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Goodman pointed out another general characteristic of forgery episodes relevant to the van Meegeren case. Any supposed new discovery of a work by an old artist will be assessed and authenticated in the extent to which its features conform to the artist’s known oeuvre. But once incorporated into the artist’s oeuvre, a new work—maybe forgery—becomes part of that oeuvre, or what Goodman calls the “ dent class” of works against which further new discoveries will be In the case of van Meegeren, the Emmaus was stylistically closest of all his forgeries to the pre ce dent class of authentic Vermeers. Once it was authenticated by Bredius and hung on the wall of the Boy-mans Museum, its stylistic features—e.g., heavy, drooping eyes with walnut-shell lids—became an accepted aspect of the Vermeer style. Van Meegeren’s next forgery could therefore move farther from the original ce dent class of Vermeers. As van Meegeren continued to forge, Vermeer style” became more and more disfigured—to the point where last fakes, including the one Göring came to own, looked more mediocre German Expressionist paintings than anything the seventeenth century, let alone Vermeer, ever produced. (Van Meegeren was also aided the fact that most of his activity was carried out during the Second World War, with actual Vermeers in protective storage and unavailable direct comparison.) In the end, all of his forgeries were enough alike Meegeren’s confession.

Eric Hebborn

It is so easy for anyone to spot van Meegeren fakes that it can leave a false impression that forgery is not a serious problem for art history and connoisseurship. Eric Hebborn was a far more brilliant faker than Han Meegeren, and some of the damage he did to art history will likely never be undone. Hebborn was born into a cockney family in 1934. While still a student, he went to work for a London picture restorer named George Aczel. Restoration, it developed, meant much more than cleaning and retouching, and soon Hebborn was repainting large areas old works, cleverly “improving” them. An insignificant landscape became, with the addition of a balloon in its gray sky, an important (and expensive) painting recording the early history of aviation. As Hebborn wrote, “A cat added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape . . . Pop ular signatures came and unpop ular signatures went Poppies bloomed in dun-colored fields.” Such “improved” pictures went straight into gold frames and the plush surroundings of a dealer gallery where sales often netted Aczel a 500 percent profit.

Before long Hebborn realized that there is little need to begin with old painting: talent along with old inks and paper was enough, and talent was something Hebborn had in abundance. He began to produce works that showed up in the collections of the British Museum, Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, and innumerable private collections. These were not trifles mainly Old Master drawings authenticated by noted art historians, such Sir Anthony Blunt, and sold through Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and especially the respected London dealer Colnaghi.

By the time his career as forger concluded, Hebborn had produced his own account approximately a thousand fake drawings, purportedly by such hands as Castiglione, Mantegna, Rubens, Breughel, Dyck, Boucher, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, and Piranesi. But that isn’t there has been sculpture, a series of “important” Augustus Johns, works by Corot, Boldini, and even Hockney. A Re naissance bronze Narcissus was authenticated by Sir John Pope-Hennessy, and a “Parri Spinelli” drawing was purchased by Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo, for £14,000.

In 1978, Colnaghi’s realized that they had been selling fakes when that that a curator had noticed that a Pierpont Morgan “Francesco Cossa” was on paper identical to a “Savelli Sperandio” in Washington’s National Gallery. Since both of these drawings had been obtained from Hebborn, his reputation as a source of drawings crashed, and temporarily did the London market in Master drawings. Hebborn