Christ and the Adulteress

Painted by Han van Meegeren around 1941–1942, Christ and the Adulteress is not a Vermeer at all but one of the most consequential forgeries of the twentieth century. Van Meegeren cast it as an early religious work in the manner of Vermeer, the same vein he had mined for his celebrated Christ at Emmaus of 1937. By choosing a biblical subject loosely indebted to Caravaggio rather than a domestic interior, he avoided direct comparison with the authenticated Vermeers in museums and gave a convenient cover for his own technical shortcomings.

A forger’s method

Van Meegeren worked on a genuine seventeenth-century canvas, grinding away most of the old image while preserving its network of age cracks, then mixed his pigments with phenol formaldehyde, an early synthetic resin sold as Bakelite, in place of oil. Baking the finished picture in an oven hardened the paint so that it resisted solvents like centuries-old work, and the surviving craquelure completed the illusion of age.

Sold to Göring

In 1943 the painting reached Hermann Göring through the dealer Alois Miedl, valued at around 1,650,000 guilders and paid for not in cash but with paintings the Nazis had looted in the occupied Netherlands. Göring prized it among his finest acquisitions and in 1943 hid it, with thousands of other looted works, in an Austrian salt mine, where Allied forces recovered it in May 1945.

The painting that exposed the forger

Tracing the picture back through Miedl led investigators to Van Meegeren, who was arrested on 29 May 1945 and charged with collaboration for selling a national treasure to the enemy, a capital offence. His defence was that he had sold no Vermeer at all but his own handiwork, a claim he proved by painting a fresh fake under guard, and the confession unravelled his entire enterprise of forged Vermeers. The canvas is now held on long-term loan from the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed by Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, where it was the centrepiece of the 2023 exhibition Looking for Vermeer.