In May 1945, as the Allies picked through the art hoard of Hermann Göring, investigators traced one of its jewels — a previously unknown Vermeer, Christ with the Adulteress — back through the wartime market to a wealthy Dutch painter and dealer named Han van Meegeren. He was arrested in Amsterdam and charged, in effect, with collaboration: selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy, an offence that carried the gravest penalties. After weeks in a cell, Van Meegeren offered a defence no prosecutor had heard before. He had not sold Holland's patrimony to the Nazis, he said, because the painting was not a Vermeer. He had painted it himself. So, while he was at it, had he painted the celebrated Supper at Emmaus in Rotterdam, and a string of other “Vermeers” and “de Hoochs” the experts had blessed.
Nobody believed him, which was understandable, because the deception had been built to survive exactly this kind of scrutiny. Van Meegeren was a technically brilliant traditional painter whose own exhibitions had been savaged by critics as derivative and old-fashioned, and his forgery career was conceived, at least in his own telling, as revenge on the tastemakers. His masterstroke was strategic: rather than copying existing Vermeers, he invented new ones from a period that did not exist. Vermeer left barely three dozen known paintings and long biographical gaps, and scholars — above all the grand old connoisseur Abraham Bredius — had theorised that the young Vermeer must have painted religious works under Italian, Caravaggesque influence. Van Meegeren painted the missing evidence for their own theory, and the experts embraced it like a prophecy fulfilled.
Baking a Vermeer
The technique was as cunning as the psychology. He bought genuine but minor seventeenth-century canvases and scraped them down, keeping the period stretcher and nail holes. He ground pigments the old way, including genuine ultramarine from lapis lazuli. The great obstacle for any forger of Old Masters is that oil paint takes decades to harden fully; chemists can test for it. Van Meegeren's solution was to mix his pigments with Bakelite — phenol formaldehyde, the first modern plastic — and bake the finished canvas in an oven at around a hundred degrees, hardening the paint into something that behaved, under solvents, like paint three centuries old. Rolling the canvas cracked the surface convincingly, and dark ink worked into the craquelure imitated centuries of grime. In 1937 Bredius, then in his eighties, examined the Supper at Emmaus and pronounced it, in print, the masterpiece of Vermeer's career. Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans bought it for 520,000 guilders — a colossal sum — and hung it as the pride of the collection. More “Vermeers” followed at ever laxer quality, buyers including the Dutch state itself; the one that reached Göring was exchanged, remarkably, for well over a hundred paintings the Reichsmarschall had looted elsewhere.
Painting for his life
Back in 1945, the authorities called his bluff: prove it. And so, in one of the strangest episodes in legal history, Van Meegeren spent weeks under official observation painting a final fake — Jesus Among the Doctors, sometimes called The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple — while witnesses watched the “Vermeer” manner flow from his brush. A commission of experts, armed with chemistry as well as embarrassment, confirmed the forgeries, detecting the tell-tale synthetic resin and traces of modern cobalt blue. The collaboration charge dissolved, replaced by forgery and fraud, and Dutch public opinion executed a spectacular reversal: the traitor became a folk hero, the little painter who had swindled fat Göring. Legend has it Göring was told in prison that his Vermeer was fake and looked, for the first time, as though he had discovered there was evil in the world. In November 1947 Van Meegeren was sentenced to the minimum one year in prison. He never served it: he died of a heart attack in December 1947, weeks after the verdict, at fifty-eight. The museums quietly relabelled their treasures, and the Supper at Emmaus became a permanent exhibit in a different kind of collection — the case study, taught ever since, in how expertise can authenticate its own expectations. Van Meegeren never quite proved he was a great painter. He proved something more unsettling: that greatness, certified, is partly a story experts tell themselves.
Quiz nuggets
- Han van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus was authenticated by scholar Abraham Bredius in 1937 and bought by Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans for 520,000 guilders.
- Göring traded well over a hundred looted paintings for the fake Vermeer Christ with the Adulteress.
- Van Meegeren hardened his paint by mixing pigments with Bakelite and baking the canvas, defeating age tests.
- Arrested for collaboration in 1945, he painted a new fake, Jesus Among the Doctors, under observation to prove he was a forger.
- Convicted of forgery in November 1947 and sentenced to one year, he died of a heart attack that December before serving it.