At the end of World War II, shortly after the liberation of Amsterdam, the Dutch government threw wealthy artist Han van Meegeren into jail as a Nazi collaborator, charging that he had sold a priceless Vermeer to Hermann Goering during the German occupation. In a spectacular turn of events, Van Meegeren soon broke down and confessed that he himself had painted Goering’s Vermeer. The great masterpiece was a phony.

While he was at it, Van Meegeren also admitted to forging several other pictures, including Vermeer’s famed Supper at Emmaus, the pride of Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, a painting once hailed by the prominent art historian Abraham Bredius not merely as a masterpiece, but indeed “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.” When the news got out, it made headlines around the world, and the forger became an instant folk hero. In widely reported interviews at the time, Van Meegeren claimed to be a misunderstood genius who had turned to forgery only late in life, seeking revenge on the critics who had scorned him early in his artistic career.

An ancient grievance redeemed; a wrong put right. It was a wildly appealing tale back in 1945, and indeed it remains quite seductive today. In the Netherlands, where Van Meegeren is still a household name, the story of the wily Dutchman who swindled Hermann Goering continues to raise a smile.

But the forger had one more trick up his sleeve: his version of events turns out to have been extravagantly untrue.


Like many others, I was originally drawn to Han van Meegeren by the sheer cleverness of what the man had accomplished. Yet, in pondering his story over the years, I found that much of it simply didn’t add up. How could anyone’s first attempt at art forgery have yielded so large, complex, and distinctive a composition as The Supper at Emmaus? As I delved deeper into the subject, I gradually came to understand that Van Meegeren had not been a meek and downtrodden artist on a quest for personal vindication, but rather a truly fascinating crook who had plied the forger’s trade far longer than he ever admitted – his entire adult life, in fact – and with astonishing success. Through interviews with the descendants of Van Meegeren’s partners in crime and three years of archival research in the Netherlands, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, I learned that Van Meegeren worked for decades with a ring of shady art dealers promoting fake old masters, some of which ended up in the possession of such prominent collectors as Andrew Mellon and Baron Heinrich Thyssen. All the while, Van Meegeren cultivated a fascination with Hitler and Nazism that, when the occupation came, would provide him entree to the highest-level of Dutch collaborators.

Art fraud, like other fields of artistic endeavor, has its own traditions, masters, and lineages. When Van Meegeren entered the world of forgery, he joined a pre-existing culture of illicit commerce that thrived in Europe and America throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the market for old masters was booming thanks to a growing number of buyers ready to dedicate their newly made industrial fortunes to the collecting of fine pictures. Not only was Van Meegeren an important player in an elaborate game of international deception in the 1920s and 30s, but some of his disreputable associates later put their expertise to work laundering stolen Holocaust assets in the same way they had laundered fake pictures – through the art trade. Although Van Meegeren himself stuck, for the most part, to the sale and promotion of forgeries, he and his circle offer a case study in opportunism: for, during the war, they operated at various points along the grey scale of collaboration – from grey, to greyer, to truly dark – as they cashed in on the Nazi takeover.

Just how big an operation was the early, unknown phase of Van Meegeren’s career? About as big as art fraud gets. The picture swindles with which Van Meegeren was involved during the 1920s were remarkable both for their financial scale and for the numbers and types of people involved. The following incident, never before disclosed, offers a glimpse of Van Meegeren’s unlikely team of accomplices.

In the spring of 1928, Van Meegeren, then thirty-nine years old and just coming into his own as a forger, paid a discreet two-week visit to London, where he stayed with a friend by the name of Theodore Ward. An industrial chemist who specialized in the technology of paint, Ward was also an avid collector of old masters, particularly still lifes by Dutch Golden Age artists like Willem Kalf and Abraham van Beyeren. He bought, sold, and traded such pictures; he haunted the salesrooms at Christie’s and Sotheby’s; and hardly a single item of quality ever came through the galleries of Bond Street without attracting his inquisitive eyes. Ward later donated his still lifes to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in memory of his wife, Daisy. Today, the Ward collection is generally recognized as one of the most comprehensive of its type in the world.

Inspired by his boundless zeal for Holland and its artistic achievements, Ward had even created an ersatz seventeenth-century Dutch interior in the parlor of his Finchley Road townhouse. With the distinctive black and white stone floors, rustic ceiling beams, and sturdy oak furniture typically found in pictures by De Hooch, Vermeer, and Metsu, the Ward residence looked almost like a stage-set awaiting costumed performers to enact familiar scenes from the history of art – a woman reading a letter, a sleeping servant, the mistress and her maid. Such an artificial atmosphere can only have delighted the visiting Van Meegeren, whose line of work entailed a very similar type of historical fakery.

