Chapter Two

Beautiful Nonsense

LET’S RETURN TO BERLIN for a moment. Not the bombed-out disaster area that Jan Spierdijk visited in the summer of 1945, but the glittering and spectacularly corrupt Berlin of the mid-Weimar period. Having weathered the First World War, failed uprisings of the left and right, and a crushing bout of hyperinflation, the German capital was, by the late 1920s, booming again, thanks to a massive influx of funds from foreign investors. Real estate prices had shot through the roof, and enormous construction projects seemed to be popping up everywhere. A brand new underground train line rumbled between the Alexanderplatz and the northern suburbs, to the immense satisfaction of the many city officials who had bought property along the route. Tourists flocked to town for the nightlife. And why not—there was something for everyone, at least everyone who liked sex. With little access to the enormous sums bloating the high end of the economy, a surprising number of ordinary Berliners made a living selling the only desirable commodity they possessed. Provocatively dressed Kontroll girls worked the Friedrichstrasse all night long; the transvestite floor show at the Silhouette Cabaret couldn’t be beat; and even if you just wanted a bit of quiet recreation back in your hotel room, the weekly Nachtkultur magazines listed hundreds of possible companions, both male and female, categorized according to their talents and specialties. Some even worked in teams: husband and wife, mother-daughter, dominant and submissive.

Babylon on the river Spree—that’s what stunned foreigners called it—and it was in this cosmopolitan setting that young Englishman Harold R. Wright showed up in 1927 with a framed oil painting and dreams of untold wealth. A mystery man then as now, Wright is not the sort of figure one normally encounters in history books. There is only one known photograph of him: prematurely bald with a beaky nose and an anxious smile, he appears thin and rangy, like a scarecrow dressed up in a baggy suit. A bit player in the international art world, Wright makes his first appearance in the records of Christie’s London auction house in 1924, buying and selling paintings in partnership with Theodore Ward—he of the Dutch-style sitting room in the Finchley Road. Then just twenty-six years of age, a minor employee in Ward’s paint business, Wright seems to have tried his best to emulate his boss, adopting the lofty persona of a gentleman amateur, someone who dealt in pictures merely as an amusing pastime. He started calling himself “Captain Wright,” and while he had no legitimate claim to that title, it wasn’t an arbitrary pretension. The son of a Nottinghamshire iron worker, Wright had dutifully served in the trenches of World War I. He never rose above the rank of private, but during one particularly bloody week of 1916, he ended up in command of his unit, earning both a commendation and a temporary commission in the process. As a result, he seems to have passed himself off as a full-fledged officer for the rest of his life. Both his courage and his presumption would serve him well on his mission in Berlin.

It was toward the end of June that Wright brought Han van Meegeren’s Lace Maker to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, a majestic building at the tip of Spree Island, so close to the water’s edge that, at a distance, the museum’s ornate dome seemed to rise dramatically out of the river itself. Claiming to have found the picture in an Amsterdam antique shop, Wright presented The Lace Maker for the expert consideration of Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, director-general of the Prussian state museum system. This was not unusual: Bode received a constant stream of visitors asking for his opinion with regard to the attribution of artworks, and for a fee, he was only too happy to render his judgment. Indeed, during the great inflation of 1921, Bode and his colleagues at the Kaiser Friedrich had been besieged by as many as a hundred people each week desperate to turn family heirlooms into hard currency on the international market—a sort of mirthless precursor to Antiques Roadshow. Moreover, Bode was already acquainted with Wright, who had brought other pictures to the Kaiser Friedrich. Yet, ordinary though the circumstances were, the outcome of the meeting was remarkable: on June 27, 1927, after careful reflection, Bode issued a written certificate declaring The Lace Maker to be a “genuine, perfect, and very characteristic work of Jan Vermeer of Delft.” Explaining his reasoning, Bode wrote, “Not only has it got the true Vermeer charm as to lighting and coloring, but at the same time there is extraordinary fascination in the expression of the face, still half that of a child.”

So impressed was Bode with this discovery that he asked Wright if The Lace Maker could be exhibited for a few months in the rotunda of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. “Generally speaking, the Ministry is not desirous of such loan exhibits,” Bode explained in a letter to Wright, “but in honor of a Vermeer—especially one which, up to the present, has been completely unknown—we shall be glad to make an exception.”

Wright graciously consented to Bode’s request. After all, in Berlin, a town where a lot of pretty girls were up to no good, The Lace Maker would have no trouble hiding in plain sight. The picture would go on view at the end of August.

 

WHEN HE WASN’T BUSY hoodwinking Wilhelm von Bode at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Harold Wright could generally be found in The Hague, which, during the 1920s, was Han van Meegeren’s base of operations. On paper, at least, Wright worked as the manager of a subsidiary branch of Theodore Ward’s paint company located in suburban Leidschendam, just outside The Hague proper. The administrative duties involved in running the Titanine Verf en Lakfabriek would not appear to have been all that taxing: Wright evidently spent most of his time either playing golf—at which he excelled—or else hanging around with the artist and picture restorer Theo van Wijngaarden. Van Wijngaarden had a reputation for “finding” the signatures of great masters on old paintings that were previously unsigned as well as for other equally questionable business practices. It was in Theo van Wijngaarden’s atelier at Sumatrastraat 226, behind the offices and storerooms of a firm of house painters, that Han van Meegeren labored to churn out brand new old masters from approximately 1920 to 1932—first as Van Wijngaarden’s employee, then as his partner.

