Between roughly 1936 and 1943, the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren manufactured a small body of “newly discovered” religious paintings that the art establishment accepted as autograph works by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. The most celebrated was The Supper at Emmaus, which the eminent Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius authenticated in 1937 in The Burlington Magazine and which the Rembrandt Society bought for some 520,000 guilders before placing it in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. None of these pictures was a copy of an existing Vermeer; they were inventions, painted to fill gaps that scholars wished Vermeer had filled. Across roughly seven such forgeries van Meegeren is estimated to have earned more than seven million guilders, a fortune for the period.
The deception unraveled not because anyone caught the painting, but because of the company one of the paintings kept. After the liberation of the Netherlands, Allied investigators traced Christ with the Adulteress — a “Vermeer” van Meegeren had sold into the collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in 1943 — back to van Meegeren. Arrested on 29 May 1945, he faced a charge that could carry death: collaborating with the enemy by selling a Dutch national treasure to a leading Nazi. His defense was the more astonishing claim that no treasure had changed hands at all, because he had painted the “Vermeer” himself.
To prove it, van Meegeren agreed to forge a fresh Vermeer-style canvas, Jesus Among the Doctors, under official supervision in 1945. The demonstration, together with chemical analysis of his pictures, converted the case from treason to fraud. On 12 November 1947, after a trial that opened on 29 October in Amsterdam, he was found guilty of forgery and obtaining money by deception and sentenced to one year in prison. He never served it: weakened by years of alcohol and morphine, he suffered a heart attack and died on 30 December 1947, aged 58.
The case endures as the textbook study of expert credulity. Van Meegeren did not defeat connoisseurship by accident; he reverse-engineered the desires of the connoisseurs, gave them the picture they already believed should exist, and armored it with industrial chemistry — Bakelite-hardened paint, genuine seventeenth-century canvas, and engineered craquelure — so that the era’s authentication tests confirmed a conclusion the experts had reached before they ever looked.
Between roughly 1946 and 1967, the Hungarian-born painter Elmyr de Hory — born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest in 1906 — flooded the international art market with what he claimed were more than a thousand forged drawings and paintings in the manner of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir, Derain and Dufy. He did not copy existing works; he invented new ones in each master’s hand, producing them at extraordinary speed and selling them to reputable galleries and dealers across Europe and the United States. His Modigliani drawings were so numerous and so convincing that they continue to complicate efforts to catalogue that artist’s genuine output.
De Hory’s method married fluent imitation to a sympathetic backstory and, eventually, a professional sales machine. He presented himself as a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat quietly selling off a family collection scattered by war — a narrative that explained both the steady supply of “old” works and his own genteel poverty. From 1959 he worked with the dealers Fernand Legros and Réal Lessard, who moved his output across five continents, co-opted authenticating experts, and forged the certificates and stamps that turned a convincing sketch into a saleable asset. The forgeries flourished because the supporting paperwork and the salesmen’s theatre supplied everything the eye alone could not.
The exposure, when it came, ran through the buyers rather than the pictures. In 1967 the Texas oil millionaire Algur H. Meadows discovered that a large group of modern paintings he had bought through Legros were fakes; experts examining the collection condemned dozens of them, and the scandal pulled the thread that led back through Legros to de Hory. The forger was never convicted of forgery: he had created no fakes on Spanish soil, where he lived, and in 1968 an Ibiza court jailed him only briefly on unrelated charges. His celebrity was sealed by Clifford Irving’s 1969 biography Fake! and Orson Welles’s 1973 film F for Fake.
De Hory’s end was as ambiguous as his attributions. On 11 December 1976, told that Spain had agreed to extradite him to France to face fraud charges, he took an overdose of sleeping pills at his home on Ibiza and died. He left behind an unknowable number of pictures still hanging as genuine and a permanent uncertainty in the modern-art market — the rare forger whose greatest legacy is doubt itself.
Between 1915 and 1918 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired three monumental terracotta statues said to be ancient Etruscan warriors, and from 1933 it exhibited them as treasures of its antiquities collection. They were forgeries, made in the Italian countryside in the early twentieth century by a family of skilled potters and sold into the antiquities trade. The deception held for roughly a quarter-century of public display and was settled in 1961 by two converging proofs: a chemical analysis of the glaze that no ancient maker could have produced, and a signed confession from the last surviving forger, who handed over a thumb he had kept as a souvenir.
The three pieces were a so-called “Old Warrior,” acquired around 1915–16 and missing its left thumb and right arm; a “Colossal Head,” acquired in 1916, so large that scholars imagined it belonged to a statue some seven metres tall; and a “Big Warrior,” standing over two metres, acquired by 1918. They were purchased through the Met’s Rome-based agent John Marshall and championed inside the museum by the eminent classical curator Gisela Richter, who published them in a 1937 monograph and described them as still resplendent in their original colours. Their scale and apparent state of preservation, rather than triggering suspicion, were read as marks of an extraordinary find.
