Futility Closet - 139-The Painter's Revenge

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a medieval newspaper to a penny-financed education. This is episode 139. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. When critics dismissed his paintings, Dutch artist Han van Meegeren decided to seek his revenge on the art world. He devoted himself to forgery and spent six years fabricating a Vermeer masterpiece. In today's show, we'll

Starting point is 00:00:38 recount the career of a master forger and the surprising mistake that eventually brought him down. We'll also drop in on D.B. Cooper and puzzle over an eyeless fruit burglar. In episode 131, we did a lateral thinking puzzle about a forger who demonstrates his skills in order to evade a criminal charge, and that brought in a lot of email about Han van Meegeren, a real-life forger with a similar story. Here it is. Van Meegeren was born in the Netherlands in 1889. As a young man, he fell in love with the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age,

Starting point is 00:01:14 and at the start of his artistic career, he produced works in the style of the old masters. But these were rejected by critics who were more interested in surrealism, cubism, and other movements of the time. They said his gift was only for imitation. One prominent critic reviewing his second solo exhibition wrote that he was, quote, a gifted technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school. He has every virtue except originality. Von Meagren published a series of aggressive articles fighting back, but these served only to alienate the critics.

Starting point is 00:01:43 He felt they'd unfairly ruined his career, and he decided to do something about it. He later wrote, quote, driven into a state of anxiety and depression due to the all-too-meager appreciation of my work, I decided one fateful day to revenge myself on the art critics and experts by doing something the likes of which the world had never seen before. He would prove his merit by forging a painting by one of the world's most famous artists. Then, once his work had been accepted as authentic, he would reveal his merit by forging a painting by one of the world's most famous artists. Then, once his work had been accepted as authentic, he would reveal the forgery, humiliating the experts, museums, connoisseurs, the whole art world.

Starting point is 00:02:12 He moved to the south of France and set about creating the ultimate forgery. He spent fully six years in preparatory exercises and then set out to make a false Vermeer. Vermeer was not well known until the beginning of the 20th century. Only about 35 of his works had survived, and these were extremely valuable. Von Meagren studied the lives of the old masters, their techniques, and catalogs. He defined the chemical and technical procedures he would need. He bought authentic canvases from the time and mixed his own paints from raw materials specified in old formulas. He recreated the badger hair paintbrushes that Vermeer had used. He worked

Starting point is 00:02:45 out a way to harden his paints using phenol formaldehyde to make them appear 300 years old. After he finished a painting, he'd bake it to harden the paint and then crack it by rolling it over a cylinder. And then he'd wash it in black India ink to fill in the cracks to make it look the appropriate age. All this preparation took six years, and finally he set out to paint his masterpiece, which he called The Supper at Emmaus, using the colors preferred by Vermeer and other painters of the Dutch Golden Age. It was thought that Vermeer had studied in Italy, so he used Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus as a model. When the painting was finished, he gave it to a friend, an attorney, telling him it was a genuine Vermeer, and asked him to show it to the famed art connoisseur Abraham Bradyus in Monaco. He invented a story about the painting's origin. He said a friend of his had

Starting point is 00:03:30 inherited a large art collection from her father, who had lived in Italy. She loved van Meegeren and trusted him to manage the sale. It had been agreed that the painting should be sold privately for 200,000 guilders, but first he wanted to get the opinion of Bradyus, the Dutch art expert. Bradyus examined the painting and not only accepted it, but praised it highly. He wrote, it is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master. And what a picture. We have here a, I'm inclined to say, the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. This immediately made the painting a national treasure

Starting point is 00:04:05 and in danger of being sold overseas, so other Dutch experts quickly agreed with Bradyus. It was said that everything possible must be done to preserve this unique work of art for the Netherlands. The canvas was deposited in a Paris bank and the price increased to 500,000 guilders. The Rembrandt Society bought it for 520,000 guilders, or nearly $5 million today, and donated it to a Rotterdam museum, where it was exhibited among 450 Dutch masterpieces. One critic wrote, In the rather isolated area in which Vermeer's picture hung, it was as quiet as in a chapel. The feeling of the consecration overflows on the visitors, although the picture has no ties to ritual or church. has no ties to ritual or church. Now, according to his plan, at this point Van Meegeren should now have revealed the deception and humiliated everyone, but instead he began painting more