Ideal for a forger in training, The Hague in those days was a supremely stylish venue for mischief and artifice of all types. In a nation whose great wealth and enduring prosperity derived from a flinty tradition of toil and thrift, The Hague stood out for its atmosphere of leisure and unapologetic opulence. It was “the city of beautiful nonsense,” in the words of a then-popular guidebook for in-the-know visitors, “a place to linger, to walk, to gossip, to flirt, to dance, and to do nothing for most of the time.” Home to the royal family, the Dutch parliament, and a lively cultural scene, The Hague was not a commercial center in the mold of Amsterdam or Rotterdam but a playground for the elite—as well as for those with elitist pretensions. Men who could have stepped right out of a Jeeves-and-Wooster story strutted about town with monocles cocked under their eyebrows, spats strapped to their shoes, and walking sticks firmly in hand. Indeed, more sober-minded Dutchmen often rolled their eyes at the seemingly endless capacity of Hagenaars to posture and pose—a set of behaviors neatly summarized by the term Haagse Bluf. In time, a dessert by that name would become a popular treat for young children: made of raspberry meringue, it looks extremely rich, but it’s really just a puff of sweetly flavored air.

 

Han van Meegeren ca. 1918

 

Portrait drawing of Willem van Konijnenburg

 

Although Han van Meegeren was not from The Hague originally, he had adapted quite easily to the spirit of the place. Born in 1889, the third of five children in a middle-class Catholic family, Van Meegeren had grown up in provincial Deventer under the yoke of a stern schoolmaster father, who packed the budding artist off to study architecture at Delft Technical University in 1907. When the young Van Meegeren neglected his schoolwork to paint and draw, he heard the predictable paternal complaints, which grew much louder when, in 1911, twenty-two years old and still a student, Van Meegeren got his Protestant girlfriend, the shy Anna de Voogt, pregnant. Van Meegeren’s father, outraged, would not consent to the pair getting married until Anna, the daughter of a mixed marriage between a Dutch colonial administrator and a beauty from the East Indies, agreed to raise her progeny as good, church-going Catholics. Eking out a living as an assistant drawing instructor at Delft, Van Meegeren struggled to support Anna, their son Jacques, who was born in 1912, and daughter Pauline, born in 1915. But when Van Meegeren left his job—the only steady employment he would ever have—and moved with Anna and the children to The Hague to pursue an artistic career full time, he was like a caged bird suddenly set free.

 

A photo of Anna van Meegeren, ca. 1919, by H. Berssenbrugge, who specialized in “artistic” photo portraits processed to look like paintings

 

Costume party at the Haagse Kunstkring, ca. 1930

 

It was then 1917, and while war raged elsewhere in Europe, Van Meegeren was at liberty to focus on matters of art and pleasure, for neutral Holland—which profited by trading with both sides in the conflict—stood as a contented oasis unto itself. Once settled in The Hague, Van Meegeren started rubbing elbows. He applied and was accepted for membership in the Haagse Kunstkring, a social club for creative types, including painters, writers, musicians, and actors. In addition to sponsoring shows and performances by its members, the Kunstkring also hosted speaker’s evenings, costume parties, cabaret nights, talent competitions, and other light, entertaining get-togethers. At such events, Van Meegeren often showed off his skills by making photo-realistic charcoal sketches of important guests, particularly those whom he wished to impress—like Willem van Konijnenburg, The Hague’s most successful and best connected artist, who, in Van Meegeren’s portrait drawing, comes across as a singularly distinguished individual. With his knack for flattery, Van Meegeren would eventually become a sought-after portraitist for the well to do, not only in The Hague but throughout the Netherlands. And yet, while commissioned portraits and gallery sales of his figure studies and genre scenes provided a fair income—far more than most young artists ever made—it wasn’t enough for Van Meegeren, who quickly found himself in possession of expensive tastes and bad habits, among them a roving eye.

It was a problem born, to some extent, of matrimonial disillusionment. Initially, Van Meegeren had tried to include Anna in his explorations of the high life, but these outings had served mostly to underscore the couple’s increasingly divergent temperaments. An old photograph tells the story. In it, the demure Anna, preparing to attend a costume ball with her husband, wears a fanciful outfit that Van Meegeren designed for her in an Egyptian style by way of Cecil B. DeMille. Her sad eyes, downturned mouth, and faraway gaze are not those of a carefree party goer. Anna, in fact, generally preferred to be at home with the children, leaving Van Meegeren to cast about for a woman with a more adventurous attitude.

 

Johanna de Boer, ca. 1920

 

It wasn’t long before he began to take an interest in the flirtatious actress wife of his good friend Carel Hendrik de Boer. An art critic, De Boer was one of Van Meegeren’s earliest supporters in the public sphere: he had devoted a full-length article to the up-and-comer back in 1916, declaring him “a painter destined to walk the path of acclaim” after seeing his work in a small group show. Oddly, the friendship between Van Meegeren and De Boer seems not to have suffered once the affair started. The two men even set up shop giving art lessons together to society girls—De Boer lecturing on theory and Van Meegeren teaching the rudiments of life drawing. Indeed, Van Meegeren was a fixture at the De Boer residence during this period, often sketching and photographing Johanna. According to the recollections of a playmate of one of the De Boers’ two children, Johanna looked “very pretty” posing in diaphanous garments, while De Boer—“a timid man”—busied himself with his work.