Doubts circulated for years, but the case broke in 1960–61. The Met’s operating administrator and ceramics specialist Joseph V. Noble, reconstructing how Etruscan black glaze was actually fired, had the statues’ glaze analysed and found it contained manganese — a colourant the ancient Etruscans did not use. The technical evidence pointed unmistakably to modern manufacture. In Rome, the dealer-investigator Harold Parsons tracked down Alfredo Fioravanti, who on 5 January 1961 signed a deposition before the American consul admitting he had helped make the warriors, and produced the Old Warrior’s missing left thumb, which fit the hand exactly. The Met publicly announced the forgeries in February 1961 and removed the statues from view.
The warriors are a case study in how scale and beauty can suppress scrutiny. The forgers solved a hard physical problem — kilns too small to fire a giant figure — by building each statue in sections, deliberately breaking it, firing the fragments, and reassembling it as a “restored” antiquity, turning the very brokenness that should have raised questions into a credential of age. For decades the museum’s confidence, its curator’s investment, and the public’s wonder all reinforced a conclusion that a single glaze test and one honest confession finally overturned.
In 1930 Belle da Costa Greene, the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, examined a panel painting being offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a fifteenth-century Spanish work by the painter Jorge Inglés, found it false, and in rejecting it gave its anonymous maker the name by which he is still known: the Spanish Forger. The label was a useful error. The forger was almost certainly not Spanish and not medieval; the evidence points instead to an artist working in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. But the name stuck, and the body of work Greene began to assemble under it grew into one of the largest and most successful forgery oeuvres ever identified — by later estimates several hundred panel paintings and manuscript miniatures, scattered through public and private collections across Europe and America.
The Spanish Forger’s genius was material and psychological at once. He worked almost exclusively on genuine medieval supports — authentic parchment leaves and old wood panels — scraping away original text or paint and painting his own “medieval” scenes onto surfaces that were themselves centuries old. Because an illustrated leaf was worth far more than a plain one, he often “completed” real but unfinished medieval manuscripts, adding miniatures and figures that buyers were delighted to find. The carrier was real, the age of the material was real, and only the image was modern, which defeated the simplest test a buyer might apply.
What he could not fake was chemistry and taste. His pictures carried pigments that did not exist in the Middle Ages: scientific analysis of his works, including neutron activation study of the panel Greene rejected, found colourants such as copper-arsenite greens unavailable before the nineteenth century, and later spectroscopic work identified synthetic ultramarine and other modern compounds. His style betrayed him too. His charming, decorative scenes were full of tells no genuine medieval illuminator would have produced — women with pronounced décolletage, sweetly tilted heads, gold leaf laid over the colours rather than beneath them, and pretty images cheerfully mismatched to the religious texts around them.
Greene’s identification did not end the forger’s afterlife so much as transform it. She and later scholars, above all William Voelkle of the Morgan Library, spent decades cataloguing the oeuvre, which grew from a handful of suspect pieces to well over two hundred and, by recent counts, around three hundred and fifty images. The forger’s true identity has never been established — his nationality, dates, and even gender remain unknown — yet his work is now so recognizable, and so admired as craft, that genuine “Spanish Forgers” are themselves collected and sold as a named category. He is the rare faker exposed so thoroughly that his fakes acquired a market of their own.
In the city of Lübeck in northern Germany, between 1948 and 1951, a restorer named Lothar Malskat was hired to conserve a set of Gothic frescoes that an Allied firebombing had dramatically uncovered in the choir of the Marienkirche, the great brick church of St. Mary. Instead of conserving the medieval paintings, Malskat found that almost nothing survived — the original pigment, he said, “turned to dust when I blew on it” — and so he whitewashed the walls and painted entirely new “thirteenth-century” frescoes of his own invention. When the work was unveiled at the church’s 700th-anniversary celebrations on 2 September 1951, it was hailed as a national treasure. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer attended, and the West German post office issued some two million stamps reproducing the forged saints.
The fraud was exposed not by an expert but by the forger himself. On 9 May 1952, Lothar Malskat walked into a Lübeck police station and announced that the celebrated frescoes were his own modern inventions, painted on the orders of his employer Dietrich Fey, who had taken the credit and the bulk of the money. The confession was so improbable that the authorities did not believe him; a local newspaper dismissed it as “the lamentable case of a painter gone crazy,” and townspeople reportedly suggested he be committed. Only after Malskat had his lawyer formally file criminal charges — against Fey and against himself — in October 1952, backed by photographs documenting his process, did the state investigate.
An expert commission confirmed the obvious. The frescoes were painted freehand on fresh, post-medieval plaster, and they were riddled with impossibilities — most famously a flock of turkeys, a New World bird that no thirteenth-century European could have seen, since turkeys did not reach Europe until after the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century. Malskat had also given his “medieval” figures the faces of his contemporaries, including the film actress Marlene Dietrich, the mystic Rasputin, and his own sister. At a trial that opened on 10 August 1954, both men were convicted: Dietrich Fey received 20 months in prison and Lothar Malskat 18.
The case is a study in how spectacle, civic pride, and the desire for a redemptive postwar miracle can suspend ordinary scrutiny. A bombed nation wanted its medieval glory restored, the “miracle of the Marienkirche” supplied exactly that story, and almost no one looked closely enough at the painted birds — until the man who painted them insisted, against all resistance, on being disbelieved.