Starting point is 00:04:50 forgeries. He bought a 12-bedroom estate and continued making further paintings, supposedly from the same friend's collection. Over the next few years, he created six more fake Vermeers and several additional forgeries after the Dutch Old Masters. He let middlemen handle all the sales, staying out of sight. These paintings brought him a fortune, but also alcohol and drug addictions. And his work got increasingly sloppy. But this didn't seem to matter. Van Meegeren said they sold just the same. The new paintings had clearly been painted by the same hand as the first painting, and that one had been accepted. And during World War II, wealthy Dutchmen would eagerly buy up great artworks just to keep them out of Hitler's hands.

Starting point is 00:05:25 Holland had lost countless art treasures to the Nazis. The new paintings earned van Meegeren the equivalent of $60 million, which he used to buy real estate jewelry and works of art. If he'd stopped here, he might have got away with it. But now he made his only mistake. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he sold a Vermeer forgery to a Nazi art dealer, who sold it to Hermann Goering for seven million dollars. Goering showcased it at his residence, then hid it in an Austrian salt mine among thousands of other artworks looted by the Nazis. At the end of the war, the Allies discovered it there. Repatriation officers used the Nazis' meticulous records to trace it to

Starting point is 00:06:00 Van Meegeren. They approached him and asked him the name of the original owner so they could return it to him, and he refused to provide it. They then suspected that he had sold Dutch cultural property to the Nazis and charged him with being a Nazi collaborator. That would have been treason, punishable by death, so he made a startling confession. He said, the painting in Goering's hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer of Delft, but a van Meegeren. I painted the picture. So rather than treason, he was confessing to the lesser charge of forgery. He announced that he had forged the Emmaus and indeed a whole series of 17th century paintings and admitted that he had made a fortune from his

Starting point is 00:06:34 forgeries. Asked whether he could paint another copy of Goering's painting in order to prove that this was true, he said, to paint a copy is no proof of artistic talent. In all my career, I have never painted a copy, but I shall paint you a new Vermeer. I shall paint you a masterpiece. And he did so. In the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses, he spent two months painting Christ preaching in the temple, which art experts judged to be a magnificent work in the true Vermeer style. This news made headlines, and it turned van Meegeren into a folk hero. Here was a brilliant forger who not only had fooled the snooty art world, but had also

Starting point is 00:07:05 swindled the Nazis. In fact, there's an apocryphal story that the news of the forgery reached Hermann Goering when he was awaiting trial in Nuremberg. It said that, quote, Goering looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world. Anyway, since a panel of experts had determined that Goering's painting was a forgery, and hence not the cultural property of the Netherlands, Hi, pussycat.

Starting point is 00:07:29 Sasha's trying to scent mark my microphone. The charges of Nazi collaboration were dropped because this wasn't, it turned out, not an authentic Vermeer that had been sold to the Nazis. But van Meegeren now faced charges of forgery and fraud. His trial began in Amsterdam in October 1947. At the trial, van Meegeren identified eight forgeries that he'd made and the court asked an international group of experts to address their authenticity. They identified the paint hardener that van Meegeren had been using, and a bottle with exactly that ingredient was found in his studio. Van Meegeren testified that he'd painted the Vermeers only to prove himself.

Starting point is 00:08:06 When the judge asked, You do admit, though, that you sold these pictures for very high prices, he said, I could hardly have done otherwise. Had I sold them for low prices, it would have been obvious they were fake. He said, I didn't do it for the money, which brought me nothing but trouble and unhappiness. In November 1947, he was found guilty of forgery and fraud and sentenced to a minimum of one year in prison.

