Stealing the Mystic Lamb (19 page)

As a wealthy dealer based in Brussels, Lambert-Jean Nieuwenhuys had already proven himself a war profiteer. Portly and regal, but with a sharp and merciless eye for opportunities both legal and questionable, Nieuwenhuys handled an astonishing number of major Flemish works during this period. Once he had established an art dealer dynasty in Brussels, scores of paintings passed through his hands, as he took full advantage of the chaos of the French invasion and occupation, and the redistribution of art that accompanied it. His influence extended from Germany to Spain, and he was involved in dozens of legitimate and illegitimate acquisitions and sales, along with knowing misattributions and
the dissemination of forgeries. His name and the name of his son, C. J., may be found in the provenance of works around the world—an indication of the power and influence of opportunistic dealers during this period of political turmoil.

During the French occupation of what was then called the French Netherlands, a window of opportunity was open for wily dealers like Nieuwenhuys to buy prime artworks from the ignorant French confiscators. In Brussels alone, fifty churches and seminaries were plundered by the French Commission. So much art from this area entered the market, almost every item of which was stolen, that the flood did not begin to recede until after 1815, when hungry English, German, and Russian collectors descended with open wallets on the newly independent United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Nieuwenhuys, the prince of Belgian art dealers, mopped up the lion’s share of profits from the illicit Flemish art market.

Nieuwenhuys had already been involved in deals with
The Ghent Altarpiece
—or at least a copy of it. English art dealer W. Buchanan wrote in his
Memoirs of Painting
that Nieuwenhuys had sold panels from the Michiel Coxcie copy of
The Ghent Altarpiece
, painted for Phillip II in 1559, after they had been stolen by one of Napoleon’s generals. But Nieuwenhuys sold them as the originals.

The Coxcie copy of
The Ghent Altarpiece
—its panels were displayed at this time in Berlin, Munich, and Ghent—was considered nearly indistinguishable from the original to the untrained eye. One of Napoleon’s generals in Spain, Auguste-Daniele Belliard, had seized the copied altarpiece from a monastery while serving there in 1809.

We do not know whether Belliard thought that Coxcie’s copy was the original. Most likely he was taken in by the likeness, even though he already knew, or learnt quickly, that the original van Eyck was divided between the Louvre and the cathedral of Ghent. In any case, he surely saw an opportunity.

Belliard brought the Coxcie copy to Brussels, where he sold it through Nieuwenhuys, one panel at a time. Nieuwenhuys passed off each individual panel as one of the originals. His story was that the originals had been
captured and dispersed in the turmoil of the period. During the Napoleonic era, there was every possibility that a territory seized by one imperial force would remain within that empire indefinitely. Therefore art taken in war was, for all intents and purposes, the property of the nation that took it. Only in recent decades has there been, among dealers, a widespread reluctance to deal in works with a questionable provenance, partly because of lawsuits brought by descendants of owners whose art was stolen from them in past wars.

So when word circulated that
The Ghent Altarpiece
had been seized by French forces, it was not inherently problematic for potential buyers to see its panels on the art market. The Nieuwenhuys family thrived on this shift in ownership on a massive scale and benefited from the lack of concrete information as to which works were where and owned by whom. Nieuwenhuys and his son, C. J., who inherited his father’s business acumen and slippery ethics, sold several real van Eycks, including the
Lucca Madonna
(1436), as well as quite a few fakes and paintings with intentionally enhanced attributions. For instance, Nieuwenhuys sold Rogier van der Weyden’s
Triptych of the Nativity
as the work of Hans Memling, whose paintings were of greater value than van der Weyden’s at the time.

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
.

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.