The Dutchman Han van Meegeren considered himself a top painter, even though in the art world it is a common belief that you can’t just give yourself the title of master. That is for others to decide – critics and connoisseurs, people with an eye for beauty who can separate the wheat from the chaff with a trained eye. These people agreed that van Meegeren, while technically excellent, would never achieve the greatness of a van Gogh or a Rembrandt. Moreover, he was not in touch with the times in which he lived. While the world was marvelling at Picasso’s cubist experiments, he was painting scenes from the Bible. In other words, van Meegeren was a craftsman and an imitator, nothing more than that. But because he was an ambitious and resentful man, the criticism only fuelled him further.
“Revenge does not fade. He who is patient wins in the end”, we can read in his notebook. And indeed, he buried himself in his work and within a few years his paintings were hanging in the world’s best galleries. At that time, he was probably the richest painter in the world. His paintings were selling for several times the price of Picasso’s, but still nobody knew about him. Van Meegeren had become a forger.
The paintings that made him millions bore the signature of Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch master and one of the most revered painters of all time. The forger’s thinking went something like this: if I can’t win the favour of self-proclaimed art connoisseurs, I can at least make them laugh. His plan largely succeeded, as he dragged them along for years, but he ran out of luck before his final triumph.
He planted one of his forgeries on the Nazi leader Hermann Georg, another self-proclaimed art connoisseur, and as the Third Reich crumbled into dust, the truth about the colossal deception came out.
A portraitist with big ambitions
Henricus Antonius van Meegeren was born in 1889 into a middle-class Catholic family in the east of the country. Ever since he knew himself, Han, as his friends called him, wanted to be a painter, but his strict father had no taste for art and sent him to Delft to study architecture.
Ironically, this city, a few kilometres from The Hague, was also the birthplace of Johann Vermeer, the great master whom Han later emulated so successfully. At the time, he had other things on his mind, but he was not yet thinking about life beyond marriage. He wanted to marry and make a name for himself in the world of painting. His relationship with his father had finally fractured, as Han’s wife was of the Protestant faith and his greatest love was still art.
While the Great War raged around the world, life in The Hague, where the van Meegeren family had moved, was relaxed and lively, as the Netherlands managed to remain neutral with few difficulties. The young Han, who of course never completed his architectural studies, finally turned to painting in the Dutch royal capital.
Very soon, he managed to break into Hague high society and began to receive commissions from lawyers, merchants and politicians who wanted to decorate their homes with his portrait. Within a few years, he became the most sought-after portraitist in the city and a regular guest at the parties of the local notables. His professional and social life flourished, but on the private front he had his share of problems. He had nothing in common with his wife Anna apart from their three children, and their marriage slowly drifted towards the abyss. Han’s other two great loves – women and alcohol – must have played a role in the middle.
He earned a fair bit of money from portraiture, but his ambitions went beyond painting grey-haired, serious-faced men. He had always been fascinated by Rembrandt, Vermeer and other classics from the golden age of Dutch painting, who were able to bring images from everyday life to the canvas with such subtlety that they became part of the treasure trove of world art. Like every young painter, Han wished that one day his name would be mentioned in the same breath as the masters.
Without a voice
Over the years, he transformed himself from a portraitist into a very decent painter. He became a member of the prestigious Hague Art Society and had several solo exhibitions. Critics also spoke of him exclusively in choice words. In 1921, he painted The Doe, a simple but elegant depiction of the Dutch princess Juliana, a domestic favourite, and for a few years it hung in almost every house in the Land of Tulips. Just as tapestries used to hang in our country and calendars still hang today. Forgeries aside, it was by far the most successful work he signed his name to.
Van Meegeren was for a time a thoroughly respectable and financially above-average painter. Not exactly a master, but a master nonetheless. The doe brought him a hefty pile of guilders, but it could be said that it did not satisfy his need for artistic satisfaction. And when he tried his hand at “serious” art a few years later, he had a sobering experience that finally led him astray.
