Han van Meegeren - Biblical scene

MEEGEREN, Henricus Antonius van (1889-1947) Meegeren, Henricus Antonius van (Han), painter (Deventer 10-10-1889 - Amsterdam 30-12-1947). Son of Hendrikus Johannes van Meegeren, teacher, and Augusta Louisa Henrietta Camps. Married on 18-4-1912 to Anna de Voogt. From this marriage 1 son and 1 daughter were born. After divorce (19-7-1923) married on 22-11-1928 to Johanna Theresia Oerlemans, who brought 1 daughter from a previous marriage. This marriage, from which no children were born, was dissolved by divorce on December 18, 1943. image of Meegeren, Henricus Antonius van
Han van Meegeren showed from an early age that he had a great talent for drawing and painting. His drawing teacher at the HBS in Deventer, Bart Korteling (1853-1930), had a great influence on him. The choice of study may also have been partly determined by this talent for drawing: after his final exams, Van Meegeren went to study architecture at the Technical High School in Delft in 1912. That did not last long: encouraged by an award for one of his drawings submitted for a competition, he decided in 1913 to establish himself as a painter in The Hague. Here, in 1917, his first one-man exhibition of paintings received a favorable reception from art critics, who pointed out that Van Meegeren's style was very traditionally linked to the impressionism of the Hague School. However, a series of Bible scenes, produced in the early 1920s, showed that Van Meegeren was also strongly inspired by symbolism.
For the first time in 1923, Van Meegeren decided - selfishness seems to have driven him - to produce forgeries of paintings that resembled the old masters from the Golden Age and, moreover, often suggested the authenticity of a painting by imitating the old signature. The rapidly increasing appreciation for Frans Hals prompted him to produce two variations of this painter's well-known portraits of his paintings. The well-known art connoisseur and collector C. Hofstede de Groot bought one of them through an intermediary, the other was bought by the art auctioneer Fred after Hofstede de Groot's enthusiastic positive advice. Muller & Co. However, an inspection of this last painting revealed numerous flaws: modern dyes had been used, 20th-century wire nails emerged beneath the layers of paint and the composition of the glue used was also incorrect. Finally, Hofstede de Groot was forced to buy the second painting as well, and not much else was heard of the two 'Necks'. Van Meegeren's name was not mentioned in all this, although rumors regarding his involvement may have been circulated.
Undisturbed by this forgery intermezzo, Van Meegeren now became a valued and fairly successful artist in The Hague circles. In particular, some drawings reproduced in large editions and sold as sheet metal became known to a wide audience. In the 1930s and 1940s, many Dutch living rooms featured Van Meegeren's Hertje (1921) or his Street Singers (1928), somewhat sentimental or sweetly intended performances. He received many painting and drawing commissions for portraits. Yet this calm life of a second-rate artist seemed to satisfy him less and less. This was especially evident in the art reviews that he published from 1928 to 1930 in the monthly magazine De Kemphaan, a militant right-wing radical art magazine. In it he clearly spoke out in favor of the traditional-figurative art of earlier centuries and strongly complained about the partial preference of the art critics of his time for the 'moderns'. An argument in the Haagsche Kunstkring (Van Meegeren had been a member since 1919), which took place in 1932, could also be traced back to the contrast between 'traditionals' and 'moderns'. After this incident, Van Meegeren resigned from membership and decided to settle in the south of France with his wife.
Precisely in the month of Van Meegeren's departure from the Netherlands, October 1932, a Vermeer-style painting of Lady and Gentleman on a Spinet surfaced. This canvas ended up with a private individual through the art dealer, and only after 1951 would it be classified as a forgery. It is very likely that Van Meegeren was the creator. It was important that the Hague art expert A. Bredius had welcomed the discovery of this 'Vermeer' with enthusiasm in 1932. In his French studio, Van Meegeren initially practiced on three old masters - he produced two Vermeers, one Hals and one Ter Borch, which he kept to himself, perhaps because he found his copyist's work too transparent.
