Christ at Emmaus

Christ at Emmausis the most consequential Vermeer forgery of the twentieth century, painted by Han van Meegeren in 1936–37 at a rented villa, the Primavera, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the south of France. It was authenticated as an early Vermeer by the connoisseur Abraham Bredius in 1937 and bought the following year for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where it hung as the museum’s prize Vermeer until Van Meegeren confessed in 1945.

A subject chosen to deceive

Rather than imitate one of Vermeer’s familiar interiors, which could be measured against museum originals, Van Meegeren invented a religious scene of the risen Christ supping with two disciples, modelled on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. The choice was strategic: scholars of the day suspected that Vermeer had trained in Italy, so a previously unknown early religious work seemed to confirm a long-sought missing chapter in his career, while the unfamiliar subject left nothing to compare it against.

Faking three centuries of age

Van Meegeren spent years solving the chemistry of forgery. He painted on a genuine seventeenth-century canvas, scoured down with pumice and water to preserve its old craquelure, and bound his pigments not in oil but in the synthetic resin Bakelite, so that the surface could be baked hard in an oven instead of curing slowly over decades. He ground his own colours from period materials such as lapis lazuli and white lead, rolled the baked panel to open a network of cracks, and worked India ink into them to mimic centuries of accumulated grime.

Authentication and exposure

Shown the picture in 1937, the aged Bredius declared it in The Burlington Magazine“the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer,” and the Rembrandt Society raised some 520,000 guilders to secure it for Boijmans. The deception held until 1945, when Allied investigators found another of Van Meegeren’s false Vermeers, Christ and the Adulteress, in Hermann Göring’s collection and traced it back to him; to escape a charge of selling a national treasure to the enemy, he confessed to having painted the “Vermeers” himself. At his 1947 trial a commission led by Paul Coremans proved the paint contained the twentieth-century resins Bakelite and Albertol, settling the matter for good. Contrary to a persistent misconception, the painting was not in the 1935 Vermeer exhibition at the same museum, since it did not yet exist.