Han van Meegeren — the forger who out-painted Vermeer to escape a traitor’s death

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.