The Forger Who Fooled the Nazis: Han van Meegeren

After the Second World War, an Allied art commission set out to identify the works collected by Nazi leaders and return them to their owners. Among Göring's paintings was a puzzle: Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, a “Vermeer” nobody had ever heard of.¹

The trail led to Han van Meegeren, an eccentric and wealthy Amsterdam painter, born in Deventer in 1889.¹

Collaboration with the enemy was a very serious charge. Facing it, Van Meegeren confessed to a lesser crime: he had forged the “Vermeer,” and others too.¹

Nobody believed him at first. So, to prove it, he painted another “Vermeer” while the authorities watched, using the same materials and techniques.¹ The man accused of selling Dutch heritage to Göring had, in fact, sold him a fake.

Van Meegeren felt that critics had never given his own talent its due. His original plan, he said, was to reveal that he was the author of the forgeries once the critics had praised them.¹

In all, fourteen forgeries of Vermeer and of another Delft master, Pieter de Hooch, are known.¹

Look at these two genuine Vermeers: the soft light from the left, the cool blues and yellows, the stillness. A new Vermeer was a sensation: scholars proclaimed The Supper at Emmaus a masterpiece.¹

Van Meegeren did not copy existing pictures. Works like The Supper at Emmaus and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery were new compositions, presented as lost Vermeers.¹ Part of the trick was giving the experts exactly what they hoped to discover.