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By Root 1552 0

’s two most acclaimed collectors owned five Van Meegeren forgeries between them. In the three-year span from 1939 to 1942, they had paid out more than $20 million in today’s dollars. Van Meegeren, awash in cash and seemingly able to sell any daub he produced, had grown ever more reckless. For his monumental Last Supper, yet another “Vermeer,” he had not even bothered to scrape the old canvas clean to guard himself against the prying eye of an X-ray machine, as he had done so meticulously with Emmaus. Now he simply bought an old picture and painted over it, confident that nobody would take the trouble to look beneath the surface.

No matter how many parties he threw, Van Meegeren could not spend all his money on women and drinking. He tried. He fancied himself an expert on Vermeer and on women, prostitutes mostly, and one acquaintance recalled that “he bought women by the dozen.” He lavished a fortune on prostitutes at every step of the social scale, from the cheapest and most wretched to the most elegant of courtesans.

And still a fortune remained. Van Meegeren turned to real estate; by one account, he bought some fifty houses and nightclubs, most of them in Amsterdam. He stashed his money in thick wads and hid them throughout his house. (In 1942, when the government issued an edict calling for the surrender of all 1,000-guilder bills, then worth roughly $400 apiece, Van Meegeren turned in 2,800 bills. That stack of cash was the equivalent of more than $10 million today.) He updated his old story about having won the French lottery. Now he told people he had won it twice.

Van Meegeren’s forgeries grew almost shockingly crude, far worse than Emmaus. His fifth Vermeer, for instance, depicted Isaac Blessing Jacob. The figures are as flat as paper cutouts, and Jacob looks as if he is braced to receive a karate chop to the neck rather than a blessing. But nothing could slow the juggernaut. Van der Vorm bought Isaac Blessing Jacob for $6 million in today’s dollars.

The Dutch state proved as gullible as any private buyer. Eager to make amends for having missed out on Emmaus, the state soon found a new Vermeer of its own. That painting, The Washing of Christ’s Feet, may be even worse than Isaac Blessing Jacob. Jammed with Van Meegeren’s familiar zombies, the picture shows Jesus and four other figures squeezed near a table. It is impossible to make out what space the table occupies or where the figures are in relation to one another. Jesus’ arm seems broken at the elbow. His right hand—the spiritual focus of the picture—extends toward Mary, to bless her, but as one modern critic notes, “It looks disturbingly as though Christ is trying to prevent Martha from bumping her sister with the bread platter.”

The Rijksmuseum appointed a team of seven experts, Hannema among them, to advise it on the proposed purchase. One of the seven, a University of Amsterdam art historian named J. Q. Altena, declared The Washing of Christ’s Feet a forgery. Even so explosive a charge did not derail the purchase, or even delay it. “None of us liked it very much,” Hannema said later, “but we were afraid it would go to Germany.” Instead, it stayed in Holland. The price in today’s dollars was just under $6 million.

By this time the Van Meegeren saga had no place for a voice of reason. Instead, made foolish by fear and greed, buyers rushed to grab these strange masterpieces before they lost their chance. No one turned up in the middle of the action as often as Hoogendijk, the Amsterdam art dealer (and the dealer who had sold Emmaus). Van Meegeren sold five of his forgeries via Hoogendijk. Astonishingly, there is no evidence that the dealer ever realized he was caught up in an enormous fraud.

When the truth finally came out, Hoogendijk sounded more dazed than angry, like the victim of a stage hypnotist who snaps awake to find that he has been waltzing around the floor with a broomstick. “I do not understand how it could possibly have happened,” he moaned. “A psychologist could explain it better than I can.”

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ALL IN THE TIMING

Despite Emmaus’s