Stealing the Mystic Lamb (18 page)

With Napoleon deposed, Royalist factions back in Paris reinstated the French Bourbon monarchy, in the person of Louis XVIII. Always ambitious, he was unhappy with his position as king-in-exile, and welcomed the reinstatement. He was an avid collector of books and curiosities as much as art, and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, although this was tempered by his rationality. The one thing about which he could not be reasonable was
his food intake—he was a passionate gourmand and bon vivant of the highest rank, with the predictable results for his waistline. Louis proved an intriguing combination of some of the characteristics that led to the deposition of his ancestors: He was selfish, pompous, luxurious, and indulgent, but with Enlightenment characteristics of rationality, impeccable manners, and an awareness of the sociopolitics of the world around him.

Louis XVIII had been living safely abroad throughout the Revolution. The younger brother of the beheaded Louis XVI, Louis XVIII became heir upon the death of his elder brother’s ten-year-old son, Louis XVII, who died while in prison during the Revolution on 8 June 1795. Louis XVIII then declared himself king and set up a court-in-exile in Venetian-controlled Verona, until he was expelled at the request of the Directory in 1796. He was a wandering monarch, self-declared as king of France, but he had no power nor any subjects beyond his immediate retinue. He lived briefly in Russia, England, and Latvia during this time. There is a pathos to this ghost of a king, inheritor of an overthrown, intangible throne.

Louis XVIII strategically corresponded with Napoleon during Napoleon’s time as consul. He offered to pardon regicides, to give titles to the Bonaparte family, and even to maintain the changes Napoleon and the revolutionaries had made since 1789. But Napoleon replied that the return of the Bourbon monarchy would lead to civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Napoleon would not play second fiddle, even if he could be the puppet master behind the throne.

Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, Louis XVIII was granted the French throne by the victorious Allied powers. His rule was more symbolic than actual, as he was forced to implement a newly written constitution, the so-called Charter of 1814, guaranteeing a bicameral legislature that would prevent monarchic abuses of power.

Louis’s reign was interrupted by Napoleon’s dramatic escape from Elba on 26 February 1815. News of his flight quickly reached the king, who sent the Fifth Army to engage Napoleon at Grenoble. On 7 March 1815, Napoleon dismounted from his horse and approached the army on foot,
eyeing his former soldiers. His words are recorded for posterity: “Soldiers of the Fifth, you recognize me. If any man would shoot his emperor, he would do so now.” There was a cold silence. Then the army shouted, in unison, “Long live the emperor!” And that was that. He retook the leadership of the army, gathered a force 200,000 strong, and marched on Paris.

King Louis XVIII fled and took shelter in the city of Ghent. He remained in Ghent for less than one year. When Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Louis returned to Paris and was restored to the throne by the victorious powers for the second time. In an interesting side note, Citizen Barbier contrived to get himself employed by Louis XVIII. He was briefly engaged as chief administrator of the king’s private libraries, before he was fired from the job and deprived of all offices in 1822—perhaps only then did the king realize that he had hired one of Napoleon’s master thieves.

The fleeing king’s brief stay in Ghent proved of vital importance to his host city. Had they not sheltered him, the central panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
would almost certainly still be on display at the Louvre today. Grateful to the city, Louis took measures to repay the kindness he was shown. Indeed, he made more of a positive impact on the history of Belgium and the Netherlands than he did on his own kingdom of France. Louis XVIII officially united with Holland the newly French Netherlands (the former Flanders and the future Belgium) in late 1815. The result was the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. He then returned the stolen central panels of
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
to the city of Ghent. A long-time sufferer of gout, Louis remained wheelchair-bound until his reign ended with his death on 16 September 1824.

The central panels of van Eyck’s masterpiece were among at least 5,233 indexed looted objects that were returned to their places of origin during the reign of Louis XVIII. How many were stolen in total, between the ravages of the revolutionary French soldiers and Napoleon’s confiscators, will never be known.

The Ghent Altarpiece
was whole once more, proudly displayed in the cathedral of Saint Bavo. And it would remain there—for barely a year.

N
o sooner had
The Lamb
returned to the cathedral from its imprisonment in France than it was stolen in the night. Yet another kidnapping would follow, and
The Lamb
’s nomadic existence was not even halfway over. This time the thief would be an insider, stealing on commission from a wealthy criminal dealer who exploited the turmoil of the war-torn period for personal profit.

Jan van Eyck’s art achieved the zenith of its international popularity when
The Ghent Altarpiece
was displayed at the Louvre. This launched a century of van Eyck mania among collectors, viewers, and critics, during which time his works sold for significantly more than anything by other star artists like Michelangelo, and legends grew up around him. Grand Tourists, artists, and intellectuals traveled out of their way to see his paintings, most of all
The Ghent Altarpiece
. In 1876 the French painter and art critic Eugene Fromentin wrote, “As long as van Eyck stands on the horizon, a light shines to the edges of the present world; under this light, the present world seems to awaken, recognize itself, and grow brighter”—a sentiment shared by all. An examination of the nineteenth-century obsession with van Eyck offers important insights into the history and psychology of art collecting.