As an older member of Van Meegeren’s social circle recalled in an unpublished letter from the 1970s, Johanna de Boer was everything Van Meegeren could have wanted in a woman: “She conducted herself very provocatively. Nowadays if a girl were to lay down naked and drunk on a billiard table we might think nothing of it . . . but back then it was really scandalous.” Indeed it was: the affair went on for years and eventually wrecked the artist’s home life. While continuing to live with Anna and the children, Van Meegeren, who already maintained a separate art studio, proceeded to rent a pied-à-terre in the center of town for his assignations. Although the complaisant Carel does not appear to have raised any objections, long-suffering Anna ultimately sought the comforts of another man and divorced Van Meegeren, who then married Johanna—although not before fitting in a few other dalliances in between. It took him five years to get around to tying the knot.

Considering the nature and extent of these extramarital pursuits, Van Meegeren very likely turned to forgery, at least at first, as a way to underwrite his immoderate lifestyle. Johanna was not a cheaply purchased plaything. Although her acting career consisted mostly of supporting roles in drawing-room comedies, her materialistic ambitions were legendary among her friends, one of whom recalled her jesting, Mae-West style, that she preferred the kind of bank account “with a lot of zeroes in it.” And much like giving drawing lessons with Carel de Boer—or taking on occasional commercial illustration work, which Van Meegeren also did during this period—forgery was a well-travelled path to extra income for struggling artists in the Netherlands.

 

THE BEST INDICATIONS are that the forging of Dutch old master paintings began during the era of the masters themselves. Toward the end of his life, the artist and writer Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719) published a three-volume chronicle of the Dutch art world called De Groote Schouburgh—The Great Stage—where he noted that it was not unusual at that time for dealers in possession of valuable pictures to keep “various young painters at work copying these pieces.” True, before the advent of mechanical reproduction, there was a legitimate trade in faithful, handmade copies—marketed as such—but it seems that dealers sometimes increased their profits by selling copies as the real thing, carefully choosing buyers who were unlikely to be acquainted with whoever had bought the original. There are many instances of such pictorial mitosis in old provenance records, and to some extent, this disreputable practice even continues today. During the 1990s, the New York dealer Ely Sakhai secretly commissioned copies of his Gauguins and Renoirs, selling the genuine masterpieces in the United States and the duplicates in Asia for roughly equal prices. He was convicted of fraud in 2004.

Due to modern advances in disseminating news and information, selling doubles of valuable pictures is now a much more difficult proposition than it was during the seventeenth century, an issue Sakhai no doubt had ample time to ponder in the course of his three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Purely duplicative forgery was, in fact, already quite problematic by Van Meegeren’s era. During the nineteenth century, with the growth of public museums, art history had come together as a rigorous academic discipline, and scholars had dedicated themselves to sorting out what was real and what was imitation—an error-prone process, but one that successfully rooted out thousands of old copies. As meticulous lists of authentic pictures by the major masters were compiled, it became easier for experts to keep close tabs on the whereabouts of important items. Under the circumstances, dealers whose Rembrandts had a tendency to develop twins earned bad reputations very quickly. By the beginning of the twentieth century, influential galleries with good names in the trade had far too much to lose to become involved with the chicanery of copying.

Not that this impulse toward honesty overwhelmed everyone in the art world. A new breed of unscrupulous dealer had begun to appear on the scene in the years just before the turn of the century, employing new methods to prey upon unwary customers at the priciest end of the market. Claiming not to be dealers at all, these so-called gentleman amateurs derived much of their cachet from appearing to be above commerce. They collected pictures for the love of art—or so they said—but they could always be persuaded to sell select items to people deemed worthy of owning fine things. Just like the handful of true aesthetes who really did offer pictures without an eye to profit, these dishonorable “gentlemen” might gain a client’s trust by selling a genuine masterpiece or two. But then they would begin palming off forgeries or fraudulently restored old pictures sporting false signatures. The Italian art historian Gianni Mazzoni, one of the leading authorities on turn-of-the-century forgery, has shown that some such dealers acted as impresarios, directing the efforts of modestly remunerated hired hands who made the fakes to order.

Aristocratic titles and impressive addresses seem to have been helpful in creating the illusion of leisure essential to the gentleman amateurs’ success. The “Baron” Michele Lazzaroni did quite well selling ersatz Italian masterpieces—in theory, works by early Renaissance painters like Crivelli, but, in reality, ruined old pictures repainted, completely or in part, by skilled artisans in Lazzaroni’s employ. The Belgian dealer/collector Emile Renders did much the same with the art of the Flemish Primitives. Teaming up with a talented Brussels-based picture restorer (and sometime forger) named Jef van der Veken, Renders purchased dozens of second-rate old pictures in terrible condition, which Van der Veken “repaired” imaginatively in the style of Van Eyck and Petrus Christus. Although Renders was thought to have some of the world’s finest Flemish paintings in private hands—and he did have several excellent pieces—for the most part, what he had was a chateau filled with Van der Vekens, any of which he would have been happy to sell at a good price. In addition to these so-called hyperrestorations, Van der Veken also produced outright forgeries for dealers even less scrupulous than Renders, but by inventing new compositions rather than reproducing existing ones, Van der Veken usually evaded the attention of experts intent on debunking copyists.

