Painter Fooled World's Top Experts

Amsterdam, 1945. The war in Europe has just ended, and a small, neatly dressed painter sits in a cell facing the worst accusation his country can throw at a man. The charge is collaboration. The punishment on the table is death.

The police believe Han van Meegeren sold a priceless painting by Johannes Vermeer — a treasure of Dutch culture — straight into the hands of Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Paintings do not get more valuable than a lost Vermeer. Men do not get more guilty than the one who sold it to the enemy.

Then the prisoner says the one thing nobody in the room expects.

The painting was never a Vermeer at all. He painted it himself, in his own studio, a few years earlier. And it was not the only one.

First, the charge against him

When the Second World War ended, an Allied commission began the huge job of sorting through the art collections the Nazi leaders had gathered and returning stolen works to their owners. Inside Göring’s collection, the investigators found something astonishing: a large religious painting, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, believed to be a previously unknown work by Vermeer, the Dutch master of the 1600s.

Vermeer left behind only a tiny number of paintings — around three dozen are known today. A brand-new one surfacing after nearly three centuries was the kind of discovery that makes headlines. The commission traced the sale backwards, and the trail ended at the door of a wealthy, eccentric Amsterdam painter: Han van Meegeren.

He was arrested in 1945. Selling Dutch cultural heritage to the occupying enemy was treated as treason, and treason could be punished with death. On paper, the case looked simple. In reality, it was about to become the strangest art trial of the century.

The artist the critics threw away

To understand the confession, you first have to understand the grudge.

Van Meegeren was born in Deventer in 1889 and trained as an artist in Delft and The Hague. He loved the Dutch Golden Age — the era of Vermeer and Rembrandt — and he painted in that old style at a time when the art world had moved on. His early exhibitions received some kind reviews, and one drawing, of Princess Juliana’s pet deer, became genuinely popular. But as the years passed, critics turned on him. His work was described as out of date, tired, and merely imitative of the old masters.

He never forgave that. In his own account, the critics had crushed his career while praising painters he considered no better than himself. According to Britannica, his original plan was almost theatrical: he would forge paintings so perfect that the experts would celebrate them, and only then — at the moment of their greatest praise — would he step forward and reveal that the genius they were applauding was the very man they had dismissed.

Revenge came first. The money, as it turned out, came second, and there was a great deal of it.

Paint, plastic and a hot oven

A forgery has one brutal problem to solve: time. A painting by Vermeer should be about 300 years old, and age changes paint. Old oil paint becomes rock hard over decades. A freshly painted canvas fails the simplest checks of the era — experts would swab the surface with alcohol and test it with a heated needle, and soft, young paint would give itself away at once.

Van Meegeren spent years experimenting. As Edward Dolnick recounts in his book The Forger’s Spell, the painter bought an oven and tried mixture after mixture; paints burned, melted, or lost their colour. The breakthrough was a modern material hiding in plain sight: Bakelite, an early form of plastic. Dissolved into his pigments, the resin let the paint survive the oven and harden the way centuries-old paint should. After baking, the surface passed the alcohol and needle tests. Rolled carefully, the hardened paint even cracked into a fine web of lines — the craquelure that old canvases develop with age.

It was chemistry doing the work of three hundred years.

The Vermeer the experts were dreaming of

Technique alone would not have been enough. Van Meegeren’s real genius was choosing what to paint.

Copying a famous, well-known Vermeer would have been suicide; every detail could be compared. Instead, he attacked the empty space in Vermeer’s story. Almost nothing is known about Vermeer’s life, and none of his surviving paintings show the grand religious scenes that other painters of his time produced. Scholars had long wondered whether a young Vermeer might once have painted biblical subjects before turning to the quiet rooms and letter-readers he is famous for.

So van Meegeren simply invented that missing chapter. He painted the early religious Vermeer the experts had always hoped existed — larger, stranger, and more dramatic than any real Vermeer. When the paintings appeared, the experts did not ask the dangerous question. They did something far more helpful to a forger: they treated the strangeness as proof of genius. A canvas unlike any known Vermeer did not make them suspicious. It made them announce that Vermeer had been an even greater, more many-sided artist than anyone had realised.

I think that is the uncomfortable heart of the whole affair: the paint fooled nobody by itself. Van Meegeren studied what the experts longed to believe, and then he handed it to them on a canvas.

