The forger who managed to fool Göring

Five years ago, a portrait attributed as a selfportrait by Han van Meegeren (1889–1947) – the famous Vermeer forger who, during the Thirties and Forties, duped Dutch critics and museums, as well as Hermann Göring – sold in an English country saleroom for £220.

The “attribution” meant that the auctioneer was not sure that, even though it bore the monogram “VM”, along with an inscription on the reverse, he could underwrite it as a genuine work by van Meegeren.

The authenticity of a work by a known forger is particularly tricky to establish. As Wim Pijbes, the emeritus Rijksmuseum director, said in 2011, when he bought what was described as a death mask of van Meegeren for €300 at a sale in Amsterdam: “A museum can always be wrong, it could always be a fake – there are still lots of fakes on the market.”

The buyer of the self-portrait, the art dealer Paul Liss, wasn’t sure either, so he subjected the work to further research. Now, finally, he has put it on his website, fully attributed to van Meegeren, in his

Faking it: John Myatt’s painting of

The Risen Christ

depicts Göring standing beneath the Vermeer ‘work’ which Han van Meegeren could have sold him after authentication

own style and priced at £13,500.

He has George Richards, his gallery manager, to thank. Richards, who had studied at Leiden University, showed the painting to a number of art historians there who compared it with early work by van Meegeren, before he became a forger – in particular those at the Haagse Kunstkring art club in The Hague, which van Meegeren belonged to and that still has a number of his pictures in its collection.

While there are no van Meegerens to compare it with in public collections in the UK, several appeared in Andrew Graham-dixon’s recent BBC Four documentary outlining the artist’s early career. Pictures from the Haagse Kunstkring collection, for instance, were filmed while the club’s current members discussed the critics’ view that van Meegeren’s lack of originality (in an era when modernism was fashionable) was a possible motive for his turning to forgery.

Taking revenge on art critics by fooling them with something they had never seen before bears direct comparison with the story of the British artist Eric Hebborn (1934-1996), perhaps the greatest known forger of Old Master drawings.

Hebborn was a prize-winning student at the Royal Academy Schools in the early Fifties, but his old masterly, figurative style was swept aside by the wave of enthusiasm for American abstract expressionism that engulfed the nation later that decade. He went on to draw compositions in the style of certain Old Masters that related to known paintings and that could be interpreted as studies.

Amusingly, some Old Master drawings auction catalogues now make attributions to Eric Hebborn, as if that might add value to an otherwise unattributable work. Hebborn’s own work, prior to his forgeries, is barely traceable. He did make a number of pictures in his own style after his 1991 autobiography, Drawn to Trouble, but, while competent, they were somehow stuck in the traditions of artists like van Ruysdael, whom he admired, and failed to create a stir.

A more recent case is that of John Myatt, the 74-year-old painter involved in the 1998 Tate archive case, in which false exhibition records for the fake Ben Nicholsons and Jean Dubuffets by Myatt were inserted into the Tate archive by a man named John Drewe, who masterminded the sale of the forgeries.

Myatt says he made plenty of art before he met Drewe, but, like van Meegeren and Hebborn before him, it was too conservative to catch on. And in his case, it was the combination of hard times and the promise of huge rewards rather than a grievance against the critics that persuaded him to make his forgeries (some of which, incidentally, are still in circulation and unidentified).

While he makes a good living now from “genuine fakes” after Monet and van Gogh, which are signed on the back and cost up to £35,000, his own early work, which he describes as figurative and skilful, remains unknown. Show an auctioneer a painting signed Myatt, and they would probably say “attributed to” unless proven otherwise.

For the curious, a film about Myatt will be released next year. In Genuine

Fakes, made by Green Eye Productions, Myatt is played by Colin Morgan, the Irish actor. The film will feature some of Myatt’s own work, along with the first glimpse of The

Risen Christ, a Myatt version of a van Meegeren version of a Vermeer.

While John Myatt makes a good living from genuine fakes, his own early work remains unknown