It was all the fault of an exhibition in The Hague, where he presented a series of paintings inspired by motifs from the Old and New Testaments. This was van Meegeren’s attempt to transcend his reputation as a portraitist of Hague merchants and a painter of pets. The plan did not work out. While critics continued to praise his sophisticated technique and sense of composition, they questioned his creativity and expressive power. His painting of Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem was straight out of a painting textbook, but at a time when Picasso had long since become famous for his asymmetrical images, classical textbooks were outdated.
Van Meegeren could have continued to create portraits and depict scenes from the Bible, he had more than enough knowledge to do so, but critics accused him of simply having nothing to say to the world. He argued that his three-year-old son could do a much better job than Picasso, and of course he disagreed with the critics and began to plot his revenge. He founded a magazine in which he attacked contemporary art. Contemporary artists were all, in their turn, “artistic Bolsheviks, haters of women and lovers of black people”.
He also took on the Jews, who dominate the entire world art trade. He was not a Nazi, because he was never interested in politics, but it is true that he shamelessly did business with the regime that occupied his homeland a few years later, and it was not long before he ended up in prison after the war for it. But that was a long way off, and van Meegeren turned all his energies to revenge.
His piece of the pie
It was no coincidence that he chose to forge his work, as it was a way of proving his mastery as a painter and making his critics laugh. On the other hand, the crime also brought not inconsiderable material benefits. Van Meegeren loved the freedom that money brings. He enjoyed travel and good restaurants, but even more so alcohol and female company. When it came to drink, he swore by only the finest gin, and was not particularly picky about women. He liked prostitutes of all kinds – from travellers who charged a guilder an hour to elite escorts.
When he was approaching 40, he divorced his first wife Anne and married Johanna De Boer, an actress, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. Their relationship was strong and loving, despite the fact that Han was an unrepentant womaniser and a heavy drinker.
His first steps into the world of crime were cautious and deliberate. He learned his trade from Theo Wijngaarden, a Hague crook who started his career as a painter and slowly worked his way up to art dealer. In this case, the art was fake.
Their business plan was very simple. They were forging 17th- or 18th-century Dutch masters who were not exactly famous, but not entirely unknown either. Famous enough that someone was willing to pay for them, and unknown enough that there were not many art historians who were aware of them and, as a result, questioned their authenticity.
Wijngaarden was an excellent restorer and could age any painting by a few years. In addition, he had many acquaintances in the world of painting, both in official circles and in the underworld. His pupil absorbed the knowledge diligently and soon surpassed his teacher and struck out on his own.
As long as there has been painting, there have been forgers. Van Meegeren was only fortunate to have lived in a period when, for the first time in history, forgery was a highly profitable activity. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, paintings were still largely just decoration, a piece of furniture. As a result, the trade in them did not make much money either. Later, when art criticism and art history emerged, some paintings became art. Suddenly, the art trade also became a very lucrative business, where art lovers, professional critics and speculators of all kinds met.
After the First World War, there were already many galleries, museums and other institutions in Europe and the USA that were, in one way or another, making money out of the fine arts. The trade in paintings was then, as now, big business, and van Meegeren wanted a piece of the pie.
The Old Masters
As a forgery apprentice, he sold forgeries to small fish for a few thousand euros, but the world of high art required much more effort and creativity. The ambitious van Meegeren had a very ambitious plan. He needed a very rich buyer, a masterpiece like the world had never seen before and a convincing story of its origin. In addition, it should not be forgotten that every work of art by a famous artist has to pass the test of authentication. The business plan was much more complicated this time.
Van Meegeren decided to forge a painting by Johann Vermeer, one of the greatest Dutch masters who worked in the 17th century. Today, there are only 36 paintings bearing his signature in the world. In 2004, one of them was sold for €30 million and his most famous work, Girl with a Pearl Earring, is now worthless, like Guernica or the Mona Lisa. In 2006, the Dutch voted it the most beautiful painting in the country in a poll. As a point of interest, it was sold in 1881 for two guilders and thirty cents, which would have bought at most a poster of it in the souvenir shop of the Hague Museum, where it is on display today.