A masterpiece is born in 1937

The centrepiece of the deception appeared in 1937: The Supper at Emmaus, showing Christ revealing himself to two disciples after the resurrection. It was shown to Abraham Bredius, the most respected Vermeer scholar of the age — the man whose word could make or break an attribution.

Bredius did not hesitate. He proclaimed the painting a genuine Vermeer, and not just any Vermeer: its masterpiece. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam bought it, and the discovery was celebrated across the art world.

After that triumph, the forgeries flowed. One biblical “Vermeer” followed another, and each new canvas faced an easier test than the last, because it no longer had to resemble a real Vermeer — it only had to resemble the Vermeers van Meegeren had already planted in the accepted list. Britannica counts 14 known forgeries by his hand, in the names of Vermeer and the painter Pieter de Hooch, with nine of them sold before the war at enormous profit. NPR, drawing on Dolnick’s research, puts the money he pocketed at the equivalent of about 30 million dollars.

The buyer who collected stolen art

The most dangerous sale came during the war. In 1942, a Nazi banker and art dealer named Alois Miedl bought van Meegeren’s Christ with the Adulteress — and sold it on to Hermann Göring.

Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, was one of the greediest art collectors alive, and his collection was stuffed with works looted from occupied Europe. For this single “Vermeer” he traded away 137 paintings from that hoard. The fake became one of the jewels of his collection.

It also became the thread that unravelled everything. The Nazi machine was obsessive about paperwork, and the records attached to Göring’s prize painting carried van Meegeren’s name. When investigators followed that paper trail after the war, it led them to a knock on a door in Amsterdam in 1945 — the knock that put the painter in the cell where our story began.

One last painting, under the eyes of guards

A confession is not proof, and at first, many people simply refused to believe him. Parts of the art world kept insisting the paintings were genuine even after he admitted painting them — the alternative was admitting how completely they had been fooled.

So the authorities demanded a demonstration. Under official observation, using the same materials and methods, van Meegeren sat down and painted one final “Vermeer”: Jesus Among the Doctors. There was no trick left to hide behind. The watching officials could see the living painter produce, step by step, the same kind of work that had hung in museums as a 300-year-old masterpiece.

Later science backed him up. When researchers examined one of his fake canvases decades afterwards, they found traces of Bakelite in the paint — the same modern resin found among the materials seized from his studio. A seventeenth-century painter could no more have used plastic than he could have flown an aeroplane.

A guilty verdict that saved his life

In 1947, the Amsterdam court delivered its verdict. The treason charge was gone. In its place stood the lesser crimes he had confessed to: forgery and fraud. The sentence was one year in prison.

He never served it. Within about two months of sentencing, van Meegeren suffered heart attacks and died in Amsterdam on 30 December 1947, aged 58.

The Dutch public, meanwhile, had performed its own strange rewrite of the story. At his trial, van Meegeren presented himself as a patriot who had deliberately swindled the enemy’s greediest collector — and many of his countrymen happily remembered him that way: less a criminal, more a folk hero who had made a fool of Göring.

Strip away the legend, though, and the irony stands on its own. The painter could clear himself of the crime that carried a death sentence only by proving, beyond all doubt, that he was guilty of another one. His talent was real — that was the whole problem. The experts who once called his own paintings worthless had hung his secret work in a great museum and praised it as the finest Vermeer ever found. To save his life, he finally made them say his name out loud.

Questions people ask

Did van Meegeren really paint The Supper at Emmaus himself? Yes. He confessed to it, then proved his ability by painting another work in Vermeer’s style while officials watched. The Rotterdam museum that bought the Emmaus as a Vermeer now presents it for what it is: a van Meegeren forgery, and the subject of a museum film about his fake Vermeers.

Why did nobody spot that the paintings were new? The testing of the time was primitive — mainly the alcohol-and-needle check — and his baked, plastic-hardened paint was designed to defeat exactly that test. Just as important, the paintings matched a theory experts already wanted to be true: that a young Vermeer had painted religious scenes which were later lost.

Was Bredius the only expert fooled? Far from it. Museums bought the paintings, collectors paid fortunes for them, and even after the confession, some specialists continued to argue that the works were genuine. Bredius is remembered because he was the greatest authority of all — his blessing opened every door that followed.

Did Göring ever learn his Vermeer was fake? The painting was recovered from his collection by Allied forces after the war, which is what led investigators to van Meegeren in the first place. The exposure of the forgery became public through the arrest and trial in the Netherlands.