Han van Meegeren, successful Vermeer faker

Dutchman Han van Meegeren (1889-1947) was born in Deventer and developed an early interest in painting. He wasn’t supported in his dream to become an artist by his father, who banned painting as a career. But it didn’t matter - a school teacher-painter encouraged the lad. The teacher loved art from the Dutch Golden Age and probably steered van Meegeren into C17th paintings as well.

Old Mr van Meegeren sent his son to school to become an architect in Delft, but the lad didn’t graduate and moved instead to art school in The Hague in 1913. Van Meegeren exhibited his first set of legitimate paintings in 1917, and they proved to be somewhat old fashioned with the critics. He did not have as much talent as the great artists who had lived in the Golden Age, apparently.

In 1937 the first famous art historian to be fooled by van Meegeren’s Vermeer was the Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius. He examined a large painting of a Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus that was in France and wrote an article in the Burlington Magazine saying "It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great mas­t­er, untouched, on the orig­inal canvas, and without any rest­oration, just as it left the paint­er's studio. We have here the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft".

The painting was larger than anything Vermeer had done, and it had religious subject matter, a genre Vermeer rarely touched. But art historians had speculated that Vermeer might have painted religious themes early in his career, and they were eager to believe it was Vermeer’s work. Vermeer was a good target because he’d produced so few paintings (c33), meaning art hist­orians were constantly seeking previously undiscovered Vermeers.

 

Lady with a Flute
by Han van Meegeren

a la Johann Vermeer

The Witch of Haarlem
by Han van Meegeren 
a la Frans Hals

Many other fakes followed. van Meegeren studied Vermeer (plus Pieter de Hooch and Frans Hals), bought authentic C17th canvasses, and used the original recipes for making his own paints. His biggest problem was trying to make the painting look like it was 300 years old so he experimented with the original paint formulas and baked his paintings in an oven. To avoid burning, van Meegeren found using phenol formaldehyde on a finished painting would make the paint harden. When it was finished baking, he made cracks on the surface to give a sense of legitimate old age.

Then van Meegeren had another problem: the content of the paintings. At first, he painted pictures much like those that Vermeer had painted, but he found that experts looked too closely at them and detected little differences between the real thing and the forgery.

van Meegeren said he did the fakes to revenge himself on the art critics by doing perfect forgeries. Van Meegeren set out to show the world that he was just as good as the Golden Age artists by creating paintings and passing them off as the old artists’ originals. Presumably he also loved the huge amount of money made from the fakes and the luxurious life style this money bought for his family.

Starting with his famous Christ at Emmaus painting, van Meegeren continued to churn out paintings with religious subject matter, and they continued to be snapped up by art patrons. By the time he was found out, he’d made $30 million on his forgeries (c$400 million today).

During WW2, the Nazi leader Hermann Goerring traded dozens paintings for van Meegeren’s forgery of Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery. Goerring was pedantic in his record keeping and at the end of WW2, van Meegeren was arrested for collaborating with the enemy and tried in court. In order to avoid execution, van Meegeren pleaded guilty to the lesser crime of forgery. He claimed responsibility for the painting of the Vermeer that Goerring had bought, along with five other Vermeer paintings and two Pieter de Hooghs.

The incredulous court room had him paint another forgery in front of them to prove it, and when he passed the test, his charges were reduced to forgery. Rather than be angry with van Meegeren, the Dutch public largely lauded him as a patriotric hero. He had, after all, secured many paintings that had been unlawfully seized by Goerring by duping the famous Nazi into thinking he’d purchased a real Vermeer. Even in 2015, when I reviewed his reputation in the Netherlands, people still secretly admired van Meegeren for being so scholarly in his fakes. More than once have I heard that Meegeren’s tour de force was a feat more of intellect than of skill.

 

van Meegeren at his October 1947 trial in Amsterdam
He died two months after this photo was taken.

van Meegeren died of a heart attack soon after the trial ended. Until the end, he believed that post mortum his name would be forgotten, and his paintings would eventually be remembered as true Vermeers. This was not what he wanted AT ALL. Many forgers did prefer anonymity and were therefore rarely remembered. But Han van Meegeren was the exception. He wanted to be remembered as the most serious, most successful modern day art faker in the world.

And there was another accidental result. Art historians, patrons, museum directors and dealers agreed that from then on, all masterworks needed to be evaluated with more scientific rigour. 

A sympathetic book was Van Meegeren's Vermeers - The Connoisseurs Eye And The Forger's Art by Lammertse (Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2011). A less sympathetic book was by Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren  (Mariner Books, 2009). Lopez dated van Meegeren’s initiation into The Hague’s underworld of art swindlers to 1920 when he was mentored by a dealer and painter, Theo van Wijngaarden, who had apprenticed in trickery by a genius: Leo Nardus. Nardus stuck art patrons with old copies, fresh fakes, and misattributions of famous artists. Then a panel of invited experts, including Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry and PAB Widener, defrocked Nardus.

Note that I  did not include photos of van Meegeren's religious paintings in this post  because I did not like them: The Supper at Emmaus (1936), The Last Supper I (1939) and Jesus Among the Doctors (1945).