The Head of Christ

The Head of Christ is one of the religious forgeries Han van Meegeren painted around 1940–1941 in the manner of an “early Vermeer.” It belongs to the most lucrative stretch of his career, when he abandoned Vermeer-style interiors, which could be measured directly against authentic pictures, in favour of devotional subjects whose looser precedents gave his own technical limits room to hide.

A head for the Last Supper

The small canvas reads as a study, an isolated head of Christ rather than a finished narrative scene, and it shares both its date and its buyer with van Meegeren’s largest religious fake, The Last Supper II of 1940–1942. Both pictures leaned on the period theory that Vermeer had travelled to Italy and absorbed Caravaggio, a piece of art-historical speculation van Meegeren exploited to make his invented “early” phase seem plausible.

Van Beuningen and the unmasking

The picture was bought by the Rotterdam collector D.G. van Beuningen for a reported 400,000–475,000 guilders, a sum on the order of $225,000 at the time. Van Beuningen also acquired The Last Supper II and was later drawn into post-war litigation over the authorship of the works he owned once they were exposed. The forgeries unravelled after van Meegeren’s 1945 arrest and confession and were confirmed fake at his 1947 trial; his collection passed by name into the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.