Van Meegeren’s decision to reproduce this particular Vermeer was well thought out. At that time, in the 1930s, Vermeer was the most famous Dutch painter, alongside van Gogh and Rembrandt. His paintings, which were even fewer then than today, fetched millions. Moreover, the Baroque master died a poor man, with no imitators and no patrons, and no one knew exactly how many paintings he had produced and how he had lived. This was grist for the mill of the forger, who intended to turn these biographical holes to his own advantage.
In 1931, the news broke to the European art public that a new Vermeer masterpiece had miraculously appeared. It had been bought for a small sum of money in a gallery warehouse by Dr Abraham Bredius, the undisputed authority on Dutch art. The painting was authentic and is now worth several million euros. It was a magnificent discovery, and at the time there seemed to be no reason why the new Vermeer should not miraculously appear elsewhere. And that, too, was water for the forger’s mill.
Alchemist, scientist and baker
The most challenging part of the project, the making of the painting, took van Meegeren almost six years. He had to create a work of art that was reminiscent of Vermeer in style and that looked in every way as if it had been created in the 17th century. He was good at imitating the style of the great master, but the technical side of the project was a much tougher nut to crack.
The materials and techniques used by 17th-century painters have been completely forgotten in the 20th century. Before the invention of tube paints, studios were like alchemists’ laboratories. Each paint had its own way of being stored, and behind each one was a long and meticulous manufacturing process. In Vermeer’s time, for example, black paint was made by crushing the charred pits of a specific variety of peach. His trademark deep blue, or ultramarine, was extracted in those days from a rare stone of the same name that was mined only in Afghanistan. The forger dug into old books and dissected the Baroque master’s technique with the precision of a scientist.
Once he had found the right formula, he faced an even higher hurdle – how to age the painting by three hundred years. It should be remembered that the structure of oil paints changes and hardens a great deal over the centuries. If a few drops of alcohol were poured on a freshly painted oil painting, the paint would smear instantly – this is also the first test that any restorer would do when checking authenticity – but old paint would be unaffected by alcohol, because over the years the paint hardens so much that it forms a special layer on the canvas that repels the liquid. This is a natural chemical process that takes place over decades, but van Meegeren didn’t have that much time.
Modern science came to his rescue. He used Bakelite, a man-made substance invented in 1907 that becomes solid and smooth after heat treatment. The forger then turned into – baker. He bought a huge furnace and heated the paintings in it, which he had previously coated with a transparent layer of Bakelite. It took him countless experiments to find out how long and at what temperature he had to bake his works of art before he could serve them to his victim.
Custom-made artwork
Once he had mastered the ageing technique, he had to tackle the content. He decided to paint the scene from the Bible when the resurrected Jesus appeared to his disciples on the road to the village of Emavs. Although Vermeer was known for painting scenes from everyday life, art historians have suggested that he also had a “Bible phase”, as he was said to have travelled around Italy studying Renaissance artworks with religious themes. They were convinced that there was a biblical Vermeer hiding in a dusty cellar. It would not be the first time, and it was only a matter of time before someone discovered it. The forger served historians exactly what they wanted.
Van Meegeren had created a masterpiece and all he had to do was find a rich buyer and weave a convincing story. Since the counterfeiter is not allowed to step out of anonymity, the dirty work is done for him by intermediaries – speculators who know the world of counterfeiting, or suckers who fall for it. This time, van Meegeren has turned to the latter.
He persuaded Gerard Boon, a friend from his Hague days and a politician with an immaculate reputation, that he had stumbled upon the very real Vermeer by chance. He explained that he had been entrusted with it by a rich and mysterious Dutch woman who had lived in Italy for decades. She had asked him to sell the painting somewhere in Europe on her behalf, as it would otherwise have been confiscated by the fascist authorities.
Boon, who also happened to be the most ardent anti-fascist in the Netherlands, was willing to help in exchange for a small commission. The story was tailor-made for a naive politician, just as the Vermeer of the Bible was tailor-made for art critics. And that was the forger’s next step.
