Interior with Drinkers

Interior with Drinkers is not a Vermeer at all but a forgery painted by Han van Meegeren in 1937–1938, in the manner of Pieter de Hooch rather than Vermeer himself. Van Meegeren made it in the wake of his greatest success, the fake Supper at Emmaus, which the art historian Abraham Bredius had hailed in 1937 as a masterpiece by Vermeer of Delft. Emboldened by that triumph, he turned out a run of further forgeries, of which this domestic interior was one.

A forger’s method

Van Meegeren had spent years perfecting a technique to make new paintings pass as three-hundred-year-old ones. He bought genuine seventeenth-century canvases and scrubbed away most of the existing image while preserving its old craquelure, then mixed his pigments with the synthetic resin Bakelite, a phenol formaldehyde, in place of oil. Baking the finished canvas hardened the paint so that it resisted solvents like a centuries-old surface, and India ink worked into the cracks completed the illusion of age. The same Bakelite resin would later betray him, when Paul Coremans’s commission identified it as a twentieth-century material that no Dutch Golden Age painter could have used.

Sale and exposure

The picture was sold to the Rotterdam collector D.G. van Beuningen for 219,000–220,000 guilders, around $120,000 at the time, as an autograph old-master work. The deception held until 1945, when van Meegeren was arrested on 29 May and, to escape a charge of collaboration over a forged Vermeer that had reached Hermann Göring, confessed that the supposed old masters were his own work. Van Beuningen lent his name to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, but this canvas is not among its holdings, and its present whereabouts are not publicly recorded.