Han van Meegeren
Spoiler, we’re talking about yet another art forger today. This guy is on another level though, Han van Meegeren is sometimes called the boldest modern forger of Old Masters. So what exactly did he do, how did people find out, and what do the Nazis have to do with it?
Background
Of course, I’ll provide a little context for you, to set the stage. Han van Meegeren was born on October 10, 1889 in Deventer, Netherlands. He showed promise in visual art as a little kid but he quickly was forbidden from pursuing this by his father who was pretty abusive from what I can gather. When he was in high school he met a teacher who was also an artist, Bartus Korteling, who became his mentor. Kortling was an especially big fan of the Old Masters and Vermeer specifically, he showed van Meegeren how Vermeer mixed his colours and applied them to the canvas. Remember this.
After graduating it is no surprise that van Meegeren’s father didn’t want him to go to art school but he did let him go to architecture school where van Meegeren actually designed a boathouse for his rowing club in Delft that still stands today. In 1912 he married classmate Anna de Voogt who was expecting their first child.
Finally, in 1913 he gave up on architecture school and switched to drawing and painting at an art school in the Hague. In the summer of 1914 van Meegeren moved his family to Scheveningen (one of eight districts in the Hague) and took a teaching job for a small salary. In 1915 his daughter Pauline was born and van Meegeren suddenly needed to augment his income so he started sketching posters and pictures for commercial products like Christmas cards as well as doing commissions for still lifes, landscapes, and portraits.
Things started to pick up with van Meegeren’s art career at this time, he was earning a reputation as a talented portraitist. He earned large commissions painting the English and American elite who came to spend their winters on the French Riviera where he took many trips. They were especially impressed by his thorough understanding of Dutch Old Master techniques.
This Is Where Things Get Interesting
In 1917 van Meegeren had his first public exhibition, it included work from a number of different styles and he gained many positive reviews. This served to bolster his portrait business. However, five years later in 1922, he had a second exhibition where he displayed only Christian religious paintings but critics did not give it the rave reviews he was hoping for. They said that he had skill but lacked originality and that he was simply copying the Old Masters. “Informed opinion consigned van Meegeren to the always populous ranks of the formerly promising” (Schjeldahl, 2008). I’m sure you can see how this would have upset van Meegeren.
In his 1945 confession statement, he said “driven into a state of anxiety and depression due to the all-too-meagre appreciation of my work, I decided, one fateful day, to revenge myself on the art critics and experts by doing something the likes of which the world had never seen before” (Schjeldahl, 2008). Some people think this is just him backtracking to justify the forgeries but nevertheless, this is his explanation and his motive. Boohoo no one liked my paintings, let me absolutely destroy the legacy and body of work of an iconic Dutch artist who I admire. Make it make sense.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1923 van Meegeren divorced Anna and she and their, now two, children depart for Paris leaving van Meegeren alone to do whatever he wants. He quickly married actress Johanna Theresia Oerlemans, who likely broke up the marriage in the first place, and the pair moved to the South of France. The plan was to hide out in France painting portraits of the wealthy and hone his forgery technique. He wants to show the journalists that he can create something even better than a copy of an Old Master, he wants to fool them completely. He bought authentic 17th-century canvases (where do you find those?) and mixed his own pigments in the same way that Vermeer would have (remember when he learned that in high school) he even went so far as to create his own badger hair paintbrush similar to what Vermeer would have used. He went all out to make these paintings appear authentic and this process took him six years.
In a true stroke of genius van Meegeren decides he has to get only one very important Vermeer scholar to believe his paintings are real and then everyone else will believe it. This worked better than he could have ever expected. One day in 1937 a Dutch lawyer, hired by van Meegeren, approached the scholar, named Abraham Bredius, claiming to be the trustee of a Dutch family estate and wanted him to look at a large painting. The painting in question was Christ and Disciples at Emmaus painted by Han van Meegeren but being touted as an undiscovered Vermeer. Bredius did take a look and shortly afterwards wrote “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. And what a picture! Neither the beautiful signature . . . nor the pointillés on the bread which Christ is blessing, is necessary to convince us that we have here—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft . . . quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer” (Essential Vermeer, 2021). Pretty convincing, huh?
As you can see the painting kind of sucks but because Bredius was so well thought of that after this article came out no one questioned this work or really any others from van Meegeren. With this scholar on his side van Meegeren was easily able to continue to produce as many fake Vermeers as he wanted. There is so little known about Vermeer himself and there continues to be debate about how many paintings he actually created in his lifetime, so van Meegeren was able to pass these forgeries off as long lost works by the master. With all of these gaps in Vermeer’s biography scholars could point to these “new” paintings and say I knew that he had to have painted more, even though they’re not really in the same style it just shows how multi-talented Vermeer was.