But in 1936 he decided to produce the painting The Supper of Emmaus (commonly referred to in the Netherlands as The Supper at Emmaus), which would soon become famous. It would become his best work in the field of forgery. He set up the painting in an almost technically perfect manner - having become wise through experiences in 1923. He bought an old canvas that he could paint over, carefully composed his paints with ingredients already known in the 17th century, used synthetic resin as a binding agent, according to the most modern instructions, and succeeded in imitating a deceptive antique craquelure. Based on a painting by MM da Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus, he chose a scene that was not known by Vermeer. But the painting would also be very satisfying from an aesthetic point of view - although opinions differed once the forgery was discovered. Style, composition and color were strikingly Vermeer-esque, and corresponded with the few biblical or classical group performances that Vermeer had made (especially the Martha and Mary in Edinburgh attributed to Vermeer). It was precisely the devoutly intimate shine and glow that matched the views and expectations that many art experts had regarding 17th-century Dutch painting in the 1930s. The strongly dominant admiration for Rembrandt seemed to 'Rembrandtize' all that art in a much more romantic-religious way than people would accept for Rembrandt's art after 1945.
Van Meegeren had given the 'Vermeer' that people were waiting for at the time, so to speak. After this Supper at Emmaus came to the Netherlands and was submitted for expertise to the same Bredius who had already given his approval to a previous, much less convincing, 'Vermeer', this painting became the 'find of the century'. The possibly even more enthusiastic director of the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, D. Hannema, soon managed to make the purchase for 550,000 with the help of Rotterdam patronage, and in 1938 a large exhibition 'Masterpieces from four centuries', which attracted a lot of attention. Only a few art critical voices raised a sound of doubt (including the historian Johan Huizinga).
Encouraged by this great success, Van Meegeren continued his forgeries over the next few years and brought them onto the market in various ways. Van Meegeren probably earned almost six million guilders from it. First in Nice, in 1938 and 1939, then - after the outbreak of war the Van Meegerens returned to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1939 - in Laren (Nh), he had no fewer than six 'Vermeers' and two 'De Hooghs ', all of which were sold for high prices through art dealers who believed they had acquired old finds. None of those pieces had the quality of The Supper at Emmaus, but the great success of the first discovery carried with it that of the subsequent works, each confirming the authenticity of all through similarities in representation or atmosphere.
During the occupation, Van Meegeren did not hesitate to reach out to a wide circle of contacts, if only to maintain good contacts with the art dealer. Collaboration with an art friend who had now become an NSB member, Martien Beversluis, led to attempts to once again draw attention to his own art. A one-man exhibition in Laren at the end of 1941 and in The Hague at the beginning of 1942 showed his drawing work, several of his works of art were sent to exhibitions in Germany and a beautiful, large edition Teekeningen I (1942) contained many reproductions of his recent work. Apart from the traditional symbolist features, which at that time even seemed somewhat old-fashioned, one could also find fascist and anti-Semitic symbolism with some difficulty. Van Meegeren would still be resented after the war to the Führer with a written dedication on the title page of this book, although it could not be proven that the jubilantly written dedication was from his hand - he had signed many copies. Van Meegeren was also probably not in favor of one of his art intermediaries selling the 'Vermeer' Christ and the Adulteress to Hermann Goering in 1943, although he did collect the more than one and a half million guilders paid for it. He would have been happier with another sale. One of his 'Vermeers' was also purchased by the government for the Rijksmuseum for more than one million guilders at the insistence of leading experts, somewhat hastily, precisely to prevent such old Dutch cultural property from falling into foreign (at that time: German) hands. . It seems that Van Meegeren was not very creative in the last years of the war. Becoming wealthy, he moved to Amsterdam in 1943, bought a large mansion on the Keizersgracht and became a generous and therefore well-liked grand seigneur in Amsterdam bohemian circles.
