The Blessing of Jacob

The Blessing of Jacob is not a Vermeer at all but a forgery painted by Han van Meegeren between 1941 and 1942, an invented Old Testament scene passed off as the work of a young Vermeer. It belongs to the run of false “early religious Vermeers” that Van Meegeren launched with Christ at Emmaus, the 1937 fake whose triumphant reception had convinced scholars that Vermeer passed through a devotional, Italian-influenced phase early in his career.

An invented early Vermeer

Rather than imitate the familiar Delft interiors, which could be set beside genuine pictures in museums and found wanting, Van Meegeren chose biblical subjects drawn from Old Master compositions. The approach let him hide what one account calls his own technical and expressive shortcomings behind a manner no one could check against an authentic work, since the supposed early religious Vermeer existed only in his forgeries. The Blessing of Jacob followed the same recipe as the other religious fakes, among them Christ and the Adulteress, the picture later found in Hermann Göring’s collection.

Sold to Van der Vorm

The forgery was sold to the Rotterdam shipowner W. van der Vorm for a reported 1,270,000 guilders, a sum on the order of half a million dollars at the time. Van Meegeren’s deception came undone after the war, when Allied investigators traced a Vermeer in Göring’s hands back to him and he was arrested in 1945 on a charge of selling a national treasure to the enemy. Facing that accusation he confessed to the forgeries, and chemical analysis by Paul Coremans’s commission, which detected twentieth-century materials such as the synthetic resin Van Meegeren had used to harden his paint, confirmed the fakes at his 1947 trial in Amsterdam.