Han van Meegeren: The Forger Who Sold a Fake Vermeer to the Nazis and Had to Paint in Court to Prove It

In May 1945, Allied investigators tracking down art looted by the Nazis arrived at the door of a wealthy Amsterdam painter named Han van Meegeren. They had traced a painting recovered from Hermann Göring’s personal collection, a previously unknown Vermeer titled Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, directly back to him. The charge waiting for him was treason: selling an irreplaceable piece of Dutch cultural heritage to one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. If convicted, he faced execution.

Van Meegeren had exactly one way out, and it required admitting something almost nobody would believe. “The painting in Göring’s hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer,” he told police. “I painted the picture. I painted it!” He was telling the truth. Proving it turned out to be the hardest part.

The Artist Nobody Took Seriously

Han van Meegeren was born in 1889 in Deventer, Netherlands, and studied architecture only because his father insisted on it, while quietly pursuing painting on the side. He idolized the Dutch Golden Age masters, particularly Johannes Vermeer, and by his own later account felt genuinely wounded by his early career, convinced that critics and fellow artists had never given him the recognition he deserved as an original talent.

Rather than keep failing to win acclaim for his own work, van Meegeren decided to prove his skill a different way: by painting something so convincingly in the style of a dead master that the entire art establishment would praise it as an authentic masterpiece. He chose Vermeer specifically because so few authenticated Vermeers existed, only around 35 or 36 known works, leaving plenty of room for experts to believe an undiscovered one might still surface.

Six Years Learning to Fake the Past

Producing a convincing forgery took considerably more than technical painting skill. Van Meegeren spent years studying pigments, mixing his own paints from raw materials the way a 17th-century artist would have, and sourcing the correct badger-hair brushes Vermeer was known to use.

The harder problem was age. A genuine 300-year-old oil painting develops craquelure, the fine network of cracks that forms in old paint and varnish over centuries, and there was no way to fake that convincingly with ordinary paint, which would take decades to develop real cracking on its own. Van Meegeren experimented for years before discovering that mixing Bakelite, an early synthetic resin, into his oil paints let him bake the finished canvas in an oven, hardening it artificially into something that could pass close chemical inspection as genuinely centuries old. He painted on real 17th-century canvases too, scraping off worthless period paintings to reuse the aged material underneath.

His breakthrough insight, according to later analysis, was resisting the temptation to copy an existing Vermeer directly. Instead he created entirely new compositions that merely gestured toward Vermeer’s style, leaving room for experts to fill in the connections themselves rather than inviting direct comparison to a known original.

The Masterpiece That Fooled the Pope of Vermeers

In 1937, van Meegeren unveiled The Supper at Emmaus, presenting it as a newly discovered Vermeer from the artist’s obscure early period. Abraham Bredius, the most respected Vermeer scholar alive at the time, examined it and declared it “a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art,” pronouncing it an authentic, untouched masterpiece straight from the painter’s studio. Bredius’s endorsement carried enormous weight. The painting sold for a fortune and entered a major Dutch museum collection as a genuine Old Master.

Van Meegeren kept going. Over the following years he produced additional forged Vermeers and works in the style of Pieter de Hooch, selling them quietly through intermediaries to wealthy collectors who had no reason to doubt paintings already endorsed by the country’s leading expert. By 1943 his forgeries had earned him something in the range of $25 to $30 million in today’s terms, funding a lifestyle that included dozens of properties across Europe.

Selling a Fake to Göring

In 1942, one of van Meegeren’s forgeries, Christ with the Adulteress, reached the art dealer Alois Miedl, who sold it onward to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command and an obsessive collector of looted European art. Göring traded 137 to 200 authentic Dutch paintings, seized earlier in the occupation, in exchange for what he believed was a genuine Vermeer. It may have been, by some estimates, the highest price ever paid for a single painting up to that point.

Göring stored the painting among thousands of other looted works in an Austrian salt mine, where Allied forces discovered it in May 1945. A US Army officer traced the transaction back through paperwork to van Meegeren’s door within weeks.

The Trial That Required a Live Forgery

Dutch authorities initially charged van Meegeren with collaboration, a capital offense, for knowingly selling national cultural treasure to the enemy. Van Meegeren’s confession that the painting was his own forgery was met with open skepticism. Nobody believed a living artist could fool the country’s top experts this thoroughly, and admitting he had done exactly that meant admitting to a separate crime, fraud, that could still send him to prison.

Van Meegeren proposed the only proof that could possibly work: he would paint another fake Vermeer, from scratch, under direct observation by court-appointed witnesses and journalists, using the same materials and methods. Between July and December 1945, confined to a studio and watched closely, he produced Jesus Among the Doctors, a new forgery completed live in front of the very authorities trying to determine whether he was capable of what he claimed.

The court also convened an international panel of chemists and art historians, led by Paul Coremans of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, to examine van Meegeren’s other works. Chemical analysis found Bakelite resin embedded in paintings supposedly created three centuries before plastic existed. The case closed itself.

Acquitted of Treason, Convicted of Fraud

The collaboration charge was dropped entirely, since a forged painting was legally not authentic Dutch cultural property and therefore nothing of real value had actually been sold to the enemy. Prosecutors instead charged van Meegeren with forgery and fraud, seeking a two-year sentence. In October 1947, the court convicted him and sentenced him to one year in prison, a remarkably light sentence given the scale of the deception.

The Dutch public, meanwhile, had already decided how they felt about him. A newspaper poll conducted around the time of the trial found van Meegeren to be the second most popular man in the Netherlands, trailing only the prime minister. To a country still processing years of Nazi occupation, the story of a clever Dutchman who had swindled Hermann Göring out of dozens of authentic Dutch paintings using nothing but paint, patience, and an oven felt like a genuine act of national defiance, regardless of the fraud underneath it.

Van Meegeren never served his sentence. On December 30, 1947, just before he was due to enter prison, he suffered a heart attack and died at 58.