Van Meegeren advised the politician-agent to hand the painting over for examination to the greatest expert on Dutch Golden Age painters, the aforementioned Dr Abraham Bredius, who had miraculously discovered the new Vermeer a few years earlier. In art circles, he was called “the Pope” because his word was law and the sky was blue above him.
When he got his hands on van Meegeren’s forgery, the eighty-three-year-old Bredius burst into tears. He was looking at the very real Vermeer. What’s more, it was Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece! He immediately wrote an article about the miraculous discovery and within weeks all Europe was talking about the Vermeer of the Bible.
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The human factor
The artwork was then thoroughly examined and all the experts agreed that it was an authentic Vermeer. Almost all of them. A few pointed out that it was a fake, but European art circles were already in love with the Vermeer of the Bible at that time. When modern scholars analysed it many years later, they could not help wondering how naive their predecessors had been. Van Meegeren may have produced a very solid forgery, but anyone who gives a damn in the art world should have noticed that this is not an authentic Vermeer. In fact, it is much more complicated than that.
Even today, when science has advanced to such an extent that it seems impossible for anyone to pass off a forgery to a serious expert, it happens with surprising frequency. In 2000, two of the world’s most respected auction houses – large companies employing armies of chemists, restorers and critics – sold an identical Gauguin painting separately.
Each auction house claimed to be in possession of the original, but one of them had apparently fallen into the forger’s trap. This is because, in addition to technical analysis, the expert opinion of art historians, who know best about a particular artist and the period in which he worked, carries a great deal of weight in determining authenticity. When it comes to objective analysis, however, human beings are much less reliable than laboratory tests. If it is “art”, even more so.
The same fate befell the biblical Vermeer. When Pope Bredius gave his blessing, the faithful blindly believed him. The credit for this goes to van Meegeren, who knew very well what the European artistic community believed and offered it to them – a bespoke work of art that confirmed their assumptions and at the same time exceeded all their aesthetic expectations.
The Biblical Vermeer was such a sensation that the biggest collectors in Europe and the world began to clamour for it. However, as it was part of the Dutch cultural treasure trove, the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam ended up raising the most money. Jesus in Emaves was sold for around €5 million.
(In)complete satisfaction
In June 1938, a major retrospective of Dutch painting was held at the Boijmans, and it was the biblical Vermeer who took centre stage. Its author later recounted that he attended the opening ceremony, mingled among the visitors and enjoyed the sighs of admiration for his art. At that moment, he had achieved his goal – he had made the entire Dutch art scene laugh and pocketed a hefty pile of guilders. He could have publicly shamed his critics and beaten his chest, but he remained silent. Van Meegeren may have been a resentful and self-important man, but he clearly preferred money to fame. His counterfeiting career was only just beginning.
He and his wife, Johanna, used their hard-earned money to buy a villa on the Côte d’Azur, taking refuge from the sour Dutch weather. They were so rich that they were even able to decorate their home with some authentic Baroque masterpieces. Van Meegeren produced six more Vermeer Bibles in the following years, all of them of much inferior quality, but this did not raise any eyebrows among collectors and scholars.
Indeed, his first Vermeer became the yardstick by which all those that miraculously appeared after him were judged. Each new work of art was compared to Jesus in Emaves, and in this way van Meegeren was compared to van Meegeren. Sales, this time to intermediaries, flourished and within a few years he was earning tens of millions of euros. Picasso could only have dreamed of this at the time.
The idyllic life of the van Meegeren couple was interrupted by the approach of the Second World War. When Hitler began to look westwards after the annexation of Poland, they took refuge in their homeland, thinking that the Netherlands would once again be able to avoid the worst, but the declaration of neutrality did not help. On 14 May 1940, Rotterdam was razed to the ground by the Luftwaffe and the next day the Netherlands was on its knees. The government and the royal family fled to London, and power passed to the Nazis.
