From the NS archive: The Van Meegeren affair 1 April 1950: The too-good-to-be-true “new” Vermeers.
By John Richardson
On 1 April 1950 – a propitious date for a book about fakery – the distinguished art historian John Richardson (later famous for his work on Picasso) reviewed Dr P Coremans Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers and De Hooghs , a new study of the celebrated Dutch art forger Han Van Meegeren.
It was only five years since the revelation that a number of “new” paintings by Vermeer were in fact the forgeries of an embittered and mediocre artist. Van Meegeren claimed they were made to foil the Nazis and save the national heritage from looting, but forgeries were in fact made to revenge himself on art experts who had failed to appreciate his worth. What mystified Richardson, however, was why no one had called out the paintings as fakes years earlier since, “