Failure™ Magazine

The Man Who Made Vermeers

The life and crimes of master forger Han van Meegeren.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, History

How did the National Gallery come to discover that two of its “Vermeers” were by Van Meegeren?
Like virtually every museum or collector possessing examples of Vermeer’s work that had come to light during the previous quarter century or so, the Gallery began to get suspicious soon after World War II. But anytime the attribution of a picture is questioned, arguments naturally begin to fly back and forth.

In the case of the Gallery it took a very long time for the two fakes—The Smiling Girl and The Lace Maker—to move, step by step, down the scale of esteem from “Vermeer” to “Follower of Vermeer” to off-the-wall-and-into-storage. In part, this was due to the technological limitations of picture analysis at the time.

By the late 1950s, the Gallery’s curators were pretty well convinced that the works were not by the master, but initial lab tests showed that all the pigments were appropriate to the seventeenth century. So the pictures remained on view, even though by that point almost no one took them seriously as works of Vermeer. Eventually, more sophisticated tests proved both pictures to be indisputably modern, and in the 1970s the Gallery officially designated them as such.

In the 1990s, Arthur Wheelock, the curator of Dutch art at the Gallery, did some very impressive research that traced the forgeries back as far as Van Wijngaarden. However, it was only this past summer, in July, that I published an article in Apollo [“Van Meegeren’s Early Vermeers”], extending Wheelock’s line of inquiry and explaining Van Meegeren’s role in actually creating the fakes in Van Wijngaarden’s employ. The Apollo article drew upon my interviews with Van Wijngaarden’s descendents, documentary evidence from a variety of sources, and close visual comparisons of the fakes with Van Meegeren’s contemporary portraiture.

Whether the Gallery will actually list the pictures as definitively being by Van Meegeren is an open question. Since he never confessed to his early fakes, there is room for doubt, and frankly, if you’re running a museum, Van Meegeren’s name is just about the last one you want in your catalogue.

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