"Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. Whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit they have made" (Psalm 7:14 to 15). Deceit rarely stays small. A lie told for one reason soon needs another lie to protect it, and before long the person telling it is trapped inside a story they can no longer control.
This story about deceit is one of the strangest in the history of art. It began with wounded pride, grew through greed and nearly ended in a death sentence. We retell it in our own words, correct a few details that the original illustration got wrong, and end with a takeaway for preaching or reflection. If you want to think further about how lies work on us, Sopranu's review of Paul Ekman's Telling Lies and of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) are worth a look.
Story in this post:
The Greatest Forger: Han van Meegeren and the Fake Vermeers
The original illustration says van Meegeren sold The Supper at Emmaus to the Nazis and was acquitted. In fact he sold a different fake, Christ with the Adulteress, to Hermann Göring, and in 1947 he was convicted of forgery and fraud. We have corrected these details below.
It may be the greatest hoax in the history of art. Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter with a grudge. In the years before the Second World War, the critics were merciless about his exhibitions. One described him as a gifted technician who had made a kind of composite copy of the Renaissance school, a man with every virtue except originality.
The criticism stung, and van Meegeren decided to strike back. He would prove that the experts who dismissed him could not tell a masterpiece from a fake. He painted a picture in the style of the great seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, gave it the title The Supper at Emmaus, and arranged for it to come before one of the most respected art historians of the day, Abraham Bredius.
Bredius took the bait completely. In a 1937 article in the Burlington Magazine he wrote that it was a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he suddenly found himself in front of a previously unknown painting by a great master. He went on to call it, in effect, the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.
The art world gasped. The painting was bought for the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam for a sum reported at more than half a million guilders, a fortune at the time, and it was hung with great ceremony.
According to the account in The Telegraph on which this story is based, van Meegeren had planned to reveal the forgery publicly once it was on display, humiliating his critics and destroying their reputations. Greed got the better of him. Instead of confessing, he painted more fake Vermeers and sold them, earning millions.
When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, he went further still. He sold one of his forgeries, Christ with the Adulteress, to Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, who was building a vast private art collection.
That sale almost proved to be his undoing. After the war, the Allies were determined to return the artworks gathered by the Nazis to their rightful owners. A trail of paperwork led investigators to van Meegeren's door. They wanted to know where he had obtained the Vermeer he had sold to Göring.
Van Meegeren was not willing to tell the truth, and so in 1945 he was arrested and accused of collaborating with the enemy by selling a Dutch national treasure to the Nazis. The charge was a serious one. In the aftermath of the occupation, collaboration could be punished with the harshest penalties.
Sitting in prison, facing the possibility of death, van Meegeren finally had a change of heart. He confessed that the painting was not a Vermeer at all. He had painted it himself. But nobody believed him. The deception he had built was so convincing that the experts insisted the painting was genuine.
The only way to prove his innocence was to produce another fake, and so he did. Under guard, he spent weeks painting a new "Vermeer", Jesus Among the Doctors, literally painting for his life.
The final twist is that van Meegeren became something of a national hero. He had fooled Göring and made the Nazi regime look foolish. The treason charge fell away. In 1947 he was instead convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to one year in prison, but his health was failing, and he died of a heart attack in December 1947 before serving his sentence.
Takeaway: Van Meegeren's first lie was meant to settle a score. It ended up running his life, and in the end he could only escape it by painting another lie. That is how deceit works. Scripture warns that a lying tongue is something God hates (Proverbs 6:16 to 19) and that the one who digs a pit falls into it (Psalm 7:15). Paul's alternative is simple and demanding: put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbour (Ephesians 4:25). Is there a small deception in your own life that is quietly growing, and what would it cost to tell the truth today rather than later?
Source: Based on "The forger who fooled the world", The Telegraph, 5 August 2006. Dates and details checked against Essential Vermeer and published accounts of van Meegeren's trial.
Final thoughts
Wounded pride led to a clever lie, the lie led to greed, and greed led to a prison cell where nobody would believe the truth. Van Meegeren's story is entertaining, but it is also a sober picture of what deceit does to the person who practises it. Lies promise control and end up taking it away.
Where are you tempted to manage how others see you rather than simply being honest? The freedom of telling the truth may feel risky, but it is far lighter to carry than a forgery.
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These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.