[MSN] I Was Vermeer, Edward Marriott's biography of Han van Meegeren, the most famous forger in history, is both gripping and psychologically fascinating, says Edward Marriott

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Portrait of the artist as a copycat 

I Was Vermeer, Edward Marriott's biography of Han van Meegeren, the most
famous forger in history, is both gripping and psychologically fascinating,
says Edward Marriott 

Sunday July 30, 2006
The Observer 

 
Buy I Was Vermeer at the Guardian bookshop 
  
I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger Who Swindled the Nazis
by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp276)
On 25 June 1938, as part of the jubilee for the reign of the Dutch monarch
Queen Wilhelmina, Rotterdam's Boijmans Museum unveiled an exhibition
entitled Four Centuries of Masterpieces 1400-1800. The poster for the
exhibition featured a detail from Jan Vermeer's The Supper at Emmaus, a
recently discovered painting, donated to the museum after being bought for
520,000 guilders and a work now being widely touted as the 17th-century
artist's masterwork.

Day after day, one man returned to view Emmaus. Han van Meegeren, also an
artist, would stand alongside the awestruck pilgrims and pronounce: 'I can't
believe they paid half a million guilders for this. It's obviously a fake.'
At dinner with friends, he would take the same line, only to be roundly
contradicted. When his adult son, Jacques, visited him from Paris, van
Meegeren took him to the Boijmans. Afterwards, they sat in a cafe and
discussed the painting. 'What did you think of it?' he asked his son.
'It's a masterpiece,' Jacques replied. 'But a 20th-century masterpiece, not
a 17th-century one.'

'Then who do you think painted it?'

'You, papa.'

Han van Meegeren, the subject of Frank Wynne's gripping and psychologically
fascinating biography, would become the most famous forger in history. Born
in Deventer in 1889, he was from the start a patently gifted artist, but
also a man out of time, painting portraits in the manner of van Dyck when
Cubism and Futurism were electrifying critics in Paris and New York. Driven
by a desire for revenge, a drive that had its origins in childhood, when his
autocratic father would thunderously rubbish his artistic ambitions, later
reinforced by his dismissal at the hands of the Dutch art critics, he found
himself drawn to forgery.

His career began slowly. In 1913, he won the prestigious Hague Gold Medal
for his Study of the Interior of the Laurenskerk. Though van Meegeren
received no money for the award, the study sold for 1,000 guilders, the
equivalent of nearly £3,300 today. Sometime later, a foreign collector
contacted van Meegeren and asked if he could buy the picture. Van Meegeren
agreed and set to work to create a facsimile, intending to pass it off as
the original. Under pressure from his wife, he balked at the last minute.
The mathematics were striking: instead of the 1,000 guilders agreed, he was
paid just 80.

As gifted as his tastes were unfashionable, it did not take van Meegeren
long to see that forgery made financial sense. He plumped for Vermeer, the
artist he admired above all others and with whom he felt a bond. Like him,
Vermeer - or so he chose to believe - was an artist neglected and wronged by
critics and who had died almost unknown. But it was also a canny move; so
little was known of Vermeer's life and works that it would be easy to add to
the catalogue of accepted work. He started modestly, with a minor genre
piece: Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet, described by Wynne as 'forgery by
numbers'. Pastiche or not, it was authenticated and sold for 40,000
guilders. With the money, van Meegeren bought his first car, a Dodge sedan.

The forger, writes Wynne, 'must become a skilled art historian, a restorer,
a chemist, a graphologist and a documentalist if he is to exploit his
talents as a charlatan. It is not a vocation for the indolent'. Now based in
the south of France, van Meegeren was keeping himself busy, honing his
technique while working on bread-and-butter portraits of the local
merchants, expats and musicians. Though he had learnt as a student how to
make his own pigments, creating something that would pass as a major
17th-century piece of art, not to mention securing a reputable
authentication, was going to be a lot harder.

He devised a paint-hardening method using phenol and formaldehyde, the
composite elements of Bakelite, and built himself an oven in which, he
discovered, it was possible to recreate the distinctive craquelure of
17th-century paintings. Eventually, through an intermediary, The Supper at
Emmaus, featuring Christ and his disciples, was authenticated by no less a
figure than respected Dutch art critic Abraham Bredius. From there, it was
but a short step to the hallowed halls of the Boijmans.

Though he made a fortune from his forgeries, in the end owning some 15
country houses and 52 other properties, including hotels and nightclubs, his
downfall came when he was arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer to
Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering. When, finally, he admitted that the painting
was, in fact, a forgery, the resulting court case turned into a media
circus, a forum in which van Meegeren thrived. Here, at last, he got the
revenge he thirsted for. As the judge said in his summing-up: 'The art world
is reeling and experts are beginning to doubt the very basis of artistic
attribution. This was precisely what the defendant was trying to achieve.'

· To order I Was Vermeer for £13.99 with free UK p&p, go to
observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885