Jef van der Veken tended to limit his mischief to the works of fifteenth-century artists who had painted in egg tempera, and he had good reasons for doing so. It had become very risky, for technical reasons, to forge or “fake up” the art of later generations of painters, like the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, who had worked in the more versatile medium of oil paint. Legitimate art restorers had discovered, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, that highly concentrated alcohol could be used to remove old, discolored varnish from paintings without damaging the underlying image, and in the ensuing vogue for cleaning pictures with alcohol, a fascinating side benefit of the procedure soon came to light: it was a great way to unmask fake oil paintings. Although alcohol has almost no effect on oil paint that has had time to harden thoroughly—which can take over a hundred years—it dissolves new oil paint quite easily. Tempera, which dries very hard, very quickly, is not susceptible to the solvent action of alcohol in the same way, so Jef van der Veken, Emile Renders, and Baron Lazzaroni were fairly safe promoting their contrived fifteenth-century wares. But the alcohol test posed a serious problem for anyone hoping to sell a modern fake as a product of Golden Age Holland, for it was extremely difficult to use tempera or any other traditional, fast-drying artists’ colors to mimic the buttery brushstrokes and soft glow of oil paint. So long as a fake seventeenth-century masterpiece had to be painted in oils, it could only be sold to a customer too unsophisticated to test it—a factor that tended to be a drag on profits.

Indeed, during the early years of the twentieth century, forging the Dutch masters was, more often than not, a rather down-market endeavor, geared toward duping the casual buyer who thought he was getting a bargain in a flea market or some other unlikely spot. Paintings by major artists like Rembrandt and Frans Hals would have been far too conspicuous for such purposes. Therefore, swindlers who promoted fakes in this manner tended to commission forgeries of somewhat lesser items, like the popular tavern scenes of Adriaen van Ostade or the game-and-fowl still lifes of Jan Fyt. If real, such works would certainly have been valuable, although not breathtakingly so. The Hague seems to have been a center for this type of trickery. One day in 1910, Wilhelm Martin, the director of the Mauritshuis—the royal picture gallery—went for a stroll through the city and was surprised to find a series of crude Van Ostades for sale at very cheap prices in a grocer’s window. Certain that these pictures were fraudulent, Martin bought one and carried it back to the Mauritshuis’s restoration studio, where he doused it with alcohol. The image soon dissolved into a puddle of muck. Martin wrote up the incident with a word to the wise: real old masters are not to be found amid the fresh fruit and vegetables at the local market.

Luckily for Han van Meegeren, he never had to waste his talents on such nickel-and-dime deceptions. In or around 1920, he teamed up with—or more accurately, was recruited by—the remarkable Theo van Wijngaarden, a picaresque figure whose experience and resourcefulness gave him a leg up on amateurish operators who promoted fakes of the type so easily exposed by Wilhelm Martin.

Although Theo van Wijngaarden once admitted in a newspaper interview that he couldn’t write more than a few halting lines without help, a lack of formal education hadn’t stopped him from getting ahead in life. Born in Rotterdam in 1874, the son of a plasterer, Van Wijngaarden had worked as a housepainter during his youth; he also did wallpaper hanging, decorating, and odd jobs such as repairing broken windows and furniture. Industrious and clever, he managed to avoid following in the footsteps of one of his older brothers, a petty thief with a careless habit of winding up in jail. Teaching himself how to paint and draw—primarily landscapes and flower studies—Van Wijngaarden got his introduction to the world of high art working as a “restorer” and confidential business assistant for the fabulously dishonest dealer Leo Nardus, one of the most colorful figures in the history of the art world, although a man little remembered today.

 

The art dealer Leo Nardus, ca. 1914

 

Theo van Wijngaarden’s name has barely made it into the history books, but Nardus’s has been intentionally expunged from them—largely because so many wealthy collectors wished to forget that they had ever met the man. Hailing from a prosperous family of Utrecht antique dealers, Nardus had apprenticed in the picture trade in Paris with the distinguished firm of Bourgeois Frères. His greatest commercial success, however, came not in Europe but in the United States, where he was a frequent visitor during the 1890s and early 1900s. Fluent in four languages, a champion swordsman, and an internationally known chess master, Nardus was a highly charismatic individual, and he used his charm to devastating effect in his business dealings. Taking advantage of America’s newly rich industrial millionaires, who had only just begun collecting art, Nardus made millions selling old copies that would have been unmarketable in Europe; newly made fakes, which Americans didn’t know to probe with alcohol; and, most astonishingly, an array of utterly undistinguished antique-shop pictures that he attributed, with a twirl of his handlebar moustache, to great artists such as Vermeer, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Turner, Botticelli, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Many of these ill-favored things can be found today in the storerooms of museums in Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities along the Eastern seaboard. Often the curators have no idea why their Gilded Age benefactors would ever have bought such awful paintings.

