Han Van Meegeren

Henricus Antonius "Han" van Meegeren (; 10 October 1889 – 30 December 1947) was a Dutch painter and portraitist, considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. Van Meegeren became a national hero after World War II when it was revealed that he had sold a forged painting to ''Reichsmarschall'' Hermann Göring during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Van Meegeren attempted to make a career as an artist, but art critics dismissed his work. He decided to prove his talent by forging paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. Leading experts of the time accepted his paintings as genuine 17th-century works, including art collector Abraham Bredius.

During World War II, Göring purchased one of Van Meegeren's " Vermeers", which became one of his most prized possessions. Following the war, Van Meegeren was arrested on a charge of selling cultural property to the Nazis. Facing a possible death penalty, he confessed that the painting was a forgery, and was subsequently convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. However, he died less than two months later after suffering from two heart attacks. A biography in 1967 estimated that Van Meegeren duped buyers out of more than US$30million, his victims including the Dutch government.

Early years

Han (diminutive for Henri or Henricus) van Meegeren was born 10 October 1889, the third of five children of Augusta Louisa Henrietta Camps and Hendrikus Johannes van Meegeren, a French and history teacher at the Kweekschool (training college for schoolteachers) in the provincial city of Deventer.

While attending the Higher Burger School, Han met teacher and painter Bartus Korteling (1853–1930) who became his mentor. Korteling had been inspired by Johannes Vermeer and taught Van Meegeren Vermeer's techniques. Korteling had rejected the Impressionist movement and other modern trends as decadent, degenerate art, and his strong personal influence may have led Van Meegeren to do likewise.

Van Meegeren's father did not share his son's love of art; he often forced Han to write a hundred times, "I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing." Instead, Han's father compelled him to study architecture at the Delft University of Technology in 1907. He received drawing and painting lessons, as well. He easily passed his preliminary examinations but never took the ''Ingenieurs'' (final) examination because he did not want to become an architect. He nevertheless proved to be an apt architect and designed the clubhouse for his rowing club in Delft which still exists (see image).

In 1913, Van Meegeren gave up his architecture studies and concentrated on drawing and painting at the art school in The Hague. On 8 January 1913, he received the prestigious Gold Medal from the Technical University in Delft for his ''Study of the Interior of the Church of Saint Lawrence'' (Laurenskerk) in Rotterdam. The award was given every five years to an art student who created the best work, and was accompanied by a gold medal.

On 18 April 1912, Van Meegeren married fellow art student Anna de Voogt who was pregnant with their first child. The couple initially lived with Anna's grandmother in Rijswijk, and their son Jacques Henri Emil van Meegeren was born there on 26 August 1912.

Career as a legitimate painter

In 1914, Van Meegeren moved his family to Scheveningen and completed the diploma examination at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, which allowed him to teach. He took a position as the assistant to the Professor of Drawing and Art History. In March 1915, his daughter Pauline was born, later called Inez. To supplement his small salary of 75 guldens per month, Han sketched posters and painted pictures for Christmas cards, still-life, landscapes, and portraits for the commercial art trade. Many of these paintings are quite valuable today.

Van Meegeren's first exhibition was held from April to May 1917 at the Kunstzaal Pictura in the Hague. In December 1919, he was accepted as a member by the Haagse Kunstkring, an exclusive society of writers and painters who met weekly on the premises of the Ridderzaal. Although he had been accepted, he was ultimately denied the position of chairman. He painted the tame roe deer belonging to Princess Juliana. The painting, ''Hertje'' (''The Fawn'' or ''The Deer''), was completed in 1921, and became popular in the Netherlands. He undertook numerous journeys to Belgium, France, Italy, and England, and acquired a name for himself as a portraitist, earning commissions from English and American socialites who spent their winter vacations on the Côte d'Azur. His clients were impressed by his understanding of the 17th-century techniques of the Dutch masters. Throughout his life, Van Meegeren signed his own paintings with his own signature.

By all accounts, infidelity was responsible for the breakup of Van Meegeren's marriage to Anna de Voogt; the couple divorced on 19 July 1923. Anna moved to Paris, where Van Meegeren visited his children from time to time. He dedicated himself to portraiture and began producing forgeries to increase his income.

He married actress Johanna Theresia Oerlemans in Woerden in 1928, with whom he had been living for the past three years. Johanna's stage name was Jo van Walraven, and she had previously been married to art critic and journalist Dr. C H. de Boer (Carel de Boer). She brought their daughter Viola into the Van Meegeren household.

