The forger who sold a fake Vermeer to Göring had to prove it in court by painting another.
Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers fooled the leading experts of his day, and one ended up in Hermann Göring's collection. Arrested after the war for selling a national treasure to the Nazis, he faced a possible death sentence. His defence: it wasn't a treasure, because he'd painted it.
Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter whose own work the critics dismissed. He set out to beat them at their own game by forging Dutch Golden Age masters. He spent six years refining his method: mixing his paints with phenol formaldehyde, the plastic we know as Bakelite, then baking the canvases at around 100 to 120°C so the paint hardened as if it were centuries old. He painted over genuine but mediocre 17th-century canvases to get authentic old supports.
His breakthrough was The Supper at Emmaus. Experts believed Vermeer had studied in Italy, so Van Meegeren based it loosely on Caravaggio. In 1937 the eminent scholar Abraham Bredius pronounced it 'the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft', and it was bought for 520,000 guilders and given to a Rotterdam museum. More fakes followed. One, Christ with the Adulteress, went to Göring in exchange for 137 looted paintings.
In May 1945 Allied troops found it in an Austrian salt mine with the rest of Göring's hoard, and the trail led to Van Meegeren. Charged with collaboration for selling Dutch cultural property to the enemy, he confessed it was a fake. To prove it, he painted a new 'Vermeer', Jesus among the Doctors, in front of reporters and court-appointed witnesses. Chemical analysis then found 20th-century resins in his paint.
The collaboration charge was dropped. In November 1947 he was convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to one year, but he died of a heart attack that December. The Dutch public loved him as the man who had fooled Göring; a 1947 poll ranked him the second most popular person in the country. The historian Jonathan Lopez is more sceptical, arguing the patriotic trickster was itself a performance, and suggesting Göring may never have known he had been duped.
Source: Wikipedia — Han van Meegeren · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
