Van Meegeren’s Early Vermeers
Jonathan Lopez reveals that three 1920s fake Vermeers are by the notorious art forger Han van Meegeren, who, far from being an independent operator, was part of a slick operation of organised art fraud.
Jonathan Lopez, Sunday, 29th June 2008
Best remembered today for having fabricated a fictitious ‘biblical’ period in the oeuvre of Johannes Vermeer, the notorious art forger Han van Meegeren (Fig. 2) never admitted to creating any fakes dating from before 1937, but there have always been rumours suggesting that his career had, in fact, begun much earlier than that. As is fairly well known, the government of the Netherlands arrested Van Meegeren as a Nazi collaborator at the end of World War II, charging that he had sold a Vermeer to Hermann Goering during the German occupation. When Van Meegeren revealed that he himself had painted Goering’s prized masterpiece, he became extremely popular with the general public, and his case was thereafter handled with kid gloves. Van Meegeren acknowledged forging only the six biblically-themed Vermeers that the government already knew to be connected to him through the front men who had brought the works to market, two ‘Pieter de Hoochs’ sold in the same manner, and a few unfinished items that remained in his atelier.1 Although confidential sources informed the investigative team working on the case that Van Meegeren had sold forgeries to ‘Englishmen and Americans’ decades before the outbreak of hostilities, the matter seems not to have received any official attention.2
The rumours, however, appear to have had a strong foundation in reality. In a notable 1995 essay, Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., curator of northern baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, linked three 1920s-vintage Vermeer forgeries to the workshop of a Dutch art-world intriguer named Theo van Wijngaarden, long known as a mentor and associate of Van Meegeren.3 New investigations, extending the line of enquiry first proposed by Wheelock, have now added a further twist to this revelation. Interviews with members of Van Wijngaarden’s family, archival research in the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain and the US, and comparisons of the fakes with Van Meegeren’s contemporaneous work in his own name, combine to suggest that Van Meegeren himself was the creator of the forgeries in question. Likewise, the evidence indicates that, during this early phase of his career, Van Meegeren worked not as an independent operator, as he is known to have done later, but as a forger to the trade, a cog in the international machinery of organised art fraud.
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Comments
Kreuger
February 2nd, 2009 4:29pmThe provenance of this Van Meegeren fraud and its counterpart was already revealed by Van Meegeren's authorised biographer: F. H. Kreuger "A New Vermeer" 2007 and "MeesterVervalser" 2004
Shirley Simmons
February 19th, 2009 3:47amDoes anyone know where the 'fake' Lace Maker is?? Is it in a museum or is it still lost. I have a signed copy of the Lace Maker that I bought at an auction. I've compared it with the online picture of the Vermeer and it is an uncanny replica. It's the exact size of the original and the canvas and frame are very, very old.
greta kooistra
March 24th, 2009 11:32pmI have a friend on Bonaire N.A. who owns several paintings signed by van Meegeren could you please contact gretakooistra@gmail.com
Jonathan Lopez
June 15th, 2009 11:07pmWith due respect to F.H. Kreuger, his statement at post no. 1 is factually erroneous.
Neither of the two books he cites in any way “reveals the provenance” of the works under discussion in this Apollo essay. Rather, in his books, Mr. Kreuger speculates that two of the pseudo-Vermeers discussed here--the ones formerly owned by Andrew Mellon--may well have been by Van Meegeren’s hand because the forger’s son, Jacques, left behind an unpublished memoir (mostly ghost-written by his wife) in which he mentions that his father at one time made an unidentified Vermeer forgery in the form of “a woman’s portrait.”
Kreuger assumes this statement must refer to one of Mellon's fakes, although nothing in Jacques van Meegeren's memoir indicates that to be the case. Likewise, given that Jacques van Meegeren also claimed several works for his father’s oeuvre with documented provenances going back over 150 years, his memoir is actually of very little probative value.
Mere speculation about Van Meegeren’s authorship of these paintings is, in and of itself, hardly anything unusual: as early as the 1950s, the research chemist Paul Coremans stated that it would be perfectly reasonable to think Van Meegeren responsible for them--although he too had no real evidence to back up his argument.
I would like to state clearly and for the record that none of the archival documents, interviews, or visual comparisons cited in this Apollo essay appears anywhere in Mr. Kreuger’s books, nor does Mr. Kreuger elucidate the chain of connections examined in this Apollo essay to link Van Meegeren back to the early Vermeer fakes. The work presented here is original, and its sources are properly and exhaustively cited.
Very truly yours,
Jonathan Lopez
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