Starting point is 00:08:25 He didn't even serve the time. He died a month later at age 58. That's the standard story about van Meegeren, which casts him as a romantic avenger. But that view has come under fire recently, among others by Jonathan Lopez, a Harvard-trained art historian, who points out that van Meegeren's reputation was supported by the myth that he'd swindled the Nazis, which made him immensely popular. was supported by the myth that he'd swindled the Nazis, which made him immensely popular. Early in 1947, one newspaper poll found that van Meegeren was the second most popular man in the Netherlands after the newly elected prime minister. But as we've seen, this wasn't true, and it appears that he may have been closer to the Nazis than anyone realized. During his trial, a book of poems by a Dutch Nazi poet was discovered in Hitler's library, apparently

Starting point is 00:09:02 inscribed by van Meegeren. It said, To my beloved Fuhrer, in grateful tribute, from H. von Megeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942. Von Megeren insisted that a Nazi officer must have forged the dedication, but the handwriting clearly matched. But the trial was an open and shut case of forgery, so this was ignored. Lopez says that von Megeren had been a forger for much longer than he acknowledged, in fact, his entire adult life, and that he earned millions by teaming up with criminals who needed a talented forger. He points out that it would have been surprising if a first-time forger could have pulled off the supper at Emmaus even after six years' study, which I think is a good point. Lopez interviewed the descendants of von Megeren's crime partners and spent three years doing archival research. He contends that van Meegeren worked for decades promoting fake old masters through a ring of shady art dealers, and he cultivated a fascination with Hitler and Nazism that connected him with high-level Dutch collaborators during the occupation. Whatever the truth of his history,

Starting point is 00:09:54 van Meegeren remains the most successful art forger of the 20th century. He duped buyers, including the Dutch government, out of tens of millions of dollars. More than this, he's very often the subject of philosophical discussions about fact and fraud in art. Does his success prove that he was the equal of Vermeer? Should we now doubt the system of certification, recognition, and critique that the art world rests on? Critics and art historians acclaimed van Meegeren's work widely. Were they unqualified? Is it simply impossible to establish a painting's authenticity? Should this even matter? What is it that we value in a work of art, authenticity or merit? John Raymond Godley, Lord Kilbracken, who wrote extensively about van Meegeren in the 1960s, says that authenticity seems to be the

Starting point is 00:10:33 uppermost consideration in the market, more than aesthetics. He wrote, what's in a name? Almost everything. That is my conclusion. An artist or a writer achieves a reputation. Thereafter, all he produces is acclaimed. An unknown craftsman chances to produce an equivalent work. It is ignored. I believe that this is commonplace. Von Megeren set out to prove that it was true, and I believe that he succeeded. The important fact which emerges from the story is not that von Megeren could produce this first picture, though technically and artistically it was near perfect. It is more significant that he was able to secure the acceptance of those pictures which followed and were of less technical and artistic value. Of still greater significance is that, whether or not van Meegeren was revealed as a great artist,

Starting point is 00:11:12 the art critics were discredited. Some people say van Meegeren's paintings were accepted because they were offered for sale during the war when buyers were anxious for patriotic or economic reasons to invest money in works of art. Also during the war, such deals were transacted in secret, and buyers might be satisfied with murky stories about a painting's origins. But of the eight fakes that von Megern sold, three were purchased by connoisseurs before the war, so we can't blame wartime exigencies for all of his successes. The Emmaus, the first painting, still hangs in the Boyman's Museum in Rotterdam. Interestingly, many people now claim that it looks ugly.

