Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter who forged Vermeers so well that the leading experts of his day accepted them as genuine. In 1943 one of them was sold to Hermann Goering for 1.65 million guilders. After the war, Van Meegeren was accused of collaborating with the enemy, and he saved himself by admitting that he had painted the picture.
He was born in Deventer in 1889 and spent the 1920s as a portrait painter in The Hague, where the critics never warmed to his work.
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The Nazis were not the first to be fooled. By the time Goering paid, the painting that made Van Meegeren's name had already hung in a Dutch museum for years as a Vermeer, backed by the most respected name in the field.
Van Meegeren turned to forgery, as Paul Maliszewski wrote in the Wilson Quarterly, for fast profits and out of frustration with his contemporaries. For years it paid.
The sale to Goering came later. It put Van Meegeren in a cell, and the way out he found was to plead guilty to a different crime, a confession that almost no one believed at first.
Who vouched for the first fake?
Abraham Bredius, the foremost expert on Dutch painting of his day, examined Van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus in 1937 and wrote about it in the Burlington Magazine…
What You'll Discover
What the experts hoped to find.
How an inventory led to him.
The last Vermeer, painted under watch.
What the lab found in the blue.