German art lovers
The German occupation regime in the Netherlands was much milder than, for example, that in Poland, but the local population was still not very sympathetic to the new authorities. “The Dutch are the most rude and disobedient people in the West, everybody knows that”, Goebbels wrote in 1942.
As the war spread to other parts of Europe, the living conditions of the native population began to deteriorate dramatically. The Dutch were forced to go in large numbers to forced labour in Germany, which was depleting the land of the tulips as a war colony. The Jews bore the brunt of it. During the five years of occupation, the Nazis killed more than 100 000 of them, three quarters of the entire Dutch Jewish community.
With the occupation came deprivation, insecurity and chaos, fertile ground for speculators who know how to adapt to the new rules of the game. Van Meegeren’s business flourished during this time. In a way, it was even easier for him, because during the war nobody had time for lengthy laboratory analyses and expert opinions. But the art trade never died out. There were even new rich buyers – the Nazis.
Both Hitler and Goering, the regime’s second man, were great art lovers. They had similar tastes to van Meegeren and a similar contempt for modern art, which symbolised the moral decay of Western society, and they swore by – the classics. Hitler had already secured two Vermeers, because he saw something “German” in him, but Goering was still waiting for his.
The Nazis were not exactly ordinary buyers. When it came to Jewish-owned works of art, they were mere thieves. But they were more lenient with other owners and always offered to pay. The owner did not always have the option of refusing the offer and the price was often set by the buyers, but these were the new rules of the game. It is therefore not surprising that owners hid their paintings in attics and smuggled them abroad. The demand for works of art was therefore filled by forgers.
A bargain with the devil
Van Meegeren was already obscenely rich. He owned more than fifty houses, apartments and nightclubs in the best districts of Amsterdam. He lived in a palace so big that he had an ice-skating rink built in it. The prostitutes of Amsterdam adored him because he was a generous customer and, on top of that, a nice man. He put a large jewellery box in the corridor so that they could serve themselves with a necklace or two when they finished work.
His parties were reminiscent of Roman bacchanalia. Considering that he was a syphilitic and a heavy drinker, it was a miracle that he was even alive. Life was fun and relaxed in spite of everything. Until, at the end of 1943, he gave one of his Vermeers to Hermann Goering.
The forger was rather unlucky in the whole affair. The dealer he hired this time turned out to be a charlatan of the worst kind. When he contacted Goering’s broker, he told him in plain language in whose name he was selling the artwork. The owner, he claimed, was a wealthy widow who wished to remain anonymous, but her agent was Mr Han van Meegeren, who lived at 321 Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. This was very bad news for the gentleman in question, as his name was known only to his close friends and to all the prostitutes in Amsterdam.
Shortly afterwards, a letter arrived from Berlin, which also contained good news. Goering had fallen in love with Vermeer and had already exhibited it at Carinhall, his residence near Berlin, where he had collected looted art from all over Europe. He was ready to buy it, but he had two conditions: he demanded the identity of the owner of the artwork and a lower price, ten million euros seemed considerably too much.
It was no coincidence that Goering was interested in the painting’s provenance. In the spirit of German precision, every transaction, even if carried out under duress, had to be catalogued, every administrative procedure, even if inhumane, recorded. Just as the names of the people who ended up in the gas chambers were recorded, each confiscated painting was given a serial number and a place in a catalogue in which its provenance was described in detail.
Van Meegeren was forced to compromise: he would reveal the identity of the owner within two years and accept 137 paintings from Goering’s personal collection instead of the money. Given that the Nazi Field Marshal was one of the major art collectors in Europe and that he could have easily confiscated the Vermeer, the forger took it well. He wanted to forget the unpleasant episode as soon as possible, but it was not long before his bargain with the devil was his revenge.
The worst accusation
He was aware that he was playing a dangerous game. Germany was losing the war and it was only a matter of time before it was all over. The Dutch would then have no sympathy for people who made million-dollar deals with the occupiers while their fellow citizens starved.