Starting point is 00:11:44 One curator says, it's rubbish. It's a terrible painting. It's astonishing that anyone ever thought it was by a 17th century artist. You see these sickly faces with huge eyelids. That was the image of beauty in the 30s, but if you look at it now, you think that everyone has a terrible disease. That may reveal the essential difference between van Meegeren and Vermeer. Vermeer's paintings are still admired 300 years after they were painted. Von Meagren's are badly dated. The art historian Max Fredlander used to say that forgeries must be served hot. He had a 40-year rule. He said that it takes four decades for a forgery to reveal itself as its modern nuances turn into dated cliches. Von Meagren's painting looked like a real Vermeer when it was painted in the 1930s, but today it looks like a fake Vermeer that was

Starting point is 00:12:23 painted in the 1930s. Time has a way of revealing these things. On the other hand, but today it looks like a fake Vermeer that was painted in the 1930s. Time has a way of revealing these things. On the other hand, we don't know how many people have got away with this and have never been caught. The French painter Theodore Rousseau wrote, we should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected. The good ones are still hanging on the walls. If you wear glasses, then you know that sometimes you end up focusing more on what's on your glasses than what's going on around you. That's what's great about Krizol No-Glare Lenses. They provide protection against the five enemies of clear vision. Glare, scratches, smudges, dust, and water. That means no more fingerprint smudges from taking your glasses on and off, or scratches

Starting point is 00:13:03 from cleaning your lenses on your shirt. Plus, Crizal no-glare lenses make it safer for you to drive at night by reducing any reflection caused by surrounding streetlights and the headlights of oncoming traffic. Crizal even protects your eyes from harmful UV light, which can contribute to long-term damages like eye disease by providing 25 times more UV protection than going without eyewear. And because Crizal's labs use extensive tests to ensure your lenses meet the highest standards, you can be confident in the quality of your lenses. Thank you. and start living life in the clear. Listener Daniel Sturman wrote to us about episode 133. When your listener proposed that the Voynich manuscript might be written in a language used by women for women, it reminded me of another unique language I once read about, the mother-in-law language that is used by an Australian Aboriginal tribe. As can be guessed from its name, this is a unique language form

Starting point is 00:14:09 that is used exclusively when speaking to one's mother-in-law and no one else. The mother-in-law language is a specific type of what is called avoidance speech. This is a restricted form of language that is used only when speaking to people whom your society considers it taboo to associate with. So depending on the tribe, this language might also be used when speaking to one's your society considers it taboo to associate with. So depending on the tribe, this language might also be used when speaking to one's father-in-law or various other members of your spouse's family. Very few mother-in-law languages are actually restricted to mothers-in-law alone, and since they use the same grammar and often some of the same vocabulary as general speech, they're not a truly independent language. But the term mother-in-law language is so amusing that one can't help but want to use it anyway.

Starting point is 00:14:48 And I found this whole subject of avoidance speech or mother-in-law language is really fascinating. It's seen in many Australian Aboriginal languages, but also seen in languages in parts of Asia and Africa. In some cases, these mother-in-law languages are, as Daniel said, just a restricted version of the regular language. So for example, in Gugu Yimadir, which is spoken in the far north of Queensland, in avoidance speech, there's one word that means travel, and that has to take the place of a whole group of words such as go, walk, crawl, paddle, or float. Other examples of avoidance speech have people, usually married women, needing to avoid words that begin with certain letters or have certain roots. So for example,

Starting point is 00:15:32 in some languages in Ethiopia, married women are not only supposed to physically avoid their parents-in-law, but they also can't use any words that begin with the same syllable as the names of their mother or father-in-law. And these types of rules require speakers to resort to using synonyms or words from other languages, describing a word that they can't say, or using their language's equivalent of whatchamacallit. Similarly, in parts of India, married women are not supposed to use any words that begin with the same letters as their in-laws' names. And in some cultures in Southern

Starting point is 00:16:05 Africa, married women may not say the names of various senior male relatives or use any words that have the same roots as these names. And I would guess that in these situations, if you have a large enough family, you might find it rather difficult to say very much of anything. Yeah, you can imagine situations where it'd be very hard to come up with a way to express what you're thinking. There's so many words that, I mean, and you'd have to think so quickly, like, of all the different words you can't use and try to find other words and workarounds. Avoidance speech is tied into a similar concept of avoidance relationships. And as with the avoidance speech, different cultures show different rules and degrees of strictness for these taboo relationships.

