John C. Van Dyke

The general public knew and will hereafter remember John Charles Van Dyke as militant challenger of the authenticity of Rembrandt paintings. Professor Van Dyke may conceivably have himself resented this selection of a single incident in an unusually full artistic and critical career as his claim to immortality. But the public has a way of making its own choice in matters of this sort, regardless of individual feelings. John Hay preferred to be remembered as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, not as author of “Jim Bludsoe.” Sir William Osler confessed irritation that the public should associate his name, not with a distinguished career in medical diagnosis and instruction, but with the popular version of a chance remark on the question whether human efficiency did not deteriorate after a fortieth birthday. Still, the public had its way with each of them. Furthermore, the public at large loves a “scrap” among experts even better than it loves a bit of epigram, and Van Dyke certainly gave it something of the kind to talk about.

He did not handle with gloves the genuineness of Rembrandts on the walls of great collections. When he opened fire in 1923, with his “Rembrandt and his School,” he asserted flatly that “not one of the pictures put down to Rembrandt” in the Metropolitan Museum “is by him.” Some were “work-shop pictures—near-Rembrandts—the rest are by pupils of the school.” Only 3 of the 26 pictures ascribed to him in the Berlin Museum were authentic; the Museum’s Rembrandts “were painted by ten or more different painters.” The Louvre at Paris had only 4 genuine Rembrandts out of 14 thus catalogued; the National Gallery at London, only 4 out of 21. Following up this preliminary barrage, Van Dyke four years later listed 37 etchers whose work he believed to have been mistakenly catalogued as Rembrandts.

Having no taste for the process which is cheerfully and colloquially described as “debunking,” he put the question for himself, “What is the object of this reconstruction?” and answered, “Merely to establish the truth.” But when, in addition to the catalogued Rembrandts of the great foreign galleries, 86 American collections contain what their collectors believe to be genuine Rembrandts, and when 76 of the owners are private individuals, it was not to be supposed that so audacious a challenge would be allowed to go undisputed. Other experts, home and foreign, retorted indignantly. Many threw out the whole contention. Others asserted stoutly that at least the attack on the Rembrandts in the great public galleries was unwarranted. Few of the critics accepted his judgment as it stood. One responsible collector soothingly remarked that the author of such destructive criticism “deserves as little notice as Herostratus, who set fire to the temple at Ephesus in order to become famous.”

Van Dyke was no Herostratus, and he never recanted. But perhaps he occasionally felt a shadow of regret that his sympathetic and delightful interpretations of European and American artistic work, the impressions of nature in his numerous published books, should be overtopped and obscured in the public mind by this fight with rival experts over the works of a Flemish painter.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook