The Fake Vermeer
Van Meegeren was wounded and angered by the criticism of his talents, so he set out to show his detractors. They said he merely imitated the old time Dutch Masters, so he decided to punk them, and produce a painting so good that it would rival the best works of the Dutch Golden Age. So good, in fact, that the critics couldn’t tell the difference. After years of experiments with forgery techniques, van Meegeren made his big move. In 1936, he painted The Supper at Emmaus in the style of Vermeer, handed it off to a lawyer friend, and claimed it was a hitherto “undiscovered” work by the famous Dutch Master. A renowned art historian examined it, accepted it as genuine, and praised it to the skies as “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft“.
The Supper at Emmaus took the art world by storm. It was purchased for the equivalent of $6 million in 2022 dollars, and donated to a prominent Rotterdam museum. There, it featured prominently in a Dutch masterpieces exhibition. With the proceeds, van Meegeren bought himself a nice mansion in Nice, and began to pump it out more fake masterpieces. When WWII began, he moved back to the Netherlands, but the war caught up with him when Germany occupied the country in 1940. Nazi occupation did not cramp van Meegeren’s style, and he continued to produce forgeries and pass them off as originals. In 1942, one of his fake masterpieces, Christ With the Adulteress, by “Vermeer”, was sold to a Nazi art dealer, who in turn sold it to Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering for the equivalent of $8 million today.
