So how did Vermeer and Frans Hals, another great Dutch painter 50 years his senior, come to suffer a common fate? Their fame and popularity in the early 20^th century made them the victim of Holland's most well-known forger, Han van Meegeren. While his career is for art experts an embarrassing story to have to live down, it is also a tale that brings smiles to faces of ordinary Dutch folk. To this day they like the idea that van Meegeren fooled Hermann Goering into shelling out quite a few thousand guilders for the painting, Christ and the Adulteress, thinking it to be a genuine Jan Vermeer.

Van Meegeren is a natural subject for Harvard-educated art historian Jonathan Lopez, who has written an engaging, informative and well researched book, The Man who made Vermeers. In it he skillfully debunks some of the myths floating around van Meegeren that made him a folk hero when the story of his forgeries came to light after war's end in 1945. But Lopez does more than that, he frames the story of van Meegeren in the historic setting of the heady days of pre-war Europe and the subsequent war years that offered certain kinds of people a chance to profit from the rise of the Nazi regime.

Van Meegeren's story begins ordinary enough. The son of a French and history teacher, he started to study architecture, but switched over to art and even won a gold medal for the drawing of the Interior of the Church of Saint Lawrence (Laurenskerk) in Rotterdam. The award was given out every five years to an art student who created the best work at the art school in Delft. As Lopez quite rightly points out, it is an imitative work, harking back to various painters of another era. And, as it turns out, van Meegeren remained an imitator for he quite obviously lacked that inner spark that allows an artist to emerge with a personal voice.

In the early days of the 20^th century the forgery business had an unprecedented boom because of the huge appetite for 17^th century art, especially Dutch art, by the newly rich of North America and Europe. This appetite found a willing supplier in the form of a semi-illiterate former wallpaper hanger and housepainter, Theo van Wijngaarden. This resourceful character established a studio in The Hague where he trained van Meegeren as a restorer. Both men shared a tendency to find easy money that led them from deceptive 'overrestoration' to out and out forgery.

The earliest known forged works in which star pupil van Meegeren succeeded, centered on Frans Hals, the first of the great artists of the 17^th century Dutch school, and one of that period's greatest portrait painters. The artist's "sense of flash and dazzle" seemed to have a natural affinity to van Meegeren as Lopez's research has shown. Yet, looking at a black and white reproduction of The Smoking Boy painted by the forger around 1922, it seems impossible to believe that this work had been accepted as genuine by the renowned Dutch art historian, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. The man even bought this painting, a rather crude imitation of Hals' style, looking in part as if taken from such paintings as The Jolly Toper, Malle Babbe, and a painting now called The Laughing Cavalier though the young man in the painting is only faintly smiling. More shocking even than de Groot buying the Hals is that a few years later, the Boijmans Museum is persuaded to purchase van Meegeren's inept The Supper At Emmaus, convinced that it had been painted by Vermeer.

Eventually, van Meegeren also painted his own Laughing Cavalier, which was rejected as a fake by an Amsterdam dealer despite de Groot's insistence that it was a genuine work. The art historian's judgment had been fooled by the paint medium van Meegeren's teacher in the forgery business had developed to resist the usual alcohol test applied to verify old oil paintings. It may also have been ego since he had been fooled into buying The Smoking Boy.

Wary now of the unwelcome attention given to their The Laughing Cavalier, the two swindlers, for one has to call them this, switched to producing Vermeers. "As the great German expert Max Friedländer once put it, art dealers of the 1920s lulled themselves to sleep at night dreaming about Vermeer. Discovering a picture—any picture—that might be accepted as a Vermeer was the interwar art world's equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail," Lopez tells his readers. The Supper at Emmaus proved his point.

It is not difficult to imagine what this can lead to knowing the abundance and variations of Grail stories created over the centuries. These, of course, include the modern, preposterous, historically inaccurate and clumsily written novel, The Da Vinci Code. The forged Vemeers, to me, equal the clumsy style of The Da Vinci Code because van Meegeren never achieved the luminous nature of the Vermeer paintings. Yet, like the book, the paintings received undeserved attention, even adulation, and brought riches to their creator.

Lopez serves the reader best by having exposed and thus started the removal of the folk hero mantle from van Meegeren's cocky shoulders. Caught at the end of WWII and about to be incarcerated for being a Nazi collaborator, the forger "broke down" and admitted that he had forged Vermeers for sale to the enemy. What is soon pushed aside in the process of revealing his story and his setting out to clear him of this charge is the truth: he had made forgeries, and had been a Nazi sympathizer long before Holland came under German occupation. As it was, the Dutch needed a folk hero after the dark days of the war years, and van Meegeren fit the bill rather well because this story allowed ordinary people to laugh at the naivety of their former masters.

Those who enjoy this myth may not like what Lopez has to tell in his book, for even today the wily forger, who swindled Goering, can still raise a smile in Holland. For, to be honest, one of van Meegeren's greatest forgeries of all is the story he told at his trial. As one knows, myths are hard to defeat once established. Hence, Lopez may find it hard to convince a lot of people that his research has unraveled the carefully woven story of a supposedly unappreciated artist, who decided to turn to painting Vermeers to prove a point. It is a hoax, of course. Van Meegeren had a criminal mind that he managed to hide under his flamboyant charm, and grand lifestyle.

What is most revealing in this sordid tale is that Lopez shows, perhaps unintentionally, that van Meegeren, while a somewhat gifted forger, was not a talented artist. His own work tends toward kitsch, and that includes the legitimate society portraits he painted at various times of his career. I include into this category a drawing of then Princess Juliana's pet deer. Lopez claims that van Meegeren's artistic poise shows through in his early legitimate artwork, and uses the drawing of the deer as an example. The author seems to believe that van Meegeren could have been a great artist if only he had not been led astray by the forgeries. I cannot concur with this judgment.

For me, the highlight of this deer is not poise but sentimentality. It proves to me that despite his supposed art education, the forger lacked understanding of anatomy, a lack that is evident not only in this drawing, but also in so many of the forgeries he created. But even more revealing is that as an artist he lacked the depth needed to bring his subjects to life. All of his paintings, legitimate or forged, are without inner substance.

Just how art experts and art lovers fell for the truly abysmal creations is to me the greatest mystery of all, one that has not yet been unraveled. Perhaps one has to seek it in the psychology of what greed for riches and lust for ownership can do to blind men and women to such obvious faults.

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