Nardus’s perfidy was only unmasked in 1908 when the Philadelphia streetcar magnate P. A. B. Widener noticed that the three Vermeers Nardus had sold him weren’t included in a recent book on the artist written by the renowned Dutch art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. Having purchased a total of ninety-three paintings from Nardus over the previous fourteen years, Widener soon invited Hofstede de Groot to come to America to assess the “Nardus Pictures.” Apparently suspecting what lay in store, the Dutchman did not come alone: he brought with him the well-known English critic Roger Fry, the German connoisseur Wilhelm Valentiner, and the great American expert on Italian painting Bernard Berenson, then living in Florence. Duly assembled at Lynnewood Hall, Widener’s imposing 110-room mansion just north of Philadelphia, the experts informed Widener that only a scattered few of the pictures he had gotten from Nardus were genuine masterpieces. The vast majority had been sold under what Widener later described in a distraught private letter as “gross false pretenses,” with the entire collection worth roughly 5 percent of what Nardus had charged for it. These paintings were a very far cry from the fine group of genuine old masters that the Widener family would eventually assemble—after recovering from the Nardus fiasco—and donate to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

By the time the day of reckoning at Lynnewood Hall came around, Leo Nardus was safely back in Europe, and he suffered almost no direct consequences from his actions. Although he was rumored to have painted some of Widener’s more questionable pictures himself, Nardus was never prosecuted or publicly exposed in any way, mostly because the wealthy Americans he had duped feared humiliation of the emperor’s-new-clothes variety. There was, however, a great deal of gossip about Nardus within the picture trade, and although he continued selling art in Europe after his American adventures, he often had to hide behind front men due to his bad reputation. Such arrangements seem not to have crimped his lifestyle: the story in Theo van Wijngaarden’s family is that Leo Nardus was so rich, he ate his meals from golden plates using golden utensils.

Prompted in part by legal proceedings brought by a wife whom he had abandoned in France, Leo Nardus left the Netherlands shortly after the First World War, retiring to a seaside palace in Tunisia. With his primary employer suddenly gone, Theo van Wijngaarden was obliged to make a living on his own in The Hague, carrying on with roughly the same sort of work that he had previously done for Nardus. According to gossipy newspaper accounts from the time, Van Wijngaarden’s activities included deceptive restoration, adding false signatures to old pictures, and copying valuable items that came through the atelier. Such petty chicanery probably paid the rent, but the real challenge for Van Wijngaarden, as his granddaughter, a professional portraitist, explained to me, was learning to work in de trant van—in the style of the old masters. Although Van Wijngaarden possessed an indisputable gift for color harmony and a wonderful feeling for the texture and physicality of paint, he labored under significant limitations as an artist that made it very difficult for him to produce high-quality forgeries in an extemporaneous mode. He had never truly mastered the depiction of the human figure at close quarters; his few known portraits show only a rudimentary understanding of facial anatomy; and even his landscapes tended to be at their best when the more exacting details were omitted or left unresolved. A skilled restorer, Van Wijngaarden could make even the newest of pictures look perfectly old, but to carry the business of art fraud to the next level, he had to find better forgeries to work with than anything that he could create on his own.

What Van Wijngaarden needed was a star pupil, and he found one in Han van Meegeren. Precisely how they met is not clear, but one of Van Meegeren’s closest companions in the social whirl of The Hague, an amateur dealer named A. H. W. van Blijenburgh, had once been associated with Leo Nardus and may well have furnished the introduction. (Van Blijenburgh had been one of Nardus’s fencing partners, competing actively in both the epée and the saber.) We can fix the date at which Van Meegeren began work at the Sumatrastraat to sometime before 1921 due to a piece of lore handed down in the Van Wijngaarden family. It was at this point that Theo van Wijngaarden’s son Willy, then finishing art school, was invited to join in the production of fakes—but declined to do so. A promising painter, far more skillful than his father, Willy had grown up partially estranged from the disreputable Theo, who had walked out on the family years earlier. Willy informed Theo that he didn’t want to be “made into a Frans Hals,” and also indicated that he didn’t care to spend time in the company of Van Meegeren, whom he considered arrogant.

 

Theo van Wijngaarden, Self-Portrait, ca. 1907

 

Theo van Wijngaarden may have been especially eager to recruit his son around this time because the forgery business seemed to be on the verge of a boom: Van Wijngaarden had just figured out a way around the dreaded alcohol test. Working by trial and error, he had invented a medium for traditional artists’ pigments that successfully mimicked the physical appearance of oil paint but dried quickly and resisted softening with alcohol. The Van Wijngaarden family still has the book that “Old Theo” used as a guide during his research. This was no complex scientific tome, but rather, in keeping with Van Wijngaarden’s artisanal roots, an instructional volume on painting techniques and materials, printed in large type and in very simple Dutch, intended for use by housepainters. Based on the extensive underlinings and occasional handwritten notes in the margins, it seems that Van Wijngaarden at first attempted to adapt milk-based casein paint as a substitute for oils, but while this would have dried rock hard, it just didn’t have the right look. Ultimately, it was gelatin glue—a water-borne emulsion of bonemeal—that proved to be the perfect vehicle: when properly prepared, it had the body and smooth texture of oil paint, yet, once dry, was completely impervious to alcohol.

