The Last Supper II

The Last Supper II is the larger and more ambitious of Han van Meegeren’s two forged versions of the subject, painted between 1940 and 1942 as a false “early Vermeer.” Working largely from his own imagination rather than a documented Vermeer prototype, van Meegeren laid out an elaborate composition of thirteen figures in varied poses around the table.

A forged early Vermeer

The picture belongs to the run of pseudo-biblical scenes with which van Meegeren deceived the Dutch art world, the most famous of which was his Christ at Emmaus. Like the others, it was meant to pass as a lost work from a supposed religious phase of Vermeer’s career, and van Meegeren borrowed directly from the master where he could, modelling the head of Saint John on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. It followed an earlier, unsold attempt at the same theme, his Last Supper I.

Technique and the buried Hondius

Van Meegeren faked age with a chemist’s patience, binding his pigments with the synthetic resin Bakelite in place of oil and baking the canvas at about 100–120°C so the paint film hardened as if centuries old. He then worked the surface to force a network of fine cracks and rubbed India ink into them to imitate the dirt of a genuine craquelure. For this canvas he painted over a seventeenth-century hunting scene by Abraham Hondius, a panel he had bought in 1940; an X-ray later revealed the buried composition and helped tie the forgery to him.

Sale and the Coremans lawsuit

In 1942 the work was sold, through the dealers Strijbis and Hoogendijk, to the Rotterdam collector D.G. van Beuningen for a reported 1,600,000 guilders, among the highest sums van Meegeren ever obtained. After van Meegeren’s post-war arrest and confession exposed the forgeries, the painting became the centre of a protracted lawsuit in which van Beuningen contested the findings of the conservator Dr. Paul Coremans. The courts upheld Coremans, whose X-ray and chemical evidence confirmed the work as a van Meegeren forgery.