Christ at Emmaus

The most consequential Vermeer forgery of the twentieth century. Painted by Han van Meegeren in 1936–37, authenticated as an early Vermeer by Abraham Bredius in 1937 and acquired the following year by Museum Boijmans, where it hung as a Vermeer until Van Meegeren confessed in 1945 after one of his other ‘Vermeers’ — Christ and the Adulteress — was found in Hermann Göring’s collection. Not in any 1935 Vermeer exhibition, despite a persistent misconception: the panel did not yet exist.