By this time van Meegeren was getting extremely, and I mean exorbitantly, wealthy. Each painting was selling for millions of dollars. I’ll just give you some examples to show how unnecessarily rich this man was getting. For one he would throw crazy and extravagant parties (think Jay Gatsby level) but you might be thinking ok, parties are normal, did I mention he had an ENTIRE SEPARATE HOUSE that he maintained just for partying?! He once said in an interview that he owned 52 houses PLUS 15 country houses. He also kept a safe by the front door filled with JEWELS that prostitutes were encouraged to help themselves to on their way out. I can’t. He was that rich.
Then, in 1942 something absolutely crazy happened. One of van Meegeren’s agents sold a painting called Christ with the Adulteress to Nazi banker and art dealer Alois Miedel. Because this was during WWII all real Vermeers were locked away or otherwise hidden by museums, historians say that this painting could probably have been spotted as a fraud during a time when they were on display because the quality of van Meegeren’s work had declined but there was nothing to compare it to so people thought it was yet another long lost Vermeer. The crazy part of this is that Nazi Reichsmarschall Herman Göring, believing this to be an extremely rare and valuable painting, traded 137 looted paintings for Christ with the Adulteress. He traded legitimately valuable and rare paintings for this fraud, unbelievable.
The Downfall
This trade kind of led to the downfall and arrest of van Meegeren. In 1943 Göring hid all of his looted and stolen art, along with Christ with the Adulteress in a salt mine in Austria, inevitably in 1945 after the war, Allied forces entered the mine and seized all of the artwork there. They traced the painting back to the art dealer, Meidel who pointed them to van Meegeren. On May 29, 1945, Han van Meegeren was arrested for fraud and aiding and abetting the enemy. They still thought this was a real Vermeer so they labelled van Meegeren as a Nazi conspirator who had stolen the painting to give to Göring. The authorities were prepared to ask for the death penalty for this crime but van Meegeren eventually confessed, allegedly saying “The painting in Göring's hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer of Delft, but a van Meegeren! I painted the picture!” (Schuller, 1960).
The authorities had him prove his claim by getting him to paint one last forgery, Jesus Among the Doctors in the style of Vermeer, in front of court-appointed witnesses. Once he completed the work he was transferred to a pretty scary jail, described as a fortress prison, to await trial.
Van Meegeren’s trial began on October 29, 1947. The aiding and abetting the enemy charge had been dropped since the work sold to Göring was a fake, it wasn’t the cultural property of the Netherlands. A whole panel of people were brought in to examine the paintings and argue the fraud charge, they broke down van Meegeren’s technique and methods and eventually decided that yes, he was scamming people out of millions of dollars. He was found guilty but only sentenced to one year in jail.
Van Meegeren was allowed to go home while waiting to be transferred to the jail where he would serve one year but his health was declining. He suffered a heart attack on November 29, 1947, and another on December 29 of the same year which ended up killing him before he served even a moment of his sentence.
Back to his second wife Johanna for a moment. They were married the entire time he was painting these forgeries and getting filthy rich, they only ended up divorcing during the war (couldn’t find the exact year) and during that time about $50 million of van Meegeren’s profits, in today’s money, was transferred to her. Now, this money could have been confiscated by authorities to repay those who had been scammed IF (and it’s a big if) she was proven to be an accomplice to his crimes. Van Meegeren always maintained that Jo didn’t know anything and she was never proven to be involved, she lived in luxury until she died at 91. I just feel like she must have known and they really played their hand smart with that.
The Aftermath
So, where do we go from here? Like all fraud cases, this caused museums and collectors all over the world to have a good, close look at the Vermeers in their collections and try to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have the real deal. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible and there are people who still argue that the paintings that van Meegeren claimed to have painted are actually real Vermeers. All in all, it’s estimated that van Meegeren produced 18 forgeries, most of them Vermeers and these paintings actually do hang, with the correct attribution, in some very famous museums around the world.
Interestingly enough, the Dutch people took a weird liking to van Meegeren. By some accounts, they viewed him as a cunning trickster who fooled not only the snobby art elite but also Herman Göring. Some saw him as a hero for tricking Göring into trading away his (well not his but you know what I mean) real art for this low quality fake. Whether it was van Meegeren’s intention to embarrass Nazis or to just show art critics that he could pull the wool over their eyes, I guess we’ll never know.
Works Cited
Essential Vermeer. “Han van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers”. Essential Vermeer. 2021. http://www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.html
“How Mediocre Dutch Artist Cast ‘The Forger’s Spell’”. NPR. 2008. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92483237
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Dutch Master: The Art Forger who Became a National Hero”. The New Yorker. 2008. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/27/dutch-master
Schüller, Sepp. Forgers, Dealers, Experts: Strange Chapters in the History of Art. Putnam, 1960.