Interior with Cardplayers

Interior with Cardplayers is not a seventeenth-century picture at all but a forgery painted by Han van Meegeren in 1938–1939, in the manner of Pieter de Hooch rather than of Vermeer himself. Van Meegeren made it during the years he spent in the south of France, working from his villa at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where he had developed the technique that let his fakes pass as old masters.

How the fake was made

Van Meegeren painted on genuine seventeenth-century canvases, preserving their original craquelure, and bound his pigments not in oil but in the synthetic resin phenol formaldehyde, or Bakelite, which hardened when the finished picture was baked at around 100 to 120 degrees Celsius. He worked with badger-hair brushes of the kind a Dutch master might have used, then rolled the baked surface to open fresh cracks and washed India ink into them so the network of fissures read as the work of centuries.

Sale and exposure

The painting was sold to W. van der Vorm, a wealthy Rotterdam shipowner, for 219,000 to 220,000 guilders, a sum equivalent to roughly $120,000 at the time. It was one of a string of de Hooch and Vermeer fakes that came undone only after the war, when van Meegeren was arrested on 29 May 1945 for having sold what was thought to be a national treasure to the Germans, and confessed that the pictures were his own. At his 1947 trial in Amsterdam he was convicted of forgery, not collaboration, and he died that December before serving his sentence; the present whereabouts of Interior with Cardplayers are not publicly recorded.