With Theo van Wijngaarden still working out some of the technical issues related to the gelatin-glue medium—for instance, it turned many pigments an unpleasant shade of gray—Van Meegeren’s earliest efforts at the Sumatrastraat probably entailed a measure of hit-and-miss experimentation. Likewise, much of Van Meegeren’s initial work with Van Wijngaarden may have consisted not of outright forgery but of the sort of deceptive overrestoration for which Van Wijngaarden’s shop was already well known.

Although fraudulent restoration is not as blatantly criminal as full-blown forgery—someone like Baron Lazzaroni, for instance, could always claim that his Italian Primitives were at least partly real—the line between the two practices is actually quite thin, as both usually begin with genuine old pictures. Forgers reuse panels and canvases from period paintings to ensure that their creations will have what is called “age crackle.” They strip away the original image using sandpaper or caustic soda but leave the underlying ground layer intact. When painted over, the characteristic crack pattern contained in the old, hardened ground will telegraph through to the new surface, giving the forgery virtually the same craqueleur as a picture that has been dry for centuries. The cracks can then be accentuated by darkening them with dirt, ink, graphite, or other foreign matter to complete the illusion of age. Such tricks of the trade were Van Wijngaarden’s specialty: according to his family, he kept jars of rusting nails and rotting leaves buried in the backyard to provide suitable muck for the process.

 

The Boy Smoking, forgery in the style of Frans Hals, ca. 1922

 

Unfortunately, whatever out-and-out fakes may have emerged from the partnership between Van Meegeren and Van Wijngaarden during the period from 1920 to 1921 are known to us only through rumor—primarily comments made years later by Van Meegeren’s children—but interestingly, all of the rumors center on works by Frans Hals, for whom Van Meegeren, with his sense of flash and dazzle, had a natural affinity. Indeed, the first readily documentable forgeries by Van Meegeren (ca. 1922) show just how effortlessly the artist adapted his skills as a society painter to the production of Hals-style rascals. In The Boy Smoking for instance, Van Meegeren improvised freely in the style of Hals—forgery at its most complex and inventive—and after only two years on the job, this was quite an impressive accomplishment.

Of course, crafting a plausible old master was just the first of many steps involved in the business of high-end art forgery. In order to sell an ersatz painting for the price of a true masterpiece, a market, a buyer, a credible front man, and a tale explaining the picture’s origins had to be in place, and these variables often proved to be difficult to control. From a forger’s perspective, the most lucrative solution would have been to introduce the fakes to wealthy customers directly, without the protection of middlemen. This was, more or less, the model that Leo Nardus had employed, but Nardus’s American adventures had caused a backlash in the art world, subtly changing the rules of the game for future swindlers. The day of reckoning at Lynnewood Hall had cemented the reputations of Hofstede de Groot, Bernard Berenson, and the other major experts as the ultimate arbiters of quality and authenticity. Thereafter, it became virtually impossible to sell a major painting to a major collector without first obtaining a signed attribution from one of the top authorities in the field—for Italian works, Berenson; for Dutch ones, Hofstede de Groot or Harold Wright’s victim, Wilhelm von Bode; for the Flemish Primitives, the great Max Friedländer; and so on down the line. Likewise, in the post-Nardus era, wealthy Americans had become extremely wary of buying pictures from any but the most reputable galleries: in practice this meant that Joseph Duveen—the dealer of choice for the very richest of the rich—acted as the gatekeeper to the high end of America’s ultralucrative art market, along with a handful of other figures like Nathan Wildenstein and the Knoedler brothers. “Gentleman” dealers like Baron Lazzaroni could, and did, continue to do business. But now they had to work much harder: they had to dupe experts into attributing second-rate or fraudulent paintings and then dupe big dealers like Duveen into buying the merchandise. The doors to places like Lynnewood Hall were now permanently closed to charming interlopers.

Given all of the complications that working with an end buyer would have entailed, most forgers were content to sell their wares for quite modest sums to the type of dealer who knew exactly what he was getting and who was prepared to take the risks involved with promoting the fakes upward through the art market’s food chain. According to his memoirs, the great Italian forger Icilio Joni, whose spurious Siennese Primitives frequently fooled Bernard Berenson, worked for a whole parade of “gentleman” dealers, including some Americans, who came to Italy expressly looking for fakes. From a forger’s point of view, such an arrangement was attractively safe, and there are indications that, at least in the first year of their partnership, Van Wijngaarden and Van Meegeren may have availed themselves of this uncomplicated tactic. For instance, one of Leo Nardus’s old business partners, a semilegitimate dealer and collector named Van Gelder, acquired a very dubious Frans Hals Boy with a Flute during this period: it answers to the description of one of the rumored early Van Meegeren fakes, and today is not considered genuine by the leading experts on Hals.