When Germany capitulated, van Meegeren saw for himself that the collaborators were doing badly. From the window of his villa, he watched women who had got too close to the Germans having their heads shaved in the middle of the street by frantic mobs, and men who had worked for the occupiers being beaten and spat in the face. He also saw children who had to march through the city with a poster around their necks that said: “My mummy and daddy are traitors to the Fatherland”. Chaos and uncertainty were not on his side this time.
“Goering Gave a Million-Dollar Vermeer to a Patient” was the headline of an article in the New York Times on 22 May 1945. In reality, it was Goering’s wife Emmy’s secretary, but this was not the only inaccuracy the respected newspaper indulged in. A special US Army unit tasked with searching for confiscated Nazi art came across the Vermeer in a castle near Salzburg, where Goering was hiding at the end of the war.
The American soldiers learned from the secretary that her boss had given her the painting a few weeks earlier and told her that it would “provide for her for life”. At the time, no one, not even the New York Times, knew it was a fake. The artwork, which the Nazis hastily removed from its frame and wrapped around a water pipe, was accompanied by documentation, including the artwork’s provenance. The American soldiers examined the painting with German precision, catalogued all the relevant information and summoned their colleagues in liberated Amsterdam.
Just a few days later, the military police knocked on the door of the villa at 321 Keizersgracht. Han van Meegeren was accused of war profiteering and collaboration with the occupier. He had sold Dutch cultural heritage to the Germans. At the time, before being thrown into prison, the speculators were tied to street lamps and stoned for days.
Van Meegeren had only one chance to save his skin – he had to tell the truth. Better a forger than a collaborator, he thought. Two weeks later, he confessed that he had painted Goering’s Vermeer. Not only that, he had also painted Jesus in Emaves, one of the most popular paintings in the country, and five other Vermeers.
The Last Deception
The case was then taken up by the civil prosecutor’s office and an investigation was launched. That an anonymous man could paint such a work of art seemed impossible. This was confirmed by a team of experts from Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, where Jesus in Emaves was kept. A re-analysis of the painting showed that it was an authentic Vermeer and that it would be worth checking whether the accused might be suffering from a mental illness.
But the accused had another ace up his sleeve. He claimed that he could prove his innocence without any problems, all he needed was a canvas, paints and a brush. Well, yes, he needed lots of expensive paints, books on painting, brushes made of badger hair and much more. The court granted the request and Van Meegeren, after twenty years of anonymity, had the opportunity to show his talent in public.
For five months he was confined to his studio, where he painted his last Vermeer in front of forensic experts, police officers and journalists. In December 1945, he finished and the Dutch cultural heritage was enriched by Young Jesus in the Temple. The painting was convincing enough for the prosecution to drop the charge of collaboration. Van Meegeren was relieved, he would only have to defend himself for forgery.
At the trial, which began in October 1947, the experts had the first word. This time they concluded that the Jesus of Emaves was a forgery, and a bad one. This was obvious, as they found traces of bakelite, inconsistencies in the painting technique and cracks uncharacteristic of a 17th century work. Interestingly, there were experts among them who had argued the opposite at the first trial.
Then came the other witnesses, the dealers, the speculators, the collectors and everyone else. There was no longer any doubt that van Meegeren was a forger. The only question was what punishment he would receive. He was the last one to appear before the judge.
He said that he had not become a forger for money. He had never been interested in money, he had been interested in art. When critics attacked him, he felt insulted and just wanted to prove himself. Van Meegeren suddenly became a victim.
The trial was widely reported in the Dutch and world media. In the post-war depression, where every positive story was greeted with enthusiasm, Van Meegeren became a real star, a national hero who had scorned the hated Goering. In one poll, he was even voted the second most popular Dutchman, after the Prime Minister and ahead of the King. He was the little man who beat the system. That was his last great deception.
He was sentenced to a year in prison, but died shortly before he was due to begin serving his sentence, on 30 December 1947. All his assets were then seized by the state and auctioned off, with the money from the sale being shared by the forger’s victims. Some of the defrauded had given up the money, unable to accept that they owned a fake. They commissioned new analyses and expert opinions – until their van Meegeren turned into a Vermeer.
