been impressed by Van Meegeren. The critic had come round for an interview, ac companied by his wife. In short order Van Meegeren had a new portrait sub ject and a new mistress. Van Meegeren’s marriage fell apart and so did Jo’s, and in 1928 Han and Jo married.
In the meantime, Van Meegeren had kept in touch with his artistic col leagues. He liked to party, but he favored quiet pleasures, too, and he had lolled away many a pleasant day playing chess and chatting about art and art ists with a handful of close friends. Two painters made especially frequent visits to Van Meegeren’s home. The older of the two, a Dutch artist named Theo van Wijngaarden, was also a restorer and, more important, a forger who liked to talk shop.* The younger man, Henricus Rol, also Dutch, soaked up
* In Dutch, the combination ij is used for the letter y. Wijngaarden’s name is pronounced “Winegarden.”
the tales of skulduggery but never indulged in artistic misdeeds of his own.* Joining the three painters on many occasions was a shady Englishman named Harold Wright, a mysterious art collector and dealer. On one occasion he sold a much- acclaimed Frans Hals, and on another a Vermeer that eventually made its way to the banker Andrew Mellon and from him to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Both paintings supposedly came from Wright’s collection; both were later revealed as fakes; both turned out to be products of the Van Wijngaarden/Van Meegeren workshop.
Wright had made his money in business. His business was manufacturing paint. Perhaps it was Wright who gave Van Meegeren the hint that triggered his experiments with the newfangled plastic invented in America. At any rate, we know that by 1932 Van Meegeren had begun trying to use Bakelite to solve the riddle of making oil paints that would harden in the oven while keeping their color.
But as we have seen, even with that substantial hint Van Meegeren spent fruitless month after fruitless month. This was nasty, tedious work, for noth ing seemed to go right and the chemicals reeked. Van Meegeren’s skin was covered with rashes. His red-rimmed eyes teared constantly. (Van Meegeren would later claim that his wife had no idea what he was up to during all this time, but Jo could hardly have missed the stench or her husband’s odd appear ance. She put up with it because she shared Van Meegeren’s vision of a giant payday down the road. Her hope, she once confided, was that “a little zero should be added to their capital.”)
Van Meegeren began each round of experiment with a small amount of Bakelite, which he dissolved in turpentine. He added linseed oil, a standard ingredient in the paint recipes of his seventeenth-century forebears, and then he stirred in one or another of the pigments he had laboriously ground. With that newmade paint, he slapped a few strokes on a test canvas, set the oven to a temperature setting that had not already proved useless, and waited.
When he smelled smoke, when he had lost his patience, when he could not think what else to do, he opened the oven door. Usually he found a charred
* Rol had the talent to have made trouble, if he had been so inclined. Arthur Wheelock, a prominent Vermeer scholar, met Rol in the painter’s old age. “Mr. Rol was quite a painter. I visited him at the time of the Mauritshuis Vermeer show [in 1996]. If I hadn’t known that the
Girl with a Pearl Earring was hanging in The Hague, I would have sworn that was it, hanging in his back room. It was amazing.” Rol’s version was a copy that he had painted for his own plea sure rather than for profi t.
4 6 va n m e e g e r e n ’s t e a r s
canvas or a bleached and faded patch of color. He never found anything even vaguely like a masterpiece. Even today, in an upstairs room in Van Meegeren’s Roquebrune villa, some of the floorboards bear witness to these failed experi ments, the stains of spilled paint impossible to scrub away.
Then, somehow, Van Meegeren decided that maybe linseed oil was the problem. He turned instead to lavender oil and, especially, lilac oil.* Both were known to the old masters, and in using them, Van Meegeren was follow ing up a hint he had found “by chance, in an old book on oils and fats”—or so he later recalled, dismissively, although the “old book” was in fact his trusty and much-consulted German handbook of oil and pigment recipes. Oils made from flowers, Van Meegeren’s handbook explained, are volatile, which is to say they evaporate quickly. Van Meegeren may have reasoned that once the lilac oil evaporated, the paint it left behind would harden more quickly and convincingly. He hoped, in other words, that the best way to simulate a paint made with linseed oil was to steer clear of linseed oil.
That seemed unlikely. Still, Van Meegeren tried some new formulations based on lilac oil. He tried them, because, Edison-like, he tried nearly every thing. He was getting nowhere. What could it hurt? He gambled, too, that scientists would not detect the presence of Bakelite in his paint unless they tested for it specifically, which they had no reason to do.
When the momentous day finally arrived, it came without a signal. Van Meegeren had set up yet another test and had then gone to run errands. “On my way home from the doctor,” he recalled years later, “I got a flat tire, which was a great bore because the oven was on. But I thought . . . , ‘Well, after all the other failures, I can handle this one, too.’ ”
It took a long while to repair the tire, but Van Meegeren was glad to pro crastinate. “When I came home, I didn’t hurry; I had another drink and, without any expectation, took the panel out of the oven. I thought it would be scorched. But no, the white was still white! Hurriedly, I dabbed a cloth in al cohol and rubbed the paint. I rubbed ten times as hard as I needed to; when I looked—I hardly dared to look—the unexpected had happened.
“The paint was no longer soluble in alcohol! I cried like a child, I could have yelled it from the rooftops!”
* The oils have a heavy, cloying smell. Van Meegeren liked to tell a story about how Jo came in unexpectedly during his lilac experiments and smelled what she took to be another woman’s perfume. Unable to defend himself with the truth, Van Meegeren (supposedly) had no choice but to weather the attack.
* * *
Th i s s tory s ou n d s closer to the mark than most of Van Meegeren’s—it lacks the rococo details that usually marked his inventions—and it may well be true. In any case, he had indeed made a paint that passed the alcohol test. Moreover, this new paint behaved like paint—in color and tone it looked right on a canvas, and it felt right on the brush, so that the artist could put all his accustomed skills to work. That was a stunning accomplishment. The paint had a third virtue, too, one that Van Meegeren could not have anticipated. It was this third property that would, later on, bedazzle the very experts who knew the most about the technical side of forgery.
Kraaijpoel, the Dutch painter and writer, delights in Van Meegeren’s in ventiveness as well as his achievement. “Bakelite is a solid,” Kraaijpoel ob serves. “Some types are soluble in turpentine, and the resulting solution can be mixed with sawdust or another filler, to thicken the suspension, and then a telephone can be poured from it. But you can also rub pigments in it, to make paint. I think that Van Meegeren was the fi rst to think of it and to test it extensively. . . . Voilà, the most beautiful object ever made from Bakelite!”
Kraaijpoel is right to marvel. Vermeer died in 1675. Bakelite never existed until its creation, in a laboratory, in 1907. Van Meegeren fooled the world with a seventeenth-century painting made of plastic.