Laundering fakes through Van Wijngaarden’s existing contacts in the trade would have offered a straightforward means of making a living, but having conquered the alcohol test, Van Wijngaarden and Van Meegeren were soon tempted to sell their works for really big money at auction by asking friends to pose as the owners of record. This idea may well have suggested itself to Van Wijngaarden because Leo Nardus had often used intermediaries, particularly in order to obtain certificates of expertise from the upright Hofstede de Groot. And yet, while asking friends to sell fakes did provide a measure of anonymity, the gambit was still quite risky. It could only work if no doubts were ever raised about the picture’s authenticity or origins, but most forgeries do tend, sooner or later, to prompt questions. Moreover, trying to con respectable people into taking part in a criminal conspiracy is, as Van Meegeren discovered, a difficult trick to pull off.

Consider, for instance, an incident that occurred at the baronial estate of Molecaten outside Hattem in the eastern Netherlands. Van Meegeren had made a very favorable impression on Baron van Heeckeren van Molecaten in 1924 by painting two stunning portraits of the baron’s sons, Eric and Walraven. Indeed, one can easily understand the rave reviews: the round-format portrait of young Eric, in particular, is wonderfully fresh, direct, and evocative—an example of Van Meegeren’s very best work. The following year, Van Meegeren paid a return visit to Molecaten and, while there, painted a formal, three-quarter-length portrait of the baron, ostensibly as a gesture of friendship. Posed in the bright red uniform of the local Ridderschap—a fraternal order of and for the aristocracy—Baron van Heeckeren van Molecaten looks every inch the fine Dutch nobleman that he was. It wasn’t until Van Meegeren finished the painting, though, that he really got to work: casually mentioning that he had a few “old pictures” that he was planning to sell at auction, Van Meegeren asked if he could say that they had come from the manor house at Molecaten. The answer was an emphatic “no,” and the good baron distanced himself from the artist from that point forward.

Even when Van Meegeren succeeded in getting people to go along with his plans, the results were not always ideal. In 1923, he talked an old school chum by the name of H. A. de Haas into acting as a straw man in the sale of a fake Frans Hals called The Laughing Cavalier—and everyone nearly got caught. De Haas, an engineer who had belonged to the same Catholic student group as Van Meegeren at Delft, had a wife and five children to support, which may have left him susceptible to dubious financial propositions. As De Haas later recalled, he was invited to the Sumatrastraat one day by Van Meegeren, who asked him to place The Laughing Cavalier in an upcoming sale in the Frederik Muller auction house, a friendly favor for which there would be a handsome commission. What excuse Van Meegeren gave for requesting De Haas to act as the seller isn’t clear. Nor is it clear whether De Haas, whose home was adorned with a half dozen oil paintings by Van Meegeren, actually believed that The Laughing Cavalier was by Frans Hals—although the picture did have a signed certificate of expertise. Theo van Wijngaarden had brought The Laughing Cavalier to Cornelis Hofstede de Groot—the self-same connoisseur who had seen through Leo Nardus back in 1908. Hofstede de Groot approved The Laughing Cavalier enthusiastically. He also approved The Boy Smoking during the same visit. Indeed, he liked it so much that he later decided to buy it for his own collection, deducting the cost of his thousand-guilder-per-picture “honorarium,” or fee for expertise, from the 30,000 guilder purchase price.

 

Portrait of Eric Baron van Heeckeren van Molecaten, 1924

 

Portrait of E. W. Baron van Heeckeren van Molecaten, 1925

 

The Laughing Cavalier, forgery in the style of Frans Hals, ca. 1922

 

As planned, De Haas brought The Laughing Cavalier to Amsterdam, and the salespeople at Muller’s found the work quite seductive. They immediately located a private purchaser who was willing to pay fifty thousand guilders for it—approximately fourteen years’ salary for the average man—thus obviating the need to place the picture in a public sale. But this was only good news until it wasn’t: within a year, the buyer returned in a state of high outrage, saying that a technical examination had shown The Laughing Cavalier to be of indisputably modern manufacture. After reviewing the facts, the house of Muller concurred, refunded the purchase price, and then brought suit against De Haas for fraud. When De Haas tried to squirm out of it, saying that he had “purchased” the picture from Theo van Wijngaarden, Muller’s simply added Van Wijngaarden’s name to the lawsuit.

The court case, which dragged on for two years, became a sensation in the papers, as the famously chilly Hofstede de Groot steadfastly maintained—laboratory evidence be damned—that The Laughing Cavalier was a genuine Frans Hals. He argued that science had no place in the examination of pictures and that a connoisseur’s judgment should be considered sacrosanct. He even wrote a brief pamphlet called “The Eye or Chemistry”—Oog of chemie—to publicize his views. But with the technical evidence plain as could be, Hofstede de Groot’s zealous defense of The Laughing Cavalier found virtually no support among other experts. Although Theo van Wijngaarden had gone to the trouble of procuring an old panel for the forgery, it was not nearly old enough : the original preparatory ground layer on the panel contained zinc white, a pigment not invented until the nineteenth century. And Van Wijngaarden’s gelatin-glue medium, while good enough to pass the alcohol test, didn’t hold up so well under more rigorous inspection: it turned spongy when soaked in water—something that oil paint, alas, would never do.

