Art of Faking, The

Ever look at a piece of art and say to yourself, "Even I could do that"? Of course, making art is not as easy as it looks. In fact, just copying a work of art is more difficult than you'd think.

Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter who lived from 1889 to 1947, was one of the world's most famous and successful forgers of art. A forger copies famous works of art and sells them as the real thing. Between 1923 and 1945, van Meegeren forged many paintings that he sold for millions of dollars. He was finally arrested in 1945 for selling a painting that he claimed was by Vermeer, a Dutch artist who had lived 300 years earlier. Selling national treasures was a crime punishable by death: van Meegeren confessed to painting the picture himself (because a painting he'd done himself would not be a national treasure). But no one believed him, so he was forced to make one of his fake paintings while police watched!

So, how did he do it? First, van Meegeren was a very good painter. In high school, he had an art teacher who insisted his students mix their own paints according to 17th-century formulas. Van Meegeren went to art school and to architecture school, and won an important award for drawing. He later became a popular portrait painter.

Van Meegeren also knew a lot about the kinds of paintings that people wanted to buy. He knew what art experts were saying-that there were some never-before-seen paintings by Vermeer hidden somewhere. Being a student of art, van Meegeren knew a lot about how those missing Vermeer paintings might look.

Copying a master's style is one thing, but how did van Meegeren make the fakes look 300 years old? First, he found an old painting from the 1600s and cut it to match the size of Vermeer's paintings. He carefully scraped at the old painting, leaving only a thin layer of paint that had cracked with age. He made his own paint, using the same color pigments that Vermeer had used. To make sure the paint would look old when it dried, he added certain chemicals to it. And he bought some badger-hair shaving brushes and made his own paintbrushes out of them, because Vermeer's paintbrushes were made of badger hair. Well prepared for success, van Meegeren then spent a year painting his masterpiece.

After the painting was finished there was still more to do. He baked his painting in an oven to harden the paint. Then he covered it with a light coat of varnish and rolled it around a cylinder to make the surface crack. Because cracks in old paintings usually have dirt in them, van Meegeren covered the painting with black ink, letting it seep into the cracks he had just made. Then he wiped the surface clean and painted it with one final layer of light brown varnish.

He still wasn't done. To make his painting look like it had been through many hands, he made a little tear in the canvas and picked away some of the paint. At last it was done and ready to be sold as a genuine lost Vermeer painting.

In the end, van Meegeren made several mistakes. A simple magnifying glass quickly revealed the black ink in the cracks. A pigment test showed hints of cobalt blue in van Meegeren's carefully mixed paint-too bad there was no cobalt blue in Vermeer's day! X-rays and radiography showed traces of the old painting that van Meegeren had scraped away.

But, you have to wonder, if van Meegeren hadn't confessed, would anyone have found out his paintings were fakes?

Copyright Carus Publishing Company May/Jun 2007
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