Starting point is 00:16:44 show different rules and degrees of strictness for these taboo relationships. In many cases, these rules apply to the opposite gender in-laws, such as a husband and his mother-in-law or a wife and her father-in-law. But as Daniel noted, in different cultures, the rules can include other family members, such as other in-laws or certain cousins. The least restrictive rules would just forbid you from speaking in a normal way to some people, requiring you, for example, to use some avoidance speech and perhaps other modifications, such as speaking only in a normal way to some people, requiring you, for example, to use some avoidance speech and perhaps other modifications, such as speaking only in a slow, soft voice. Stricter rules, such as seen with the Jirbal people in Australia, require, for example, that a man and his mother-in-law are not allowed to make eye contact or even face one another, and they aren't

Starting point is 00:17:21 allowed to speak directly to each other. So in order for them to communicate, they need to address a third person or perhaps even a nearby object. In the most extreme cases, avoidance behaviors prohibit certain people from speaking at all in each other's presence. According to an article on the subject in the New York Times, researchers on this topic think that avoidance speech may have developed in some places, such as in Africa and India, to help reinforce the inferior status of some people, such as daughters-in-law. And in the Australian Aboriginal tribes, it might have developed with the intention of helping to prevent sexual relationships with inappropriate people, such as your in-laws. It is interesting that it's so widespread, or at least appears in such geographically disparate places.

Starting point is 00:18:04 Yeah, exactly. And I actually, I came across references that some North American languages show avoidance speech, but I wasn't able to come up with any specific examples other than people mentioning it in general. So if anybody knows about that, please write in and let us know. Daniel also had some amusing thoughts on the lateral thinking puzzle from episode 133. And these don't give away the answer to the puzzle if you haven't heard it yet. Daniel said, what might somebody appreciate if you gave them one of but hate you for the short time it takes for them to die if you give them two? I first thought of medical procedures. An appendectomy is great if you have appendicitis.

Starting point is 00:18:42 But after it's removed, you don't want your doctor rooting around in there trying to find another one. Then I thought of an even better idea, a nephrectomy, the removal of a kidney, which is performed if somebody has a certain type of kidney cancer. Unlike the other ideas, that's something you can actually give somebody twice, but it's probably not a good idea. Once you're thinking in that direction, it's easy then to think of a pneumonectomy, the removal of a lung, which is something you really don't want done twice.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Of course, once Sharon said that the answer was a physical object that can be held, none of the above answers were any good. So I decided to go with a just barely subcritical mass of uranium. That might not work as well with the puzzle though, because if you give somebody two of them, they might not have time to hate you. Paul Safaklaus wrote to say, Back in episode 124 of the podcast, you covered the D.B. Cooper case about the guy who parachuted from a hijacked airliner with $200,000 and was never seen again. Recently, some new evidence

Starting point is 00:19:43 has been discovered regarding this case. Apparently, scientists examining a clip-on tie left behind by Cooper discovered particles of cerium, strontium sulfide, and pure titanium. These materials were not commonly used at the time of the hijacking, but they were used in the aerospace industry, suggesting that Cooper was an engineer or technician. And this was news to us. The FBI had closed their case on Cooper just last year, but apparently a band of scientists called Citizen Sleuths has been investigating this case for several years now. According to their website, an FBI agent has given the group special access to the evidence

Starting point is 00:20:19 and the files in the FBI archive with the specific intent of having the work be able to continue on the case without having to spend federal money on it. Paul sent us a link to a USA Today story from January 13, in which Tom Kay, the principal investigator for the team, said that these materials that had been found on the tie had been used for very specific things in very narrow fields in 1971, the time of Cooper's hijacking. specific things in very narrow fields in 1971, the time of Cooper's hijacking. In the article,

