Van Meegeren's Vermeer Forgeries
The forger who fooled the Nazis — and confessed to save himself
Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Han van Meegeren painted 'lost' Vermeers so convincing that they entered major collections — and one reached Hermann Göring. Accused of selling a national treasure to the enemy, he confessed to the greater crime of forgery.
Embittered by critics who dismissed his own work, van Meegeren set out to prove his genius by deceiving them. He studied Vermeer's technique obsessively, sourced seventeenth-century canvases, ground his own pigments, and baked his paintings to simulate the craquelure of age.
His masterstroke, Christ at Emmaus, was hailed in 1937 as a rediscovered Vermeer and acquired for a Rotterdam museum to universal acclaim. Over the following decade his fakes earned him a fortune.
After the war, Allied investigators traced a 'Vermeer' in Göring's collection back to van Meegeren, who was arrested for collaboration — a capital offense. To escape the charge, he made the extraordinary claim that the painting was his own forgery. Disbelieved, he was made to paint a new 'Vermeer' under guard to prove it.
The case is a founding parable of authentication: it revealed how connoisseurship can be led by expectation, and how the desire to discover a masterpiece can blind even the expert eye.