The Last Supper I

This is the first of two large “early Vermeer” Last Suppers that Han van Meegeren forged in the south of France in the years before the Second World War. Begun in 1938–1939 while he was living in Nice, it belongs to the ambitious biblical phase that had opened in 1937 with his most successful fake, the Christ at Emmaus, a phase in which he passed off invented religious scenes as the lost early work of a young, Italian-influenced Vermeer.

A reused Flinck canvas

For the support van Meegeren painted over a genuine seventeenth-century canvas by Govert Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt, so that the picture would carry an old ground and old tacking edges. The composition gathers thirteen figures around the table, a far more crowded arrangement than anything in Vermeer’s actual work, and van Meegeren was reduced to relying largely on his imagination, even borrowing the head of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring for the figure of Saint John.

Set aside, recovered, and sold

Dissatisfied with the result, van Meegeren set this version aside in favour of a second, more finished Last Supper, which he sold to the Rotterdam collector Daniel George van Beuningen. The first canvas was left behind in Nice when he returned to the Netherlands at the threat of war, and after the conflict an X-ray examination exposed the underlying Flinck and confirmed it as his work. Unsigned and never sold during his lifetime, it fetched 2,300 guilders at the 1950 estate auction of his Amsterdam house, and its present whereabouts are not publicly recorded.