The Van Meegeren Forgeries

The case

In May 1945 Allied officers emptying a salt mine in Austria found, among thousands of looted works, a painting of Christ and the woman taken in adultery attributed to Johannes Vermeer. It had belonged to Hermann Göring, who had given 137 paintings in exchange for it. The trail led back through a German banker and art dealer in Amsterdam to a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren, and on 29 May 1945 he was arrested. Selling a national treasure to the enemy was a charge that could, in the mood of liberated Holland, cost him his life.

In custody, Van Meegeren eventually gave an answer no one expected. The picture Göring had treasured was not a Vermeer at all. He had painted it himself, and he had painted several other 'Vermeers' now hanging in Dutch museums and private collections, including the most celebrated of them, The Supper at Emmaus in Rotterdam.

Van Meegeren, born in Deventer in 1889, had trained as an architect before turning to painting. In the 1920s he did well as a portraitist and illustrator, but critics dismissed his work as old-fashioned and derivative, and he answered them with bitter attacks in a magazine he co-published. In 1932 he moved to the Riviera village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and spent years solving a technical problem: how to make new oil paint pass the tests experts used to judge its age. His solution was to bind his pigments with a phenol-formaldehyde resin, a form of Bakelite, and bake the finished canvas so that the paint set hard like centuries-old work. He reused genuine seventeenth-century canvases, rolled them to raise a network of cracks, and filled the cracks with ink to imitate grime.

The first great result was The Supper at Emmaus, painted after a trip to Berlin for the 1936 Olympic Games. In 1937 Abraham Bredius, the grand old man of Dutch art history, examined it and declared it Vermeer's masterpiece. The Rembrandt Society, with help from a wealthy shipowner, bought it for the Boijmans museum for about 520,000 guilders. Over the next six years more 'Vermeers' and two fake Pieter de Hoochs followed, increasingly crude but sold in wartime, when genuine works were locked away and could not be compared. Collectors and the Dutch state paid millions of guilders, and Van Meegeren, by his own later account, bought more than fifty houses and a string of country properties.

His confession was at first disbelieved. To prove his skill he painted a new picture in Vermeer's manner, Jesus among the Doctors, between July and December 1945 under the eyes of court-appointed witnesses. An international commission led by the Belgian chemist Paul Coremans then examined the disputed paintings and found the modern resin in the paint, along with cracks and dirt that could not have formed naturally. The collaboration charges were dropped, since a fake was not cultural property.

He was tried instead for forgery and fraud before the Amsterdam regional court, beginning on 29 October 1947. On 12 November he was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison; the prosecutor had asked for two. By then Van Meegeren had become something of a folk hero, the man who had swindled Göring, and in an opinion poll he ranked among the most popular people in the country. He never served the sentence. He suffered a heart attack on 26 November, the last day for an appeal, and died in an Amsterdam clinic on 30 December 1947.