The Art Forger Who Became a National Hero

Han van Meegeren was a talented Dutch painter whose bitterness at critics and reverence for the Dutch Golden Age drove him to become a master forger. Trained partly by a mentor who deconstructed Vermeer’s methods, he set out in the 1930s to prove he could not only imitate but surpass critics’ expectations by producing plausible “lost” Vermeers. Over years of study he bought genuine 17th-century canvases, mixed pigments from raw materials, made badger-hair brushes, and developed an aging regimen - adding phenol formaldehyde and melted plastic to paints, baking works at roughly 212-248 °F, mechanically crackling them, and washing them with India ink - to simulate centuries of wear. He deliberately varied subject matter to avoid exact copy detection and exploited contemporary assumptions that many Vermeers remained missing.

With a shady restorer, Theo van Wijngaarden, he entered the market and sold forgeries through intermediaries to eager collectors and experts. His 1937 Supper at Emmaus, passed to Gerald Boon and championed by famed Vermeer expert Abraham Bredius in Burlington Magazine, ignited bidding and prestige. Van Meegeren’s fakes ultimately fetched vast sums and even entered Nazi collections; after World War II one supposed Vermeer sold to Hermann Göring led to a treason trial. Forced to demonstrate his technique under official observation, he produced a forgery in court - an act that transformed him from accused collaborator into a controversial national celebrity.