“I’d love to think that this is a genuine portrait of Spinoza, but nevertheless I don’t,” says Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a professor and author of the book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Schliesser is one of several critics who question whether sitting for a portrait to begin with was in line with Spinoza’s personality, or whether the pagan imagery in the background (the sculpture in the work is a woman holding a sun) was consistent with Spinoza’s writings. “Assuming that the forensic experts are right about how similar the figure is to the posthumous portraits of Spinoza, it’s quite possible that the head was modeled on these posthumous paintings and added to the painting,” he says. “My brain recognizes that it could easily be a forgery.” That the painting was unknown until very recently, and that there is no trace anywhere of the painting in records that detail its arrival in France, or its fixture in a single family’s collection for centuries, present cause for skepticism. “I want to believe it’s not a fake,” he says in an interview. “My heart is fully convinced, but my head not,” he wrote. The biggest issue is the truncated provenance, a paramount concern of Eric Schliesser, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam who has written critically of the painting on his blog. His identification still has a lot of doubters, it would seem. But several months later, the painting is still in Vecht’s inventory. Flipping a Spinoza, evidently, holds promise of more than a 700 percent profit. Vecht brought the portrait to The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) last March, where he attached a cool $2.5 million price tag to it. “They state ‘one painting’ or ‘two cups of earthenware.’” “Normally, those documents are very superficial,” he says. One wouldn’t flaunt owning a portrait of Spinoza in one’s records, says Vecht.
Vecht isn’t bothered by the lack of documentation of the work’s provenance because Spinoza was a dissonant who had already been excommunicated by the Dutch Jewish community. Admirers of Spinoza owned works by Graat, so the two had intersecting networks. “It is assured.”Īccording to Vecht, the figure’s moustache is consistent with a contemporary description of the young Spinoza, and the sculpture over the subject’s left shoulder is an appropriate allegory of truth, which Spinoza, like countless philosophers before and after, sought to define and explain. (Another work said to be of Spinoza during his lifetime, in the collection of New York’s Jewish Museum, has been otherwise attributed.) Every detail of the lips, the eyebrows, and the off-kilter eyes matched up. After commissioning Holland’s two largest forensic institutes to compare the portrait with known, posthumous, depictions of Spinoza, Vecht concluded that he had in hand the only known depiction of the philosopher created during Spinoza’s lifetime. So he flew to Paris and bought the work for €3,000, a price at the low end of the auction estimate. (The Euro replaced that currency.) “In Holland, we are familiar with the face of Spinoza, but in France not. Vecht, the director of the Amsterdam-based art dealership Kunstzalen A.Vecht, had grown up seeing Spinoza’s face on the Dutch 1,000 gulden note. Today he is often hailed as an early proponent of atheism, although his writings were more pantheistic, and is also appreciated for his scientific work as a lens-maker. For his perceived heresies, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Jewish community in 1656. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “Of all the philosophers of the 17th-century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.” As an early figure of the Enlightenment, Spinoza rejected some of the predominant religious beliefs of his time, including the absolute veracity of the Bible as well as the immortality of the soul. More than 350 years after his death, Spinoza’s work is still influential. It was identified as a 1666 work by 17th century Dutch painter Barend Graat, and given the nondescript title of “a portrait of a man in front of a sculpture.” But Vecht immediately pegged the sitter as the famous Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
When Constant Vecht flipped through the October 2013 catalog from a Paris-based auction house, lot number three immediately leapt out.
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