The Washing of the Feet

The Washing of the Feet is not a Vermeer at all but a forgery painted by Han van Meegeren between 1941 and 1943, in the invented ‘early Vermeer’ religious manner he had used for his most famous fake, The Supper at Emmaus. Working from compositions loosely indebted to Caravaggio, Van Meegeren reasoned that scholars already suspected the young Vermeer had studied the Italian masters, so a solemn biblical subject would explain the distance from Vermeer’s known interiors rather than betray it.

How the forgery was made

Van Meegeren spent years perfecting a method to fake the look of age. He ground his own pigments, bound them with the synthetic resin phenol formaldehyde, or Bakelite, in place of oil, and painted over a genuine seventeenth-century canvas from which he had abraded the original image while trying to preserve its old craquelure.Once finished, the picture was baked at around 100 to 120 degrees so the paint hardened as if over centuries, then rolled to crack the surface, with India ink worked into the fissures to imitate accumulated grime.

Bought by the Dutch state

The deception worked at the highest level. The Netherlands state bought The Washing of the Feet around 1943 for roughly 1,250,000 guilders, accepting it as a genuine early Vermeer.After Van Meegeren’s arrest in 1945 and his confession that he, not Vermeer, had painted the wartime ‘discoveries’, chemical analysis confirmed the modern Bakelite in his pictures and exposed the whole group as fakes.The painting is now held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, kept as part of the documented Van Meegeren oeuvre alongside other unmasked forgeries such as Jesus among the Doctors.