Why Vermeer?

Even now, very little is known about Johannes Vermeer. However, the bit of information scholars did have during van Meegeren's time proved to be ideal for a forger. 

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Vermeer, who was most active in the arts in the 1660s and 1670s, was a Dutch Golden Age painter from Delft with a small number of works (roughly 35) to his name. He was mostly a genre painter, depicting scenes of everyday life, but his earlier works (made in the 1650s) feature religious scenes. To the right is Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, an early work by Vermeer.

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This switch from religious works to genre painting befuddled scholars. Some scholars, including Abraham Bredius, an art historian and museum creator who specialized in Dutch artwork during van Meegeren's time, felt confident that there must have been a middle period of transition, yet no Vermeers had been found that proved this theory. This provided van Meegeren with a unique opportunity — he knew what scholars hoped to see, and "missing Vermeers" that filled in this gap would be a welcome discovery.

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Vermeer was also a well-calculated choice for the desirability of his paintings. Given his small output and rarity, his paintings were seen as especially valuable. Actually, Vermeer's name was largely forgotten for hundreds of years, with many of his works being attributed to bigger artists. Interest in Vermeer and his work was revived in 1866 by three articles by Theophile Thoré-Bürger. Although Thoré-Bürger misattributed many works to Vermeer, the seed had been planted, and the fascination with the man nicknamed "The Sphinx" continued into the twentieth century. This craze for Vermeer even infiltrated the Nazis, as we will later see.

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The context within which van Meegeren worked also contributed to people's acceptance​ of his works as true Vermeers. Firstly, van Meegeren spent part of his career in the Netherlands and was copying a Dutch artist. The Dutch sought to keep their artwork in their country instead of passing it along to the Germans, so Dutch museums raised a lot of money in order to keep these newly discovered "Vermeers" in the country. Secondly, the art market thrived during the Nazi occupation, as art's lasting value made it a precious bargaining tool. Thus, it was unsurprising for new paintings to come onto the market, and art scholars and the public were unsuspecting when van Meegeren's "Vermeers" were "found."