While in this strange fantasy environment, Van Meegeren painted Ward’s portrait. Shown wearing a red velvet smoking jacket, cigar duly in hand, Ward looks, in the finished image, much the way members of his family often described him: sophisticated, self-assured, even a tad superior. In 1997, Ward’s son gave the portrait to the Ashmolean, sending with it a note in which he recalled, across a distance of seventy years, Van Meegeren’s frequent visits, throughout the 1920s, to the old house in the Finchley Road. “Van Meegeren was very amusing,” he remembered fondly, “because my father was aware of his tendency to paint under another name – and quite successfully! It was then an open joke between him and my father and mother.”

But Ward’s son left out the best part. For, at approximately the same moment that Van Meegeren was immortalizing Theodore Ward on canvas during that 1928 visit, an employee of Ward’s – a confidence man by the name of Harold Wright – was negotiating to sell a fake Frans Hals in the London offices of the world’s most powerful art dealer, Sir Joseph Duveen. And the intrepid Mr. Wright had every reason to think that he would succeed: just a few months earlier, he had sold Duveen a fake Vermeer, The Lace Maker, at a price equivalent to millions of dollars in today’s money. Of course, both the “Hals” and the “Vermeer” were works by Han van Meegeren.

Although criminal, Van Meegeren’s career during the Roaring Twenties had an undeniable charm: the haut-monde atmosphere, the conspiratorial strategizing, the blithe spirit of prosperous times. And Van Meegeren himself, at this point, was not unpleasant to know. With his small, bird-like frame constantly aflutter and his irreverent sense of humor on full display, the surreptitious forger made for lively company: he was outgoing, outspoken, and ostentatiously playful about leading a secret life. His alcoholism was still under control: the truly destructive binges, the incoherent, gin-fueled tirades that would eventually frighten off many of his friends, had not yet begun. Indeed, the young Van Meegeren socialized easily with both the upper-crust of Dutch society, who provided him with portrait commissions, and the denizens of the shadow world where he made his real money. He was a man of parts back then, and many of them were genuinely appealing.

It was also during these years that Van Meegeren, still very much an apprentice in the business of forgery, began to learn his trade – and not only the technical bits, but the intellectual demands as well. He was to discover, first and foremost, that a fake doesn’t necessarily succeed or fail according to the fidelity with which it replicates the distant past, but on the basis of its power to sway the contemporary mind. Although the best forgeries may mimic the style of a long-dead artist, they tend to reflect the tastes and attitudes of their own period. Most people can’t perceive this: they respond intuitively to that which seems familiar and comprehensible in an artwork, even one presumed to be centuries old. It’s part of what makes forgeries so seductive.

Van Meegeren put this principle to work early and did so with notable style and grace, although, at the time, even he was probably unaware of his anachronisms. Van Meegeren’s lovely Vermeer-esque girls from the 1920s resemble, on the one hand, the genuine article, but on the other, the highly fashionable portraits that the forger was doing under his own name at roughly the same moment. To the eyes and expectations of the day, what could possibly have been more appealing, on a subliminal level, than an art deco version of Vermeer’s delicate esthetic? Indeed, Van Meegeren’s Lace Maker looks as though she would gladly cast aside her labors and foxtrot the night away if only someone would ask her.

Yet, Van Meegeren never owned up to these delightful early fakes. Was it a lingering sense of loyalty that stayed the forger’s tongue about schemes involving multiple partners and associates in the art market’s underworld? To some extent, that’s probably the case. All of the forgeries to which Van Meegeren did ultimately confess were made during final phase of his career, when he was working without a net – orchestrating the swindles by himself; finding his own middlemen; secretly directing negotiations; and pocketing the bulk of the money. But it would be naïve to think that honor, even in the dubious form of honor among thieves, was an over-riding concern for Van Meegeren. The primary reason he kept quiet about the length and extent of his career in forgery was that after getting arrested at the end of the brutal German occupation, he wanted to be perceived as something other than a seasoned professional criminal who had exploited the circumstances of war simply to make money. He re-invented himself as the bane of cultural snobs and Nazi tyrants alike. And in the zeitgeist of the immediate postwar era, that was a very good thing to be.

Clever though this myth-making was, Van Meegeren did himself an enduring biographical injustice with his bogus revenge-fantasy explanation for his life and career. His motivations were, in reality, considerably more subtle and complex. And the true story of his metamorphosis from painter to forger turns out to offer a poignant evocation of his inner conflicts: for it was not the cruelty of the critics that doomed Van Meegeren’s legitimate artistic aspirations, but rather Van Meegeren himself. Seduced by the easy money and thrilling gamesmanship of his initial forays into forgery during the 1920s, the young Van Meegeren, slowly but surely, lost his sense of calling. Rather than soldier on, throwing his full energy into painting his own pictures in his own name, he allowed an essential part of who he was, the genuine artist, to wither on the vine. It was a Faustian bargain, one whose consequences included a chronic drinking problem, a failed first marriage and a series of tawdry affairs. Moreover, as the chip on Van Meegeren’s shoulder grew, so too did his taste for fascist politics.