Starting point is 00:20:51 Kay says that one use for these elements at that time was in Boeing's high-tech supersonic transport plane, or SST, which was being developed in the 1960s and 70s, leading Kay to wonder if Cooper might not have been a Boeing employee or contractor. Kay said, the tie went with him into these manufacturing environments for sure, so he was not one of the people running these manufacturing machines. He was either an engineer or a manager in one of the plants. In the article, Kay asks for the public's help, particularly from older people with experience in the aerospace industry in the Pacific Northwest, who might better know what having that combination of materials on someone's tie would point to. And then I found a follow-up story in the Seattle Times from January 20 saying that the focus of the citizen sleuths is now on a company called

Starting point is 00:21:35 Tektronix based in Beaverton, Oregon. Apparently this company may have been doing contract work for Boeing on the SST in the time period right before the Cooper heist, and it seems the likely is sourced for the titanium particles that were found on the tie. The Seattle Times says Kay now believes that Cooper was an engineer or manager type who was going back and forth between Boeing and Tektronix. Unfortunately, neither Boeing nor Tektronix would comment much on the reports, although a spokeswoman for Tektronix said that they don't have employment records that go back 50 years. And if they had been working on the SST with Boeing, that would have been confidential information. The Seattle Times did interview a 74-year-old retired engineer who had worked on the SST for

Starting point is 00:22:19 Boeing. And he did confirm that most everyone he worked with wore clip-on ties of exactly the same kind that Cooper had apparently left behind on the plane. That seems to imply, if it's right, that Cooper survived the jump, right? Because if he matched that so closely and didn't show up for work on Monday, someone probably would have reported it, right? As I remember, the FBI had out a whole nationwide sort of description of the man, and you would think... Well, he could have just quit. Like, if he knew he was going to be getting all this money, he might not have planned to go back to work.

Starting point is 00:22:53 That's true. So he could have just quit or, you know, said he was moving to Australia or wherever, you know, something. But even then, like, this guy, whoever he was, would have matched the physical description that they were circulating. He just would have looked fishy enough

Starting point is 00:23:03 that you'd think somebody would have reported it unless he just showed up and started working again quietly. I don't know. I'm making that up. I don't know. You know, I mean, that's one of the mysteries, right? Why nobody seemed to recognize him or report him missing or being disappeared. That's really exciting, though, because like you say, they just closed this case.

Starting point is 00:23:24 They did. But this group, this group is said, they just closed this case. They did, but this group is apparently really still working on it, and there's a lot more information on the Citizen Sleuths website on their research into and analysis of a whole variety of topics connected with the D.B. Cooper story. If

Starting point is 00:23:37 anybody's interested, I recommend checking it out. And for example, they've conducted various analyses around the bundles of money that was from Cooper's ransom request. They had found these bundles of money buried in the sand on a beach called Tina Bar along the Columbia River in 1980. And they were able to match them up that they definitely were part of the Cooper hijacking. Through the analyses of citizen sleuths, which included studying the decomposition rates of rubber bands under different conditions,

Starting point is 00:24:07 which I don't know that I would have thought to do that, but they were able to conclude that the bundles would have had to have been buried within a year at the most after Cooper was given them. And this conclusion rules out some different hypotheses that others have advanced for how the money may have come to be in the sand that didn't involve Cooper's putting them there,

Starting point is 00:24:29 since many believe that Cooper likely did not survive his parachute jump. So people were coming up with various natural explanations for how the money could have ended up just there by itself. It just washed down the river and fetched up there. Yeah, or there was these dredging operations in 1974. There were these different ideas. But Citizen Sleuth says, the money continues to resist all natural explanations for how it arrived on Tina Barr. The story behind the money may be as big as the Cooper story itself. There is no hard evidence that Cooper died in the jump, so it remains a primary debate. If Cooper walked out of the woods, there would certainly be easier ways to explain the money if human intervention was involved. So he might have deliberately buried it where it was found.

