Han van Meegeren

 

Han van Meegeren was one of the most ingenious art forgers of his time, amassing a fortune for himself of around forty million dollars by the end of his career. He spent years developing techniques to produce perfect forgeries of Dutch masters such as Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Frans Hals, and was also a talented painter in his own right, as well as a skilled art restorer. His forgeries were so accurate that they would, most likely, never have been discovered as such until years after his death. However, during the occupation of Holland by the Germans in World War II, he sold one of his paintings to a leading member of the Nazi government, Hermann Goring. To begin with, nobody believed van Meegeren’s story, but he went on to prove his case, whereupon he was hailed as a national hero.

 

Ridiculed artist

 

He was born Henricus Antonius van Meegeren in Deventer, Holland, in 1899. The third child in the family, he was brought up a Roman Catholic. He developed an interest in art, but his father did not approve and sent him to study architecture at university. However, van Meegeren rebelled against his father and decided to do his own thing and become a painter. He developed a passion for the style of the Dutch Golden Age painters of the seventeenth century, so much so that they inspired his own works. Instead of painting in a contemporary style, he made reference to the historical paintings of the Golden Age, using the same rich colours and complex perspectives, but these did not go down well with the art critics of the day, who complained that his work was derivative and old-fashioned. In some instances, he was even ridiculed for his classic style. This meant that he could not pursue his career as an original artist, as no one would buy his pictures.

 

Plan of revenge

 

Stung by the critics’ panning of his work, van Meegeren plotted his revenge. He would paint a picture in the style of a Dutch master, present it to a gallery and then wait for the art critics of the day to praise it to the skies. He would then make it known that the painting was a fake, so that the critics would be revealed as stupid, ignorant and easily led. To confound them, he painted a beautiful Vermeer, using his by now well-honed skills as a painter of the period. It was entitled Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus and was a careful copying of Vermeer’s style, down to the type of canvases, brushes, paints and glazes used in the seventeenth century. He made sure to give the painting the appearance of extreme age, baking the glaze so that the painting looked old and grubby.

Van Meegeren claimed that the painting was an unknown, early work by Vermeer, and it caused great excitement when it was first shown. In the absence of scientific dating techniques, to accurately measure the age of a painting, such as are available today, the critics declared the painting genuine. To van Meegeren’s delight, one of the critics was Abraham Bredius, whose reviews of van Meegeren’s work had been scathing. Van Meegeren had the pleasure of standing with a large crowd in front of the painting, and hearing Bredius praise it to the skies, declaring that it was Vermeer’s ‘masterpiece’.

Van Meegeren came up with a plausible story as to how he had acquired the painting, telling potential buyers that it had come from an aristocratic Italian family who had lost their money and needed funds, but they did not want it to be known who they were. Eventually, the painting was bought by the Boymans Museum of Rotterdam for the sum of two and a half million dollars.

 

Large fortune

 

Van Meegeren had painted Christ at Emmaus to show up his critics rather than to make a fortune. However, his success in fooling the art world was such that he now realised he could make huge sums of money by continuing his career as a forger. Beginning with Christ at Emmaus, which fetched a huge sum, over the next few years he began a series of forgeries, including works by Pieter de Hooch, Frans Hals and – of course – Vermeer.

So accurate were they that nothing was suspected for years, and van Meegeren was able to amass a large fortune from the proceeds of the paintings. He was helped by the fact that the World War II broke out, causing a certain amount of chaos and bringing into being a busy black market trade in all kinds of valuable goods, including old masters, as currencies declined in value. One of his paintings became the most expensive ever sold in the world at the time, fetching over a million Dutch guilders.

Van Meegeren was now a very rich man, and he proceeded to spend his money with great abandon, developing a taste for the high life. Soon, he became renowned for his drink and drug-fuelled excesses. It became clear, however, that his wealth had not brought him happiness in his personal life. Commentators have suggested that the reason for this lay in the fact that he had never been taken seriously as an original artist, even though he was a highly skilled painter, and that despite his wealth, this lack of recognition continued to rankle with him.

 

Nazi collector

 

Van Meegeren went on painting Vermeers, producing six more after the ‘Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus’. In 1943, he sold the last one, entitled ‘Christ and the Adultress’ to Hermann Goring, one of the most prominent members of the Nazi regime. At the time, the Nazis were occupying Holland. At the end of the war, the Dutch authorities began the work of restoring the art works that the Nazis had plundered from the country, and the Vermeer was found in Goring’s collection. It came to light that the Vermeer had been sold to him by van Meegeren, so the authorities contacted van Meegeren to find out more. He was arrested and charged with collaboration, which was a serious crime at the time, amounting to treason and carrying with it the death penalty.

Because of the situation van Meegeren found himself in, he was forced to confess the fact that the painting was a forgery executed by him, and not a Vermeer at all. To begin with, the authorities did not believe him, but while in prison, van Meegeren conceived a plan to convince them that this was the truth.

 

The sad demise

 

He asked for his art materials to be brought to him and proceeded to paint a picture under surveillance by his jailers. To everyone’s amazement, he produced a painting that looked exactly like the work of Vermeer, entitling it ‘Jesus among the Doctors’. It was clear that van Meegeren had the skills to produce an extremely persuasive forgery, and one that would fool even the most highly regarded art expert. As a result, the authorities changed the charge against him, from treason to forgery.

The fact that he had not been let off the charges infuriated van Meegeren, and he refused to finish off the painting by glazing it and rubbing dirt into the glaze to give it the appearance of age. Even so, he was brought to trial and convicted, receiving a prison sentence of one year. The trial attracted massive press attention, and van Meegeren emerged as something of a national hero. The public warmed to the forger as the man who had cheated the hated Nazi figure Hermann Goring, although it later transpired that Goring had paid for the fake painting with fake currency!

Sadly, however, van Meegeren was by this time a sick man, and in no position to enjoy his new-found fame and popularity. His abuse of drink and drugs had taken its toll on his health, and instead of serving out his sentence, he was sent to hospital. He died there on December 30, 1947.

After his death, his works sparked a debate in the art world about the status of forgeries. Commentators such as Arthur Koestler argued that if a copy or forgery is so good that it fools even the experts and delights visitors at museums and galleries where it is shown, there is no real basis to reject it. However, others have pointed out that, sooner or later, it becomes clear that forgeries are not the real thing, however good they are: in van Meegeren’s case, his Vermeer paintings now look like artefacts from the 1930s and 1940s, with elements of film noir in the way the faces are lit, rather than originals from the seventeenth century.