During this time, various factions claimed van Eyck as the exemplar of their own national styles. For the nineteenth-century Germans, the artist’s archaic quality harkened back to German Gothic art, but perfected it as never before. The celebrated writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
the great philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and a cavalcade of German art historians were among those who traveled expressly to see the altarpiece, in a kind of pilgrimage of art appreciation.

The French saw van Eyck as the inventor of Realism, a mid-nineteenth-century art movement of their own. During Napoleon’s time, the many stolen van Eycks on display at the Louvre enraptured the greatest painter of the period, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who visually quoted God the Father from the upper central panel of
The Ghent Altarpiece
in his portrait
Napoleon on the Imperial Throne
. Ingres’s appreciation of van Eyck fueled popular and artistic sentiment. And the market for van Eycks in England ran wild, particularly after the purchase by the National Gallery of his
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
(also called
The Marriage Contract
) in 1842. This was further augmented by the 1851 acquisition by the same museum of the
Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban
, itself likely stolen from the Bruges painters’ guild a century before.

This popularity, both scholarly and commercial, coincided, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a lively market in fake van Eycks. An early such example came from noted English forger William Sykes, referred to gently by the novelist Horace Walpole as a “noted tricker.” In 1722 he conned the Duke of Devonshire into buying a painting by forging an inscription on the back that suggested it was painted by van Eyck on commission from the English king Henry V. Today the work in question, the
Enthronement of Saint Romold of Malines
(circa 1490, now in the National Gallery of Ireland), is attributed to an unknown artist. Most van Eyck fakes were like this one—not wholesale forgeries but rather legitimate fifteenth-century Flemish paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck in order to command top prices.

The nineteenth century was a time when art collectors, through legitimate and illicit means, built up enormous collections, profiting from the turbulent political climate and the newly impoverished aristocracy, who sold off their art collections to a new class of nouveau riche with aristocratic aspirations. Art became a trophy for the nouveaux riches to show off their wealth and social standing. This century also saw the evolution
of
The Ghent Altarpiece
from a work of art, capable of inciting religious outrage and prurience, and representative of the city of Ghent, into the battle standard of the fledgling nation that would become known as Belgium.

In the years preceding the next theft of
The Mystic Lamb
, the city of Ghent featured prominently on the world’s stage—not for a shift in its own fortunes, but because of the role it played in U.S. history.

On 24 December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was signed, officially ending the War of 1812 between the young United States under President James Madison and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The United States had hoped to conquer Florida and Canada but failed to make much headway. The British had little retaliatory success of their own, beyond the burning of Washington, DC. The Treaty of Ghent, a site chosen because of its neutrality, resulted in almost no alterations from the prewar situation. The slow lines of communication between Ghent and the United States meant that the celebrated Battle of New Orleans took place two weeks
after
the official treaty had been signed, because the participating generals, including the fabled American Andrew Jackson, had not received word in time of the war’s end. News of the treaty finally reached the United States and was ratified by President Madison on 15 February 1815.

On 19 December 1816, barely a year after the restitution of the central panels,
The Lamb
was dismembered again. While the bishop of Ghent was out of the city, the vicar-general of Saint Bavo Cathedral, a Monsieur Jacques-Joseph Le Surre, stole the six panels comprising the wings of the altarpiece. Tantalizingly few details remain about this theft as a result of the disappearance, over a century later, of files from both the cathedral archive and the Ghent city hall.

It is known that Le Surre was a French-born priest, a nationalist, and an imperialist, as were the bishop of Ghent, a French nobleman called
Maurice de Broglie, and a possible henchman in the theft, the cathedral’s canon, Joseph Gislain de Volder. Le Surre disapproved of the reinstatement of King Louis XVIII and looked with dismay upon the exile of Napoleon and the return of much of the Louvre’s looted art collection. Napoleon was a great man, the greatest France had ever known. The art was the symbol of French victory and should remain in France. More than all this, Le Surre recognized that there was profit to be had.

It is not known how thoroughly premeditated was Le Surre’s theft of the wing panels or how many other people were involved, though Canon de Volder has been suspected as a probable accomplice. Some answers may be inferred from the limited information that survives.

Vicar-General Le Surre could not have acted alone, for the simple reason that the six wing panels are too heavy for one person to move, even one panel at a time. Each panel weighs approximately sixty to a hundred kilograms. It would have been extremely difficult to “shop” the wing panels from
The Lamb
, easily one of the ten most important and recognizable paintings in Europe. The theft would have been futile if there was no one to whom one could sell the panels without questions being asked. Logic points to a premeditated, opportunistic crime, one that was at least encouraged—and probably commissioned—by a wealthy and influential pirate among art dealers. The theft was almost certainly commissioned by the buyer who appeared on the scene: a thoroughly unscrupulous man and notorious profiteer of the French army’s confiscation and sales of artworks from across Europe.