However, it would be the sale of the 'Vermeer' to Goering that led to months of captivity on May 29, 1945 under the, very ironic given the circumstances, suspicion of having sold away Dutch cultural property to the enemy. Perhaps extra stimulated by this, but also aware that one piece of the sale to Goering would trigger an avalanche of revelations and discoveries, he was ahead of this and kept the honor to himself: in July 1945 he confessed to being a wholesale forger and he did his best to prove it. For example, he voluntarily painted another 'Vermeer' while in captivity, Christ among the scribes. In defense of his forgery practices, Van Meegeren himself suggested that he had come to it as a misunderstood artist who wanted to expose the hollow pretensions of art experts and the whims of art snobbery. This immediately earned him the admiring support of a few and great popularity among a wide audience. The sale of the painting to Goering could also be presented as a kind of heroic act in this context - 'the man who swindled Goering', was the headline of an article in an American newspaper in 1947. In all this, the large sums were ignored. money that Van Meegeren had collected with his forgeries and it was not yet known that he had already been guilty of forgery practices at a time when there could be no question of misapprehension - in 1923. The accusation of political collaboration also disappeared completely, and the special judicial system had little support in that respect. Van Meegeren himself was provisionally released in the autumn of 1945 pending a criminal trial.
After a careful investigation by a specially appointed committee of experts, Van Meegeren was finally prosecuted for art forgery and fraud in transactions involving the sale of paintings that had not yet expired. The trial that took place before the Amsterdam court on October 29, 1947 naturally caused a stir. One of the expert witnesses was the Belgian professor PB Coremans, who was able to give a convincing report of the chemical and radiological examination of the forgeries, and thus again confirmed Van Meegeren's very emphatic confession. It would also have been possible to further prove that Van Meegeren had produced the paintings, partly thanks to a search of the still vacant studio in Nice, where his pre-war practice pieces and a replica of a later recreated 'Vermeer' were found, as well as remains of Van Meegeren's material (including part of the old canvas that Van Meegeren had used for his disciples at Emmaus). On November 12, 1947, Van Meegeren was sentenced to one year in prison. Shortly afterwards he died in captivity.
The lawsuit had some aftermath. One of the deceived buyers of a 'Vermeer', the Rotterdammer DG van Beuningen, hired a Belgian expert, J. Decoen, who expressly declared The Emmaus Gangers and Van Beuningen's 'Vermeer' to be genuine and Coremans' research of these paintings called fraud. A civil procedure initiated by Van Beuningen against Coremans in 1951 led to full rehabilitation of Coremans in 1955. After that, there were only a few who wanted to defend The Supper at Emmaus as a real Vermeer. Most of the forgeries were stored in warehouses, and upon the liquidation of the assets of Van Meegeren, who was declared bankrupt by his creditors, a large part of the then remaining capital, which had been accrued through interest, fell to the State, which through its own purchase and acting as owner had become the main creditor for Göring's seized 'Feindvermögen'.
P: In the dissertation by MH van den Brandhof mentioned under L, a list of 460 documented works is listed (153-163).
L: MM van Dantzig, Johannes Vermeer, the "Emmaüsgangers" and the critics (Leiden [etc.], 1947); W. Froentjes and AM de Wild, 'The scientific evidence in the Van Meegeren trial', in Chemisch Weekblad 45 (1949) 269-278; PB Coremans, Van Meegeren's faked Vermeers and De Hooghs. A scientific examination (Amsterdam, [1949]); J. Decoen, Back to the truth. Vermeer-Van Meegeren. Two authentic paintings by Vermeer [from French trans. by Ch.A. Cocheret] (Rotterdam, 1951); H. van de Waal, 'Forgery as a Stylistic Problem', in Aspects of art forgery [Papers read by H. van de Waal et al.] ('s-Gravenhage, 1962) 1-14; ML Doudart de la Grée, No statue for Han van Meegeren (Amsterdam, 1966); JRG Kilbracken, Van Meegeren (London [etc.], 1967); W. Froentjes and R. Breek, 'A new investigation into the identity of Van Meegeren's binder', in Chemisch Weekblad. Magazine (1977) 583-589; MH van den Brandhof, An early Vermeer from 1937. Backgrounds to the life and works of the painter/forger Han van Meegeren (Utrecht, [etc. 1979]); eadem, 'The Van Meegeren case', in Messing with the past. Edited by ZR Dittrich et al. (Utrecht [etc.], 1984) 153-162; Han van Meegeren (1889-1947). [Exhibition in Het Slot Zeist from June 15 to September 1, 1985.] With incl. by G. Peter Hoefnagels, 'Art as a criminological phenomenon'; A. Venema, Art Trade in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 (Amsterdam, 1986).