The Forger Who Proved He Faked a Vermeer to Avoid Treason

In May 1945, Dutch police arrested Han van Meegeren for selling a national treasure, Vermeer's 'Christ with the Adulteress,' to Hermann Göring. The punishment for dealing Dutch cultural heritage to the enemy was death.

After six weeks in custody, van Meegeren confessed to a different crime. He had painted the Vermeer himself. So, he said, had he painted five other 'Vermeers' that hung in Dutch museums, including 'Supper at Emmaus,' celebrated in 1937 as the find of the century.

Prosecutors were skeptical. Van Meegeren offered a demonstration: put him in a studio under guard and he'd paint a new Vermeer. From July to December 1945 he worked on 'Jesus Among the Doctors,' using 17th-century canvases scraped flat, bakelite phenol-formaldehyde resin in place of oil to force the paint surface to harden like a 300-year-old layer, and pigments restricted to those available to Vermeer. Witnesses watched. The result was convincing enough that the court accepted his fraud claim.

He was convicted of falsification, not collaboration. The sentence was one year. He died of a heart attack in December 1947, six weeks after conviction, before serving time.

Göring's reaction, when told in a prison cell that his prized Vermeer was a fake, was reportedly 'as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.' The painting is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, hung as a forgery.