Even Hofstede de Groot, science averse though he was, knew that oil paint shouldn’t absorb water, and the paradox apparently troubled him. In Oog of chemie, he describes asking Theo van Wijngaarden for an explanation of this phenomenon during a visit to the atelier on the Sumatrastraat. Not missing a beat, Van Wijngaarden responded that he had treated The Laughing Cavalier with a special cleaning solvent that made oil paint behave just as though it had a water-based medium. To demonstrate how the process worked, he then plucked a seemingly very old painting from the walls of the atelier, rubbed it down with an unidentified liquid, and voilà, this picture too was suddenly susceptible to softening with water. Never suspecting that Van Wijngaarden had simply used another gelatin-glue fake for this alchemistic game of show and tell, Hofstede de Groot walked away satisfied.

 

Cornelis Hofstede de Groot in a 1923 oil portrait, artist unknown

 

Indeed, in a newspaper interview conducted at the height of the controversy, Hofstede de Groot openly scoffed at all the rumors surrounding The Laughing Cavalier and its possible origins. “The gossip going around about it being painted by Nardus or Van Meegeren is absurd,” he said. “They should wish that they could paint that way.” Hofstede de Groot was clearly right to rule out his old nemesis, Leo Nardus, who was long gone from the Netherlands by that point. But with regard to Van Meegeren, what could the man have been thinking? It seems astonishing that, with the talk of Van Meegeren’s involvement known to him, Hofstede de Groot still failed to reach the obvious conclusion—although perhaps he ultimately did sense that all was not right with The Laughing Cavalier. In what many perceived as a face-saving maneuver, Hofstede de Groot dramatically put an end to the lawsuit in 1926 by agreeing to purchase the painting for his own collection at the full fifty thousand guilder price tag.

As a result, the House of Muller dropped all charges before a verdict could be reached, and Hofstede de Groot never had to admit that he had been wrong about the picture. Still, the damage to his reputation was considerable—and it wasn’t just his aesthetic acumen that got called into question but his personal integrity as well. For even though Hofstede de Groot had never been accused of any complicity in the swindle, his longstanding practice of charging fees for his certificates came off as a form of corruption, at least in the eyes of his many critics.

Supplying certificates of expertise had evolved into Hofstede de Groot’s main source of income in the years following the Nardus incident at Lynnewood Hall. With so many dealers now needing to guarantee the authenticity of their pictures, Hofstede de Groot wrote hundreds of certificates every year, using preprinted forms to make the work go faster. His fees ranged from as little as thirty guilders for attributing paintings of relatively low market value up to a thousand guilders for masterpieces. Clients who wanted Hofstede de Groot to travel abroad to look at their paintings had to pay an additional 500 guilders per day—with the clock ticking from the moment he left home until the moment he returned. When one London dealer complained about these high costs, the great expert replied, “I am so much wanted everywhere that if I took less I would never be at home, always en route, and that is not the aim of my life.” Poverty wasn’t his aim either. By the 1920s, Hofstede de Groot had made enough money to move from fairly modest quarters on The Hague’s Heeregracht to a palatial limestone mansion on the Lange Voorhout, the city’s most prestigious address. To those inclined to take a jaundiced view, the notion that economic self-interest might have clouded Hofstede de Groot’s judgment in the case of The Laughing Cavalier was hard to dismiss.

And yet, while that perception was not entirely unfair, it missed the underlying irony of Hofstede de Groot’s situation. This very proper Dutchman had gotten into the business of selling certificates in order to stem corruption in the art market, not to capitalize on it. Clearly, Hofstede de Groot wanted to make money, but integrity lay at the heart of his enterprise, and the last thing he would have wanted to do was tarnish his reputation by passing a fake. Having established himself as judge and jury in the realm of Dutch old master paintings, however, Hofstede de Groot had become a prime target for forgers and swindlers, who had adapted their tactics to the changing realities of the picture trade.

When Han van Meegeren was in full grandstanding mode after the Second World War, he would claim that he had set out to make fools of the world’s art experts because they had scorned his work in his own name. But the men who were tricked into attributing Van Meegeren’s fakes over the years had nothing to do with the fate of the forger’s legitimate artistic aspirations. They weren’t journalists; they didn’t review gallery shows; and they had no influence over the contemporary art scene. Van Meegeren duped them because he had to: they represented his only path to the high end of the art market. They were, simply put, part of his business model.

And publicly embarrassing Hofstede de Groot was very bad for business. The uproar surrounding The Laughing Cavalier cast an unwelcome light on what was meant to be a game of shadows. However convenient it may have been to attempt a really big score right in their own backyard using De Haas as a front man, Van Meegeren and Van Wijngaarden soon fell back on a safer and more traditional forger’s arrangement. They would hide behind an experienced but ethically challenged art-world operator who took over the work of selecting the middlemen and orchestrating the sales, and who may even have decided which artists would be faked and which subjects portrayed in the forgeries.

This new setup was never exposed in Van Meegeren’s day—it has remained a secret for eighty years—but a web of clues and circumstantial evidence allows us to trace the operation’s outlines. It’s a murky story, and that should be taken as a measure of the scheme’s overall success. Whereas the failure of The Laughing Cavalier attracted legal scrutiny and newspaper coverage, the next stage of Van Meegeren’s and Van Wijngaarden’s efforts generated publicity of a very different kind—praise for newfound Vermeers.