This, of course, was the biggest thing that the forger was covering up in 1945. Strange though it might seem in view of the Goering episode, Han van Meegeren really was a collaborator. His interest in Nazism went back to the very toddler stage of the movement: as early as 1928, five years before Hitler assumed power as Chancellor of Germany, Van Meegeren could be found parroting selections from Mein Kampf. Fleecing Hermann Goering was just an ordinary business transaction, not a political statement. Van Meegeren truly believed in the fascist dream. After the war, that was a big problem.

Today, Van Meegeren’s affection for the Nazis is the biographical roadblock that makes it virtually impossible to conceive of the forger as a hero in any conventional sense. But, putting moral questions temporarily aside, what is truly intriguing about Van Meegeren’s turn towards Hitlerism is that it dovetails so neatly with his growing success as a forger. Although an inner anger may initially have pointed Van Meegeren down the road towards the politics of resentment – and this factor cannot be discounted – for a forger, the appeal of fascism, in its full Nietzschean mode, ultimately goes far deeper than mere sore-headedness. What is a forger if not a closeted Übermensch, an artist who secretly takes history itself for his canvas, who alters the past to suit his present needs?

It makes oddly perfect sense, viewed in that light, that the three greatest European art forgers alive during the Second World War – Van Meegeren with his false Vermeers; Jef van der Veken, the Belgian forger of Van Eyck; and Icilio Joni, the master of the fake Italian Primitives – were all avowed fascist sympathizers. They were, to be sure, arch-opportunists. But, on a more profound level, the logic of might-makes-right and the dream of the will to power captured the imaginations of these cunning men who reveled in their ability to re-write the textbooks of art.

Indeed, Van Meegeren’s later Vermeer forgeries push this mentality to its logical extreme. Beginning with his Supper at Emmaus of 1937, Van Meegeren created a fictitious “biblical” phase of Vermeer’s career, flattering the intellectual vanity of art historians who had theorized that the great seventeenth-century master, known to have painted one biblical scene in his youth, might well have produced more. Yet, the mischief didn’t end there. Looking closely at The Supper at Emmaus, does it come as any surprise that it was conceived in the afterglow of Van Meegeren’s visit to the 1936 Berlin Olympics? The magniloquent solemnity of this picture has little precedent in the work of Vermeer, but it certainly does echo the volkisch “Aryan” propaganda imagery of the era, which presented an idealized vision of life in Germany’s rural heartland. Fitting in all too well with Van Meegeren’s chosen world view, The Supper at Emmaus may actually have captured, in its very falseness, a certain middlebrow reactionary strain of pre-war culture better than any real artwork ever could.

As a forgery, The Supper at Emmaus is now a defanged cobra: nobody visiting it today at the Boijmans Museum, in Rotterdam, where it is still a source of popular curiosity, could ever be fooled by the tendentious conceit that made it seem so timeless, yet so hauntingly up-to-date, back in 1937. But, when seen for what it really is, Emmaus remains captivating. Part dream, part lie, this elaborate fake is a subterranean landmark in European intellectual history – an artifact uniquely evocative of a period in which the power of major leaders was often based on malicious fabrications. As such, it makes a relatively straightforward fraud like Van Meegeren’s 1920s vintage Lace Maker look like child’s play.

Indeed, the esthetic and intellectual distance between these two works neatly describes the path Van Meegeren travelled during the course of his career. In a sweet confection like The Lace Maker, Van Meegeren amiably portrayed a seventeenth-century maiden in the guise of a coquettish flapper, as he casually messed about with the chronology of taste. But it was this very aspect of art forgery that Van Meegeren would seize upon, refine, and build into something truly dark and potent in his later life. For, although Van Meegeren was certainly an accomplished forger in the technical sense, the greatest deceptions he pulled off actually had less to do with his prowess as a visual artist than with his use and misuse of history. This was the case when he reached back into the past to insert a modern, reactionary “Vermeer” into the canon of Western art; and, again, certainly, after the war, when he projected his self-exculpatory myth forward into the future. In both instances, he knew precisely how to seize on the zeitgeist and turn it to his own ends; to match what people wanted to hear with what he wanted them to believe.

What follows then is a liar’s biography, the story of a man whose deceptions, fueled as they were by the spirit of his times, shine a light back on that distant era today.