← Journal

The Forger Who Fooled Göring: Han van Meegeren

By prove.art Editorial · · 5 min read

In May 1945, Allied investigators cataloguing art looted by senior Nazi officials traced a painting recovered from Hermann Göring’s personal collection — a previously unrecorded Vermeer titled Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery — back to a wealthy Amsterdam painter named Han van Meegeren. The charge waiting for him was treason: trafficking an irreplaceable piece of Dutch cultural heritage to the Nazi regime’s second-most-powerful man, an offense that carried the death penalty.

Van Meegeren’s defense was almost impossible to believe. The painting was not a lost Vermeer at all. He had painted it himself, three years earlier.

An artist rejected

Henricus Antonius “Han” van Meegeren was born in Deventer in 1889 and trained as an architect at his father’s insistence, painting on the side. He had real talent as a technician, but the critical establishment of his day was unimpressed — one contemporary critic dismissed him as a capable imitator of earlier schools with “every virtue except originality.” Stung by that rejection, van Meegeren decided, by his own later account, to prove the experts wrong by forging a painter whose work they revered above all others: Johannes Vermeer, of whom fewer than forty authenticated paintings were known to exist.

Rather than copy an existing Vermeer, van Meegeren invented new ones — paintings that filled a plausible gap in the artist’s biography, particularly a hypothesized early religious period for which no confirmed works survived. That was the key insight: a forgery is easiest to sell not when it imitates what’s already known, but when it completes a story scholars already want to believe.

The chemistry of aging a painting

Van Meegeren spent years developing techniques to defeat the forensic tools of his day. He used a seventeenth-century canvas, ground his own pigments to match compounds available in Vermeer’s lifetime, and — critically — mixed his paint with an early plastic resin (Bakelite-related phenol formaldehyde) that let the paint cure hard when baked in an oven, mimicking the brittle craquelure of three-hundred-year-old oil paint. He then rolled the canvas over a cylinder to crack the surface in a convincing pattern and rubbed ink into the cracks to simulate accumulated grime.

In 1937, Museum Boymans in Rotterdam purchased his Supper at Emmaus for 540,000 guilders on the recommendation of the era’s leading Vermeer authority, Abraham Bredius, who pronounced it a masterpiece. The Rijksmuseum reportedly offered to trade its own genuine Vermeer, The Love Letter, to acquire it — an offer Boymans turned down. No one, it seemed, could distinguish van Meegeren’s inventions from the real thing.

A sale to Göring

Between 1937 and 1943, van Meegeren produced and sold at least six “Vermeers” and two forged works attributed to Pieter de Hooch. In 1942, one of them, Christ with the Adulteress, passed through the dealer Alois Miedl to Hermann Göring, who traded roughly 137 to 200 authentic Dutch paintings — seized earlier in the occupation — in exchange for what he believed was a genuine, previously unknown Vermeer. By some estimates it was, at the time, among the highest prices ever paid for a single painting.

Göring kept meticulous records of his acquisitions, and those records were what eventually led Allied investigators to van Meegeren’s door.

Painting his way out of a death sentence

Facing a treason charge that could carry execution, van Meegeren confessed to police in May 1945: “The painting in Göring’s hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer, but a Van Meegeren! I painted the picture!” Investigators did not believe him. A confession to forgery was, after all, a far more convenient defense than the truth of having sold looted national heritage to a Nazi leader.

To prove his story, van Meegeren agreed to paint one final forgery under court supervision. Between July and December 1945, in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses, he produced Jesus Among the Doctors in the style of Vermeer, using the same materials and aging process he had used for the others. The demonstration — along with chemical analysis of his earlier works — was enough to change the charge from collaboration to forgery and fraud.

His trial opened on 29 October 1947 in the Regional Court of Amsterdam. Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to one year in prison — the statutory minimum. He never served it. He died of a heart attack on 30 December 1947, weeks after sentencing, having spent his final months as something close to a Dutch folk hero: the man who had swindled a Nazi leader out of nearly two hundred paintings using nothing but paint, patience, and the art world’s own eagerness to be right.

Why the story still matters

Van Meegeren’s forgeries were never detected by connoisseurship or by the science available at the time — one of his fakes, The Procuress, wasn’t chemically confirmed as a forgery until 2011, more than sixty years after his death. What ended his career was not the object at all; it was a transaction record in Hermann Göring’s personal files. The paintings were convincing. The paper trail was what broke the case open.

That asymmetry — masterful physical forgeries defeating expert connoisseurship for years, while a single documentary trace eventually undoes them — is a pattern that recurs throughout the history of art fraud, and it’s one worth keeping in mind as authentication tools evolve well past Bredius’s trained eye.

Sources