On April 1, 1938, the art world celebrated a miracle. One of the most eminent art historians in Europe, Abraham Bredius — a man who had spent his entire career studying Vermeer — stood before a newly discovered masterpiece and declared it genuine. The painting, titled The Supper at Emmaus, was hailed as “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.” Museums wept. Collectors paid fortunes. The scholarly world congratulated itself on its good fortune.
It was a fake. Han van Meegeren had painted it himself — using Bakelite-hardened paint, 17th-century canvases stripped of their original images, badger-hair brushes, and a technique so meticulously studied and perfected that it fooled X-ray analysis, chemical testing, and the finest eyes in European art scholarship.
There is no better day than April 1st to reckon with the most spectacular art prank in history — and what it tells us about the human need to believe in beauty, authenticity, and the power of a face.
Who Was Han van Meegeren?
Henricus Antonius van Meegeren was born in 1889 in Deventer, Netherlands. He was a technically gifted painter who had the misfortune — or the bad judgment — to work in a style the critics found derivative. His portraits and interiors showed real skill, but the art establishment dismissed him as backward-looking, stuck in the 17th century when modernism was the only game worth playing. The critics wrote him off. Van Meegeren seethed.
He responded the only way a wounded perfectionist could: he decided to prove the critics wrong by giving them exactly what they wanted — and watching them fall for it.
His target was Vermeer. Not because Vermeer was the most famous Dutch master (Rembrandt held that title), but because Vermeer’s output was so small — only 34 paintings are known today — and so poorly documented that art historians were genuinely convinced there were lost works waiting to be discovered. Van Meegeren studied the scholarship obsessively. He understood what the experts expected to find. He would give it to them.
Six Years of Chemistry
Forgery is not just painting in someone else’s style. It is chemistry, archaeology, and theater simultaneously.
Van Meegeren spent six years working out every detail. He bought genuine 17th-century canvases — actual Dutch paintings from the 1600s — and carefully removed the original images, leaving the authentic aged linen beneath. He mixed his own paints from raw pigments: lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, cinnabar, the same materials Vermeer had used. He made badger-hair brushes similar to those Vermeer was known to have favored.
The hardest problem was craquelure — the distinctive web of fine cracks that develops in aged paint over centuries. A fresh painting has none. Van Meegeren’s solution was inspired: he mixed phenol formaldehyde (Bakelite, the early plastic) into his paint medium. When he baked the finished canvas in an oven, the Bakelite hardened and cracked in patterns indistinguishable, to 1930s testing methods, from centuries of natural aging.
He kept vases of fresh lilacs in his studio — not for atmosphere, but to explain the chemical smell of the Bakelite to any visitors who might notice it.
His studio kept its secrets. No models were hired — van Meegeren painted all the figures from imagination and memory, drawing on the visual grammar of Vermeer and Caravaggio. He knew the experts had theorized that a young Vermeer must have trained in Italy, influenced by Caravaggio’s religious paintings. So he gave them exactly that: a religious composition in the Caravaggio manner, signed with Vermeer’s monogram, on a genuinely old canvas.
The Sting
In 1937, van Meegeren handed The Supper at Emmaus to a lawyer-friend with instructions to present it to Abraham Bredius as a discovery from a Dutch family estate. Bredius, 82 years old and one of the most respected Vermeer scholars alive, examined the painting and was overwhelmed. He published his authentication in The Burlington Magazine: “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master.”
The Rotterdam museum bought it for 520,000 guilders — the equivalent of several million dollars today. It was displayed as the centerpiece of a major exhibition alongside genuine masterworks. Critics raved. Scholars debated its significance. The painting was called “the spiritual centre” of the entire show.
Emboldened, van Meegeren made more. Over the next several years he produced six more “Vermeers” and two forgeries attributed to Pieter de Hooch. His forgeries became more ambitious — large multi-figure religious compositions. The quality declined as his health deteriorated from chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and morphine addiction, but the sales kept coming. His total take: an estimated $30 million in today’s money.
The Nazi Problem
In 1943, van Meegeren made his most audacious move and his worst mistake simultaneously.
Through an intermediary, he sold one of his “Vermeers” — Christ with the Adulteress — to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command and an obsessive collector of plundered art. Göring paid 1,650,000 guilders. He cherished the painting as one of his finest possessions.
When Allied forces swept through Europe in 1945, they found the painting in Göring’s cache. They traced the transaction back through a chain of dealers and arrived, in May 1945, at Han van Meegeren’s door. He was arrested and charged with collaborating with the enemy — a crime punishable by death.
Van Meegeren sat in prison for two weeks before he saw the only way out.