Rejection by the critics

Van Meegeren had become a well-known painter in the Netherlands with the success of ''Hertje'' (1921) and ''Straatzangers'' (1928). His first legitimate copies were painted in 1923, his ''Laughing Cavalier'' and ''Happy Smoker'', both in the style of Frans Hals. By 1928, the similarity of Van Meegeren's paintings to those of the Old Masters began to draw the reproach of Dutch art critics, who said that his talent was limited outside of copying other artists' work.

One critic wrote that he was "a gifted technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school, he has every virtue except originality". Van Meegeren responded in a series of aggressive articles in ''De Kemphaan'' ("The Ruff"), a monthly periodical published by Van Meegeren and journalist Jan Ubink from April 1928 until March 1930. Jonathan Lopez writes that Van Meegeren "denounced modern painting as 'art-Bolshevism' in the articles, described its proponents as a 'slimy bunch of woman-haters and negro-lovers,' and invoked the image of 'a Jew with a handcart' as a symbol for the international art market".

Van Meegeren set out to prove to the art critics that he could more than ''copy'' the Dutch Masters; he would produce a work to rival theirs.

The "perfect forgery"

In 1932, Van Meegeren moved to the southern French village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin with his wife. There he rented a furnished mansion called "''Primavera''" and set out to define the chemical and technical procedures that would be necessary to create his perfect forgeries. He bought authentic 17th-century canvases and mixed his own paints from raw materials (such as lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, and cinnabar) using old formulas to ensure that they could pass as authentic. In addition, he created his own badger-hair paintbrushes similar to those that Vermeer was known to have used.

He came up with a scheme of using phenol formaldehyde (Bakelite) to cause the paints to harden after application, making the paintings appear as if they were 300 years old. Van Meegeren would first mix his paints with lilac oil, to stop the colours from fading or yellowing in heat. (This caused his studio to smell so strongly of lilacs that he kept a vase of fresh lilacs nearby so that visitors would not be suspicious.) Then, after completing a painting, he would bake it at to to harden the paint, and then roll it over a cylinder to increase the cracks. Later, he would wash the painting in black India ink to fill in the cracks.

It took Van Meegeren six years to work out his techniques, but ultimately he was pleased with his work on both artistic and deceptive levels. Two of these trial paintings were painted as if by Vermeer: ''Lady Reading Music'', after the genuine paintings '' Woman in Blue Reading a Letter'' at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and ''Lady Playing Music'', after Vermeer's '' Woman With a Lute Near a Window'' hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Van Meegeren did not sell these paintings; both are now at the Rijksmuseum.

Following a journey to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Van Meegeren painted ''The Supper at Emmaus''. In 1934 Van Meegeren had bought a seventeenth century mediocre Dutch painting, ''The Awakening of Lazarus'', and on this foundation he created his masterpiece ''à la Vermeer''. The experts assumed that Vermeer had studied in Italy, so Van Meegeren used the version of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's '' Supper at Emmaus'', located at Milan's Pinacoteca di Brera, as a model. He gave the painting to his friend, attorney C. A. Boon, telling him that it was a genuine Vermeer, and asked him to show it to Dr. Abraham Bredius, the art historian, in Monaco. In October 1932, Bredius had already published an article about two recently discovered alleged Vermeer paintings, which he defined as "Landscape" and "Man and Woman at a Spinet". He claimed the former to be a fake, and described it as "a landscape of the eighteenth century into which had been imported scraps of the ' View of Delft'" (mostly the Delft New Church's tower). The ''Man and Woman at a Spinet'', instead, not only was judged as an "authentic Vermeer", but also "very beautiful", and "one of the finest gems of the master's œuvre". In September 1937, Bredius examined ''The Supper at Emmaus'' and, writing in ''The Burlington Magazine'', he accepted it as a genuine Vermeer and praised it very highly as "''the'' masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft". The usually required evidences, such as resilience of colours against chemical solutions, white lead analysis, x-rays images, micro-spectroscopy of the colouring substances, confirmed it to be an authentic Vermeer.

The painting was purchased by The Rembrandt Society for fl.520,000 (€235,000 or about €4,640,000 today), with the aid of wealthy shipowner Willem van der Vorm, and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 1938, the piece was highlighted in a special exhibition in occasion of Queen Wilhelmina's Jubilee at a Rotterdam museum, along with 450 Dutch old masters dating from 1400 to 1800. A. Feulner wrote in the "Magazine for heHistory of Art", "In the rather isolated area in which the Vermeer picture hung, it was as quiet as in a chapel. The feeling of the consecration overflows on the visitors, although the picture has no ties to ritual or church", and despite the presence of masterpieces of Rembrandt and Grünewald, it was defined as "the spiritual centre" of the whole exhibition.

In 1938, Van Meegeren moved to Nice

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