Starting point is 00:25:05 Yeah, or somebody did, apparently. It seems unlikely that it got there by itself, but somebody buried it and then didn't come back for it, which is also a mystery, right? And lastly, for anyone who has been despairing because they missed the chance to apply for the job openings for hermits that we've previously discussed in episodes 64 and 91. A couple of our listeners kindly let us know that there is currently a new opening for a professional hermit. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the Austrian town of Saalfelden has one of Central Europe's last remaining continuously occupied hermitages, and the town is currently taking applications for its

Starting point is 00:25:45 next resident. You need to be prepared to live in a Spartan dwelling without heat or running water, and in proper hermit style, TVs and digital devices are banned. However, as with some of the other hermit positions we've discussed, you will be expected to be a sociable hermit and converse with any visitors that come seeking the hermit's counsel. The position is unpaid, but apparently the area is quite beautiful and the hermit is considered pretty prestigious in the local community. So if this appeals to you, be prepared to submit your application by postal mail. No emails accepted by March 15. And thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate the feedback and info and updates that we've been getting from you. So if you have anything you'd like to say, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:26:42 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to try to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. And I'm being joined today by Sasha, who is insisting on being pet. So hopefully I can pet a cat and do a lateral thinking puzzle at the same time. But she's sworn not to help you.

Starting point is 00:27:00 Oh, okay. This one was sent in by listener Ned Harkness, but when I read it, I thought I recognized it as a historic riddle. So I dug into it a bit and found it is, in fact. The earliest reference I can find is 1872. It was said to be displayed over the mantelpiece of an old, old inn in Lincolnshire, England. Oh.

Starting point is 00:27:17 So I don't know how old this is, but it's at least whatever that is, 140 years. A man without eyes saw plums on a tree. He neither took plums nor left plums. Pray, how can this be? Okay, a man without eyes. Does the man part refer to a human being? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:39 When you say without eyes, do you mean sense organs? Yes, I do. Visual sense organs? Yes, I do. Visual sense organs? Not like the letter I in his name or something. Right, no, I see what you mean. So when you say a man without eyes, if I were to look at this person, would he appear not to have any eyes on his face? No. Clarify your answer because I...

Starting point is 00:28:06 Would he appear to have eyes on his face? Let's ask that. That's not a negative question. No. Okay. He would appear to have... No, I'm sorry. He would not appear to have eyes.

Starting point is 00:28:16 I would not see eyes on his face. That's... I'm getting confused here. True. I'm being very careful for reasons that will be clear. Okay, let me try this again. Okay, if I looked at this man, would I see a face? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:33 Okay, so would you say that any part of his face is obscured or obstructed? No. Okay, I would see a nose? Yes. I would see zero eyes? False. I would see a nose. Yes. I wouldn't see zero eyes. False. I would see eyes. No.

Starting point is 00:28:50 I would see one eye. Yes. Yes. Oh, he only has one eye, not eyes plural. Yes. Do I need to figure out the plums part or is that pretty much it? Yes, but you're on the right path. A man without eyes saw plums on a tree.

Starting point is 00:29:04 Okay. He neither took plums nor left plums. Oh, he neither took plums nor left plums. Okay. Can we assume that he actually saw this rather than he hallucinated or dreamt it? Yes. Yes. He actually saw plums on a tree. Yes. He saw two plums and he... I'm catching on, singular and plural, right? He saw two plums, and he—I'm catching on, singular and plural, right? He saw two plums, so he took one plum and left one plum. Yes. I thought that was clever. That is really cute.

Starting point is 00:29:33 In fact, here's how the answer apparently appears under that riddle on the mantelpiece. The man had an eyes, but he had just one eye, with which on the tree two plums he could spy. He neither took plums nor plums did he leave, but took one and left one, as we may conceive. Yay. So thank you, Ned, for sending that in, and thanks to whoever wrote that way back in 1872. That was a very cute puzzle. Yes, thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our wonderful listeners. We do have some advertising,

Starting point is 00:30:16 but that doesn't cover the big commitment of time that it takes us to make the show each week. So if you would like to help support the show and get bonus material, such as extra discussions, outtakes, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, the best podcast mascot there is, then check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the supporters section of the website. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 Quiddling Snaddox.

Starting point is 00:30:46 At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics in today's show. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the talented Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 139-The Painter's Revenge

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