F. Wynne, I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger, London, Bloomsbury, 2006.

The name Han (short for Johan) van Meegeren, artist, businessman, and fraudster is not one with whom many present-generation people are familiar. However, starting in the late 1920s his name preceded him, so to speak. So much so that, at the time the Dutch Ministry of Justice put him on trial (for forgery as well as doing business with the German occupation authorities) the media were full of his exploits and thousands of people demonstrated for or against him. Nor, as the list of books that have been written about him shows, is interest in him dead even today.

Fredericus Antonius (to use his full Dutch name) van Meegeren was born in 1893 in the city of Deventer to a Catholic family. From early on he displayed artistic talent and wished to become an artist, a tendency his father, a high school teacher, did everything (well, almost everything) he could to break. He nevertheless succeeded in making it through various art schools (including one for architecture) and picking up at least one highly prestigious award. Success, however, was slow in coming, a fact that van Meegeren attributed–with good reason it would seem—to his realistic style. At a time when Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and any number of other isms were all the rage, who cared about a painter who was still in many ways following Eugene Delacroix?

Following a period in which he was so out of funds that he, his wife and son were forced to live with his grandmother, during World War I van Meegeren made his living mainly by teaching high-ranking ladies to paint—one of his students was the future queen of the Netherlands, Juliana. This line of business in turn helped him obtain commissions for portraits, the kind of work that has always been well rewarded if not always highly appreciated by the critics. Still being excluded from the first rank of painters rankled. Partly in order to prove himself in his own eyes, partly to avenge himself on the critics, and partly to make money in 1930-32 he started experimenting with the kind of techniques that would enable him to fake the work of the great seventeenth-century Dutch masters, including, above all, Johan Vermeer. It was anything but easy; canvas, paint, brush strokes, signature, the cracks that appear when old paint dries up, the nails that held the canvas to the frame, and many other details all had to be painfully studied and reproduced with sufficient accuracy to fool the best experts in the land.

In doing all this, van Meegeren was greatly helped by the fact that, following one of his teachers, he always prepared his own paint and had often worked as a restorer. In 1932 he was ready. From this point on his unleashed a steady stream of supposed masterpieces, selling them with the aid of agents who, following on his instructions, always told prospective clients that they had been put on the market by mysterious highly-placed men and women who did not wish to have their identities disclosed. Paintings by Vermeer apart, they included works by Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch. As each one was offered for sale it was submitted to experts for evaluation. Many were certified as genuine and sold for sums that ranged from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions. For van Meegeren the resulting publicity was a boon, encouraging him to produce more fake masterpieces which in turn were sold and generated publicity and so on. Amidst all this he also continued producing his own paintings carrying his own signature. Soon the point came where he no longer cared to follow his income, or so he told the Dutch tax authorities when they later took him to task. He also exchanged his first beautiful wife for two successive younger, equally beautiful, ones; bought property all over; moved into one mammoth villa after another; and lived it up in lavish parties thrown for the great and wealthy of the land.

World War II found van Meegeren, who had just returned from the Riviera, living in he Netherlands. Again using middlemen he contacted, or was contacted by, the representatives of Herman Goering. Known primarily as Hitler’s deputy (though the position was disputed) and as the creator of the Luftwaffe, Goering through a combination of bribes and requisitions, the latter primarily from Jews, had grown into one of the richest  men in all Europe. Like Hitler himself he invested some of his ill-gotten gains in art. It was destined for Karinhall, the enormous private residence the Nazi leader had built northeast of Berlin and named after his late Swedish wife.

As already, mentioned, the war having ended the Dutch ministry of justice lost no time in investigating van Meegeren’s affairs. Its agents, however, were up for a surprise; the artist whom they suspected of having collaborated with the enemy now claimed to be a forger who had made a fool of his German client, selling him every kind of fake and making millions on the deals. As to tax evasion, he claimed that he had long reached the point where the additional million no longer made a difference, with the result that he did not bother to write down the sums he received.

While the presiding judge, obviously a very conscientious one, tried to find his way through the mess, outside the courtroom people demonstrated for or against the hero/traitor Han van Meegeren. The verdict was guilty of forgery and the sentence, the lightest the judge had it in his power to give: one year in prison. Even this van Meegeren, who died of a heart attack in 1947, did not have to serve. Still the controversy around him and his paintings refused to die. In 1967 another commission of inquiry was set up, with the result that some paintings were again declared to be genuine and others to be the work of van Meegeren himself.

How many of the paintings presently in various museums and presented as masterpieces but really produced in the ateliers of modern fakers such as van Meegeren is impossible to say. Better turn our attention from the often saucy details of the story to the more important questions it gives rise to. In doing so I follow the discussion of the author of I was Vermeer, the Irish writer and translator Frank Wynne, albeit in much simplified form. They are as follows:

• What is beauty? Is it something innate to certain things, or is it merely a question of publicity and consensus?
• What, if anything, does the fact that an object is beautiful (or not) have to do with the identity of its author?
• What does the market price of a work of art have to do with its intrinsic value?
• Supposing a “genuine” work of art cannot be distinguished from its faked copy, why should the first be valued at a hundred times the value attached to the second?
• Given how profitable many aspects of the trade in art can be, can we trust the experts who are called upon to evaluate it?
• Can an artist fake his own work, as van Meegeren seems to have done more than once? Or must every object he produces be considered an original, even if it is identical with others he created?

So many questions, so few answers.