“The painting in Göring’s hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer of Delft,” he announced to his interrogators. “It is a Van Meegeren. I painted the picture.”
Nobody believed him. The idea that an obscure Dutch painter had fooled the entire art establishment was too absurd. The experts who had authenticated his works refused to recant — to admit the forgery would be to admit their own humiliation. Van Meegeren was caught in a trap of his own making: to escape the death penalty for collaboration, he had to confess to the lesser crime of forgery. But he had to actually prove it.
The Confession Painting
Under court supervision, watched by journalists and experts, van Meegeren painted his final “Vermeer” — Jesus Among the Doctors — in his own studio, using his own materials. The court watched. The press photographed every brushstroke. When he was done, even his skeptics had to concede: he was the forger.
The collaboration charges were dropped. In their place came fraud and forgery. At his trial in October 1947, van Meegeren was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. But history had other plans — he suffered two heart attacks and died in December 1947, weeks before he was due to begin his sentence, at age 58.
A 1947 Dutch poll named him the second most popular man in the Netherlands, after the prime minister. The country had watched him make a fool of Göring. They loved him for it.
What the Forgery Reveals About Art and Authenticity
The van Meegeren case is not merely a curiosity of crime history. It poses a question that every serious student of art must confront: what are we actually looking at when we look at a painting?
The scholars who authenticated van Meegeren’s forgeries were not incompetent. They were highly trained, deeply knowledgeable, and genuinely motivated by love of art. But they brought to the examination something that has nothing to do with scholarship: desire. They wanted a new Vermeer to exist. They had built careers on the theory that there were lost religious works from Vermeer’s early period. When a painting appeared that confirmed their theories, they found confirmation instead of asking the hard questions.
This is what van Meegeren understood better than the experts: authenticity is partly a social construction. We believe a painting is genuine because the right people say so, in the right context, at the right time. Strip away the provenance, the expert opinion, the institutional imprimatur, and what remains? Paint on canvas. Color and form. Light.
The original Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection — Study of a Young Woman, painted around 1665-67 — shows us exactly what van Meegeren was chasing: the quality of light that pools in a cloth sleeve, the way a woman’s face turns toward something we cannot see, the absolute present-ness of the figure. Van Meegeren could replicate the surface. He could not replicate that quality of attention.
His own most revealing statement came after conviction: “My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as a creative artist.” He had proved his skill by hiding it.
The Body as Evidence
What does this have to do with the nude in art? Everything, actually.
The figure — the human body rendered with attention, presence, and skill — is one of the most forged subjects in art history precisely because it is one of the most charged. A convincing nude or figure study carries an aura of intimacy, of witnessed humanity, that is almost impossible to fake completely. The forger can get the proportions right, the anatomy right, the technique right. But the specific quality of perception that makes a great figure painting great — the sense that this body was actually seen, actually present, actually known — tends to betray itself in forgeries through a certain deadness, a sense of studio exercise.
This is one reason why life drawing — drawing from actual live models — remains central to serious art education even in the age of photography and digital rendering. The body teaches the hand things that images of bodies cannot. The resistance of the real, the instability of the living form, the way flesh absorbs and reflects light differently from any photograph — these are things that can only be learned from direct encounter.
Van Meegeren’s forgeries failed, ultimately, not because of chemistry but because of bodies. He worked without models. The figures in his late forgeries — the ones that even a layperson today might find slightly wrong — have the quality of invented figures: correct in their parts but unconvincing in their presence. They were imagined, not observed. The difference shows.
The Eternal Joke
There is something deeply funny about what van Meegeren did, and it is worth sitting with that humor for a moment before we moralize.
He spent years — years — perfecting a skill he could only demonstrate by getting caught. He became rich by giving the art world exactly what it pretended to want while privately knowing that what they wanted was the story of the painting, not the painting itself. He sold a Nazi warlord a fake. He walked into court, picked up a brush, and proved his case by doing the thing he was accused of.
And the Dutch public, recovering from Nazi occupation, made him their second-favorite person in the country. Because sometimes the court jester turns out to be the wisest person in the room.
April 1st seems right for this story. Not because forgery is a joke — van Meegeren’s victims included legitimate museums, genuine collectors, and scholars who spent years defending attributions they should have questioned. But because the story punctures a particular kind of institutional pomposity: the belief that expertise alone, divorced from genuine looking, can protect us from being fooled.
The antidote to forgery is not more sophisticated testing equipment. It is slowing down, looking longer, and asking the harder question: not “does this look like a Vermeer?” but “does this painting have a living body in it — something that was genuinely seen?”
Nude Art LA celebrates the real body in serious art — the live model, the drawn figure, the witnessed presence. Our events put artists and models in the same room, which is where art history begins. Get involved here.