Fake, Fortune, and Bakelit: Part two

How to Age a Painting a Hundred Years in One Afternoon

Last time we met Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who forged a series of Vermeers so convincing that the Rijksmuseum paid a world record price for one of them, and Hermann Göring acquired another under the impression he was enriching Nazi Germany’s cultural treasury. Van Meegeren’s defense, when caught after the war, was that he had not betrayed Dutch heritage to the enemy. He had sold the Nazis a fake. This week, we consider how, if you are going to make paintings, first you need to make the paint.

Forgery at van Meegeren’s level is not just painting in someone else’s style. It is chemistry, archaeology, and theater operating simultaneously, and his preparation was meticulous to a degree that is still impressive.

He spent six years working out every detail in a rented villa in the south of France. He purchased genuine seventeenth-century canvases with actual Dutch paintings from the 1600s, though obviously not real masterpieces, as that would be pointless, and carefully removed the original images, leaving the authentic aged canvas beneath.

He then mixed his own okd master style paints from raw and often toxic materials: ground lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, cinnabar, the exact same substances Vermeer had used. He crafted badger-hair brushes modeled on those Vermeer was known to have favored. He probably did not need to trap badgers and give them haircuts, since badger hair was often used at the time for shaving brushes.

While all this prep work may seem incredibly elaborate, his total investment in research, preparation, and execution eventually yielded an estimated thirty million dollars in today’s equivalent value from sales of his old masters, so nice work if you could get it.

The hardest single problem was faking craquelure, the distinctive network of fine cracks that develops in aged paint over centuries. A fresh painting has none. Under needle-probe testing, which was then standard scientific practice, fresh paint yielded immediately while genuinely old paint resisted. Van Meegeren needed his paintings to resist. This is where Bakelite enters the story like a passage from an industrial chemistry textbook accidentally inserted into an episode of Downton Abbey.

Bakelite is phenol formaldehyde resin, an early synthetic plastic invented in 1907, once used to make old-fashioned telephones and valve radio casings. Van Meegeren discovered that by mixing it into his paint medium and then baking the finished canvases in an oven at a low temperature, the Bakelite hardened rapidly and produced crack patterns indistinguishable, by 1930s testing methods, from centuries of natural aging. He also rolled the baked canvases over cylindrical forms to stress the paint layer further, deepening the craquelure into something that looked thoroughly and genuinely old. It sounds absurdly primitive and brilliantly clever at the same time, rather like using a flamethrower and cold tea to age antique furniture.

Since the subject of authentic historical pigments has come up, it is worth pausing here to note that the ingredients of old paint could be a lot stranger than Bakelite.

Among the most remarkable pigments ever used in Western and Eastern art is Indian Yellow, a luminous golden color prized by painters from the Mughal miniaturists of the sixteenth century through to the European masters of the nineteenth, including Van Gogh, who used it in The Starry Night. The pigment arrived in Europe from the eighteenth century onward in the form of small, foul-smelling balls of dried matter that gave off a strong odor of urine. European paint merchants broke the balls open to find a warm golden powder inside, which when ground and mixed with oil or gum arabic produced a beatiful transparent yellow of remarkable luminosity.

The origin of these balls was, for a long time, disputed. The mystery was finally investigated in 1883, when Sir Joseph Hooker, then director of Kew Botanical Gardens, sent a letter of inquiry to the Indian Department of Revenue and Agriculture. The reply came from a civil servant and author named Trailokya Nath Mukharji, who had personally witnessed the manufacturing process in Bihar.

In the Monghyr region, a community of cowherds maintained cattle on an exclusive diet of mango leaves and water. The malnourished and severely dehydrated animals produced a dark, intensely yellow urine as a result of metabolizing compounds from the leaves. This urine was collected, boiled down to a syrup, strained, pressed into balls, and dried in the sun, then packaged and shipped to London.

The cows, denied adequate nutrition, developed kidney stones and looked, as Mukharji noted in his report to the Royal Society of Arts, very unhealthy. The practice was reportedly banned around 1908, and Indian Yellow subsequently disappeared from the pigment market. Van Gogh’s golden skies and Seurat’s luminous Sunday afternoons contain, among their ingredients, the concentrated and processed distress of underfed cattle in nineteenth-century Bihar, and can therefore never be exactly reproduced unless you are going to acquire a herd of cattle and a mango plantation, which even van Meegeren might consider going too far for art’s sake.

Art has always carried stranger freight than it appears to from a distance. Next week we answer the really important question: how does the art market actually work, and why is it so easily fooled?