The forger who had to prove he was a forger

Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter whose own work critics dismissed as derivative. In the 1930s he set out to prove them fools by producing a Vermeer they would authenticate.

He succeeded so thoroughly that it nearly cost him his life.

Painting for the expectation, not the eye

The technical problem was real: he had to defeat chemical ageing tests as well as connoisseurs. He worked on genuine seventeenth-century canvases, ground his own pigments to period recipes, and mixed a synthetic resin into the paint so it would harden under gentle heat the way three centuries of drying would.

But the decisive move was not chemical. It was choosing what to paint.

Scholarship at the time held that Vermeer must have gone through an early religious period, influenced by Italian work, of which no examples survived. That was the hypothesis a leading authority had staked a reputation on.

So van Meegeren painted exactly that missing picture. The Supper at Emmaus was authenticated with enthusiasm and bought for the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam.

He did not forge a Vermeer. He forged the Vermeer that the experts had already described in advance, and then let them find it.

The trap

During the occupation, one of his fakes reached Hermann Göring, who was assembling a collection by purchase and plunder. Van Meegeren received a very large sum and a set of returned Dutch paintings.

When the Allies traced Göring’s collection back through the chain, they arrived at van Meegeren, and the charge was selling Dutch national cultural property to the enemy — collaboration, carrying a possible death sentence.

His defence was that the painting was not Dutch national property because he had painted it himself, six years earlier, in his own studio.

Nobody believed him.

Painting under guard

He was given materials and produced another “Vermeer” in custody, watched by court-appointed observers.

He was convicted of forgery and fraud, sentenced to a year, and died before serving it. He had become, briefly, a folk hero: the man who swindled Göring.

What the case is actually about

Not skill. Van Meegeren’s forgeries look, to a modern eye, fairly obviously wrong — the faces have a flatness that reads as 1930s rather than 1660s.

It is about expectation doing the authentication. The experts were not asking “is this a Vermeer?” They were asking “is this the Vermeer I predicted?” — and a picture built from their own published hypothesis answers yes.

The same failure is available whenever a field has a strongly held gap in its evidence. Produce the thing everyone expects to find, and the expectation supplies most of the verification.

Which is precisely what happened, in another discipline, with a skull in a Sussex gravel pit.