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The twentieth century witnessed a blossoming of inventive forgery. Han Van Meegeren was a failed artist who decided to prove his worth by painting works in the style of great artists of the past, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, he produced some ten paintings that were accepted as genuine Vermeers and “great discoveries.” Van Meegeren earned millions for his forgeries, many of which had religious themes, and fooled the leading experts, museum directors, and collectors of the day. He used badger-hair brushes so that not a single modern bristle would ever be found embedded in the paint of his forgeries. He ground his pigments in oil of lilac and made a unique resin mixture that gave the paint an enamel-like surface, and he baked the canvas in the oven for two hours to harden the paint. Van Meegeren’s most notorious work was Christ at Emmaus, which the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius acclaimed as Vermeer’s greatest achievement.

“It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio!” Bredius wrote. “And what a picture! . . . we have here a—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, . . . quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.”30

No one can say how long these forgeries would have remained in museums and prominent collections if one of the works hadn’t ended up in the possession of Nazi Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. After the war the work was traced back to its dealer, van Meegeren, and he was charged with collaboration for selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy. He confessed to serial forgery, a much less serious offense, but no one would believe him. To prove it he painted a brand new fake in prison while awaiting trial. After the work was examined by a scientific commission, van Meegeren’s confession was accepted.

“Yesterday, this picture was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he wrote before serving a one-year sentence. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”

It may be said that the art world holds no fury like the expert duped. While it seems clear that van Meegeren’s success owed much to his talent, his brushwork and compositions are now criticized for their coarseness and shapelessness. Philosopher Denis Dutton has noted that a face in one of van Meegeren’s “masterpieces” resembles Greta Garbo’s.

Bredius’s praise for Christ at Emmaus helps illustrate why so many scholars and institutions are duped at least once in their careers. Often experts have preconceived ideas about a certain artist or era and are just waiting to see them proven by a “rare find.” Bredius was the scholar who had theorized that there might be undiscovered works by Vermeer with religious themes. In the words of Mark Jones, editor of Fake? The Art of Deception, the catalog for a popular exhibition held at the British Museum in 1990 (an exhibition which Drewe almost certainly visited), “Present Piltdown Man [a hoax in which an oranguntan’s jawbone and a modern man’s skull were claimed to be the remains of an early human] to a paleontologist out of the blue and it will be rejected out of hand. Present it to a paleontologist whose predictions about the ‘missing link’ between ape and man have been awaiting just such evidence and it will seem entirely credible.”

Historians and dealers continue to be seduced by the notion that lost treasures are out there waiting to be found; they are willing to pay top dollar as well as lower their threshold for scrutiny. Take the Zagreb museum, which opened with great fanfare in 1987 and claimed to be the Louvre of Yugoslavia. Its curators