ITP 50: Woman Reading Music, by Han van Meegeren

Date: 01-04-2001
Owning Institution: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   20th Century    

In a hushed seventeenth-century interior a young girl is reading a sheet of music. The neck of her lute can be seen in silhouette beside her. Sunlight floods through the leaded glass of the window at which she sits. The artist has taken particular care over the highlights in her pearl earring and necklace. In anticipation of the main exhibtion at the National Gallery this summer, “Vermeer and the School of Delft” this week’s picture is Vermeer’s own incomparable Woman Reading Music.

April Fool! In fact, the picture is by one of the most celebrated hoaxers of the twentieth century, Henricus Antonius “Han” van Meegeren. Van Meegeren created more than half a dozen fake Vermeers in the 1930s and 1940s, successfully passing several of them off as the real thing, and earning himself a fortune in the process. Leading collectors of the day paid the equivalent of many millions of pounds for Van Meegeren’s “Vermeers”. By the time he was unmasked, in 1945, he was found to be in possession of huge amounts of paper money – hard cash that was necessary, in wartime Holland, to feed his prodigious appetite for alcohol, drugs and prostitutes.

“The Van Meegeren Affair”, as it came to be known, reflected badly on the self-styled connoisseurs who had collected the faker’s work with such naïve enthusiasm; and even worse on their advisers, who included many of the leading Dutch art scholars of the day. Indeed one of Van Meegeren’s principal motives for forging Vermeer’s work was the desire to humiliate the critics and art historians who had so signally failed to recognise his own talent. An embittered and mediocre painter of lifeless boardroom portraits, unpleasant soft-porn fantasies and saccharine sweet animal paintings – an especially execrable example of which, The Deer, was for several years reproduced as Holland’s best-selling Christmas card – Van Meegeren saw himself none the less as a tragically neglected genius. Having mastered the art of self-deception, he set out to deceive others.

His first target was the renowned Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius. To fool Bredius, he created a large Supper at Emmaus, which was to be acclaimed not only as a great lost Vermeer but one which shed new light on the master’s career – showing that he had painted religious pictures as well as the genre scenes for which he was known. It was ingenious of Van Meegeren to have invented a new kind of Vermeer, which helped to explain the differences between his fake and the real thing. Bredius managed to see in the picture “a depth of feeling … such as is found in no other work of his.” There were dissenting voices, notably that of an agent working for the art dealer Joseph Duveen, whose two-word brief to his employer was “rotten fake”. But Bredius was held in such high renown that his view prevailed. The picture was bought for the Boymans-Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam for a huge sum. Van Meegeren went on to “uncover” and sell a whole series of other lost Vermeers. Hermann Goering was so keen to acquire one of these, Christ Taken with the Woman in Adultery, that in exchange for it he gave Van Meegeren some 200 of the Dutch paintings that Hitler’s troops had successfully pillaged from the museums of Northern Europe.

The deception was only uncovered when Van Meegeren was put on trial after the Second World War for the treasonable offence of selling his nation’s patrimony to the Nazis. His defence took the form of a confession. Goering’s picture was not, Van Meegeren told his stunned inquisitors, a jewel in the crown of Dutch heritage. He had painted it himself. In fact, he had painted all the “Vermeers” that had been through his hands. To prove it he knocked one up in the courtroom. Then with exquisite timing, before having served a single day of his prison sentence, he contrived to die of a heart attack.

Nowadays it seem hard to believe that anyone could have mistaken his pastiches for real Vermeers, but if people want to believe something passionately enough they can usually find ways of persuading themselves that it must be true. It cannot have been easy, because even though the painting reproduced here is by some considerable distance Van Meegeren’s best forgery it differs from the Delft master’s work in a multitude of ways.

Working on the principle that it takes one to know one, I went to see Leo Stevenson, leading Vermeer pasticheur of the present, for a quick crash-course in fake detection. According to Stevenson, the depiction of light in the painting is the first clue. “It is obviously based on imagination rather than observation. It is like film-lighting, with none of the subtle blurring of tones and lines that you find in a Vermeer. In Vermeer’s work the brightest parts of the painting will never have a hard edge. Also, if the forehead and nose are going to be so brightly lit, then logically speaking more of the light reflected off the table and paper in front of the woman should be thrown into her eyelids. But I know why that is. It’s because Van Meegeren has ripped off the figure of his woman from a real Vermeer, The Woman Reading a Letter in the Rijksmusuem, without taking the trouble to adjust the light falling on to her to the new luministic conditions of his own painting. That’s a real giveaway.”

Stevenson also points to the forger’s lack of understanding of seventeenth-century clothes, arguing that Van Meegeren has painted the woman’s blue robe, which would have been an overgarment in seveneteenth-century Holland, as if it were a twentieth-century blouse. And for good measure adds that the face is blatantly wrong, too. “It is not a seventeenth-century face at all. It is a face from a 1940s magazine, like some old glamour shot of Marlene Dietrich. Really, once you start looking, everything in the picture screams out that it is fake.”

Van Meegeren artificially aged his pictures by putting them for several hours in a large oven. But still they look half-baked. As Stevenson puts it, “all the ingredients of a Vermeer are there, it’s just that they have been very badly cooked.”