The forger's question

In 1945, shortly after the liberation of the Netherlands, a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren was arrested and charged with a crime that could have cost him his life. Among the possessions of the Nazi leader Hermann Göring, investigators had found a previously unknown painting by Johannes Vermeer, and the trail led back to van Meegeren, who had sold it. Selling a national treasure to the enemy was treason. Van Meegeren's defence was as audacious as it was unexpected: the painting, he insisted, was not a national treasure at all. He had painted it himself.

Nobody believed him at first. To prove his claim, he agreed to produce another 'Vermeer' under the eyes of court-appointed witnesses, and over several weeks he did exactly that. His method was ingenious: he reused genuine seventeenth-century canvases and baked the paint in an oven with a synthetic resin until it was hard enough to pass for three hundred years old. It soon emerged that several of the most admired Vermeers to appear in the previous decade, including The Supper at Emmaus, which a leading art historian had hailed as perhaps the master's finest work, were his. Overnight, the collaborator became something close to a folk hero: the man who had pulled the wool over Göring's eyes. He was convicted of forgery, sentenced to a year in prison, and died of a heart attack before he could serve it.

What makes the story more than a historical curiosity is the uncomfortable question it raises. On the day before the confession, The Supper at Emmaus hung in a major museum and drew admiring crowds. On the day after, it was the same canvas, the same paint, the same arrangement of light and shadow; not a single brushstroke had changed. Yet its value, both financial and artistic, collapsed almost overnight. If our admiration can be switched off by a single piece of information, what exactly were we admiring in the first place?

One answer is that we were never responding to the picture alone. Philosophers have long argued that an artwork is not merely a physical object but an achievement, and that our appreciation is bound up with what we believe about how it came to be. A Vermeer is extraordinary not only because it is beautiful but because a particular man in seventeenth-century Delft found a way of seeing that nobody had found before. A skilful imitation of that vision, made three centuries later, is a different achievement altogether, however impressive it may be. On this account, the experts were not foolish to revise their judgement; they were simply judging something new.

There is, however, a less flattering explanation. With hindsight, van Meegeren's fakes look rather clumsy, and it is hard to see how they ever passed muster. The faces are heavy-lidded and oddly modern, and several critics have since remarked that they resemble the film stars of the 1930s more than anyone Vermeer could have known. That so many experts were taken in suggests that they saw what they expected to see, and that the forger succeeded less by matching Vermeer's genius than by matching his own era's idea of it. Seen this way, the episode is less about the nature of art than about the power of reputation to shape what we perceive.

Both explanations are probably true, and the tension between them has not gone away. Indeed, today's art market, in which a famous signature can multiply a painting's price a hundredfold, still rests on the assumption that we can tell the real thing from a copy and that the difference matters. Van Meegeren's lasting achievement was to show how fragile that assumption is. He set out to fool the experts; he ended up exposing them and, in a sense, the rest of us as well.