The Forger Who Fooled the Nazis: Van Meegeren's Fake Vermeers
Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers fooled museums and Hermann Göring. Arrested for treason, he saved himself by confessing they were his.
In May 1945, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested for a crime that could have cost him his life: selling a national treasure, a painting by Johannes Vermeer, to Hermann Göring. His defence was a confession to a different crime. The Vermeer, he told his interrogators, was not a Vermeer at all. He had painted it himself, along with other “discovered” masterpieces museums had bought for millions of guilders.
Van Meegeren (1889–1947) was not copying famous pictures. He was inventing missing ones, and the art world had told him, in advance, what a missing Vermeer should look like.
The gap in Vermeer’s career
Vermeer left only a small body of work — 36 known paintings, mostly quiet domestic interiors from Delft. Scholars in the early twentieth century suspected there had once been more, including an early, religious phase shaped by Italian painting. No such religious Vermeer had surfaced. That expectation was the opening.
Van Meegeren had trained in the techniques of the Dutch Golden Age and built a respectable early career as a portraitist and illustrator. Britannica summarises what followed: he felt his own talents had been slighted by critics, and his original intention, by his account, was to let the experts acclaim his forgeries and then reveal that he had painted them. Whether revenge or money drove him is disputed, and the dispute matters enough to return to below. What is documented is the work: he spent about six years working out his method.
How to make new paint three centuries old
A forged painting fails two ways. It can look wrong, or it can test wrong. Van Meegeren worked on both.
For the surface, he started with real age. He bought genuine seventeenth-century canvases and painted over them; The Supper at Emmaus was painted over a mediocre period picture, The Awakening of Lazarus. He ground his own paints from raw materials Vermeer could have used — lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, cinnabar — and worked with badger-hair brushes of the kind Vermeer was known to use.
For the tests, his key invention was hardness. Paint dried for 300 years resists solvents; fresh oil paint does not. Van Meegeren mixed his pigments with phenol formaldehyde, an early synthetic resin of the Bakelite family, so the paint film would harden fast. He then baked each painting at roughly 100 to 120 degrees Celsius, rolled it to widen the network of fine cracks, called craquelure, and washed it in India ink so dark pigment settled into the cracks like centuries of dirt.
The result passed the standard checks of the day: colour resistance, white lead analysis, X-rays, and microscopic study were all reported as confirming an authentic Vermeer. The resin that made the trick work was also what exposed it, because Bakelite did not exist in the seventeenth century.
Emmaus: the masterpiece that never was
The Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1937, shows Christ revealing himself to two disciples at a table, a subject from the Gospel of Luke. Van Meegeren modelled it on Caravaggio’s version of the same subject at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, matching the Italian influence scholars expected in an early Vermeer.
In September 1937 the painting was shown to Abraham Bredius, the leading Vermeer authority of the period. Bredius accepted it and, writing in The Burlington Magazine, praised it as “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam calls the picture, in its collection entry, the most famous falsification in Dutch art history. The museum bought it in 1937 as an extraordinary Vermeer — its words — beating the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to it. The price was 520,000 guilders. The painting is oil on canvas, 118 by 130.5 centimetres; the Boijmans catalogue now credits it, correctly, to Han van Meegeren, creation date 1937, and lists it as in storage.
Contemporary praise went further than a purchase. The Boijmans account notes that the canvas was even compared in importance to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, and the museum displayed it as a highlight; it also holds two more of his Vermeer forgeries, Head of Christ and Isaac Blessing Jacob. Dissent existed, but stayed private: a diary by Willy Auping, then a curator at the Kröller-Müller Museum, later published by the museum, dismissed another new “Vermeer,” The Washing of the Feet, bought by the Rijksmuseum for 1.3 million guilders, as bad and crude.
Britannica counts 14 known forgeries by Van Meegeren of works attributed to Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, nine sold before the war at enormous profit.
The painting in Göring’s salt mine
During the German occupation, another fake, Christ and the Adulteress, reached Hermann Göring through Nazi banker and art dealer Alois Miedl. Göring traded 137 looted paintings for it. In August 1943 he moved his hoard, this painting included, into an Austrian salt mine. Allied forces entered the mine on 17 May 1945, and the supposed Vermeer was among what they found.
An Allied commission traced the painting back to Van Meegeren, in Britannica’s account. He was arrested on 29 May 1945, charged with fraud and with aiding the enemy as a collaborator who had handed Dutch cultural property to the Nazis, a charge that carried a possible death penalty. That was when he reversed the accusation. The reported words were: “The painting in Göring’s hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer of Delft, but a Van Meegeren! I painted the picture!”
A confession that convenient needed proof. Between July and December 1945, watched by reporters and court-appointed witnesses, he painted one more picture in Vermeer’s manner, Jesus among the Doctors, using the same materials and techniques. It was a new composition, not a copy, which was the point: inventing a convincing Vermeer on demand was the skill he claimed.
Chemistry, court, and a one-year sentence
The court appointed an international commission led by Paul B. Coremans, director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. It examined eight paintings Van Meegeren said were his, and found in the paint the phenol-formaldehyde resins Bakelite and Albertol, twentieth-century hardeners that could not have been in a seventeenth-century picture; a bottle of the resin was also found in his studio. The dark material in the craquelure, it noted, was too evenly spread to be natural dirt, and matched his India ink wash.
His trial opened on 29 October 1947 in Amsterdam. The collaboration charge had been dropped: a forgery is not Dutch cultural property, so no national treasure had been sold to Göring. On 12 November 1947 he was convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to one year in prison. He never served it. He died of a heart attack in Amsterdam on 30 December 1947.
Doubt did not die with him. Some buyers refused to accept that their Vermeers were fake. In 1958 Coremans produced a photograph of a Hunting Scene attributed to A. Hondius that matched an image visible by X-ray underneath Van Meegeren’s Last Supper — the period canvas he had painted over. A Carnegie Mellon examination in 1967 again found twentieth-century materials, and later Boijmans analysis found that the Emmaus paint contained pigments not introduced until the nineteenth century.
One part of the story should stay labelled as interpretation. The popular version casts Van Meegeren as the slighted artist who humiliated the critics and cheated the Nazis, and in the Netherlands he became, for a time, a folk hero for it. Art historian Jonathan Lopez, in his 2008 book The Man Who Made Vermeers, argued from his research that income came first — that the forgeries funded addictions and an expensive lifestyle — rather than revenge. The documents support the sales, the prices, and the technique. They do not settle his motives.
Bottom line
Van Meegeren did not defeat expertise with brushwork alone. He painted the picture scholars had already imagined — an early, Italian-influenced, religious Vermeer — on a real old canvas, in period pigments, hardened with a modern resin that fooled the tests of the 1930s. The same resin, identified by Coremans’s commission, proved the fraud when his life depended on proving it himself. The Supper at Emmaus still exists, now catalogued under its real maker’s name: a forgery good enough to be bought as a masterpiece, and evidence of how badly experts can want a discovery to be true.