the MEEGEREN website

"Lady with a Blue Hat"

A Vermeer painting, once owned by Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.
In itself a fine portrait, but no Vermeer... and there are good reasons to suppose that it was a Van Meegeren, see reference 6 above: "A New Vermeer".
(click to enlarge)

"Graan, olie, katoen" (Corn, Oil, Cotton)

Van Meegeren was fond of large dimensions, both for his oils and his drawings. Whoever else made drawings of 1 meter 30 by 2 meters (approximately 50 by 80 inch) like this one?

Apart from its large dimensions, this drawing has another gimmick: Thousands of workers are seen here to pull a soap-bubble occupied by a board of capitalists. The gimmick is that Van Meegeren has depicted himself and his wife Jo in the row of enslaved workers (see the lower right-hand corner). He pokes fun of the situation: He of all people, who cheated capitalists out of their millions, toils in their service! A typical Van Meegeren joke.

Click on the image to enlarge the picture and enjoy the many details in this huge and elaborate work.

"Graan, olie, katoen", lower right-hand corner

Han van Meegeren is indicated here twice by an "H" and his wife Jo by a "J".
Nobody noticed this joke when the drawing became known.

There was even a art-historian who thought that the capitalists in the soap-bubble were meant to be Jews and accused Van Meegeren of anti-Semitism.
There are, however, no signs that these capitalists are Jewish (there are no Stars of David or other symbols). And the small figure lying on the book is just blowing up the soap-bubble; he does not represent a devil lying on a Bible as the same art-historian wanted us to believe.
Van Meegeren’s joke had eluded this critic.

Nevertheless this art-historian did much harm as the same accusation is sometimes repeated, even today.

Van Meegeren’s Eyesight (a new view on his work)

I recently acquired Van Meegeren’s eyeglasses which glasses brought me to a new view on his work, see below.
To the modern eye, the frame of the eyeglasses looks quite heavy and dark, although it was quite fashionable in its time. One lens is partly broken.

The lenses are not strong and the eyeglasses were used for reading only. This ties in with the fact that in photographs Van Meegeren is never seen wearing eyeglasses. In addition his nephew Pim recollected that he never wore eyeglasses when he painted.

An optician measured these lenses for me with the following result:
Right + 0.50 cylindrical – 3.00 at 13 degrees,
Left + 1.50 cylindrical – 3.50 at 166 degrees,
they thus appear to be extremely cylindrical.

When I measured a small square as seen through these lenses, the image appeared to be stretched 9% in width and shortened 9% in height. This means that Van Meegeren perceived the outside world as being 18% leaner than it was in reality. This distortion was compensated by his eyeglasses when he was reading, but it was not compensated when he painted.

There existed already rumours that Van Meegeren’s eyesight had had a unique distortion and that this was why the faces in his paintings were so often oblong. The lenses of his eyeglasses explain this now. The faces in his “Emmaus” can be seen as a good example of his distorted view when he saw the outside world as being 18% taller and leaner than in reality.

This sounds logical, but there is a snag: although his eyes “saw” the world narrower than it actually was, he must have known from experience that its objects were broader in reality.
Or to put it in other words: When he made a drawing, the object on paper must have been made of the same width as in reality, although to his eyes it was narrower. Otherwise there would have been a difference between reality and the drawing, and that is exactly what a good draughtsman seeks to prevent.
But how then did this process work when he drew from memory? How much of his memory appeared in his paintings? It is well probable that people and faces in that case became oblong.
Reactions on this theme are welcome.

Van Meegeren’s eyesight and his Villa

In 1937 Van Meegeren made this sketch (left) of his villa (right) in Roquebrune, France.
It has always been thought that he rendered his villa in this stretched manner to make it more important than it was. But it also reflects the result of his eyesight to see things taller than they were.

“Kinderen met Eend” (Children with a Duck)

A visitor from Israel sent me this intimate picture (left) of two children playing with a duck. The children were assumed to be Van Meegeren’s own children. Taking the apparent age of the boy and the girl into account this could be true, but the assumption could not be corroborated.

Comparing it with a Van Meegeren picture of another child (right) leads to the following conclusions:
(a) the left-hand picture is certainly a genuine Van Meegeren
(b) it can be seen as a genre piece of Van Meegeren’s children, rather than a portrait.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them)


Provenance: Created The Hague about 1918 – bought Amsterdam about 1947 – certificate The Hague 1953 – auction Cape Town 1967 – Israel about 1975 up to the present

“Zilverreiger” (White Heron)

One of the female visitors to this website owned this “Zilverreiger” and sent me this picture from Mexico. She inherited it from her great-grandfather Jan Feith who was a journalist and a good friend of Han van Meegeren. He must have obtained it about 1940.

Van Meegeren created a menagerie of animals in this style when he was experimenting with ground pastel pigments, powders he partly applied with his fingers. The reproof that Van Meegeren didn’t make original work is well contradicted by this experiment (and many of his other experiments).
His famous little “Deer” was one of these animals.

We know his animals merely from old black-and-white reproductions as Van Meegeren’s work is found in private collections only; museums never wanted to buy Van Meegeren and they still don’t.
Here is your chance to enlarge the picture and have a good look on the delicate shades of colour in this pastel.

"On board Schuttevaer" also called "Slecht Zicht"

We knew this drawing from "Teekeningen 1", the book Van Meegeren published in war-time Holland.
Here is the original in colour, in the possession of a collector in Delft.
Possible provenance: created before 1942, probably in the twenties; in the possession of his wife Jo, who had it signed by him in 1947. Auctioned possibly in 1961 by Max van Waay and certainly about 1995 in Rotterdam.

< Early Landscape >

I recently received a picture of this early landscape from its owner in Schiebroek, Holland.
Van Meegeren lived in the 1920’s for some time in a castle by the name “Binckhorst” near The Hague. He paid his rent by means of this painting (as he often paid his rent and other bills in kind).
The receiver of the painting was not fully satisfied and removed the top of the painting; he found the sky in the upper part of the landscape “too dull”. In this way the painting got its unusual, but attractive, longitudinal shape.
Had Van Meegeren known this, he certainly would have laughed about it. After all, he spoke of his production in those early years: “It was atrocious. Painting assembly-line pictures that were sold to my surprise… when I looked back at better times, I became sick of nostalgia.”
Nevertheless his early paintings show a straightforward and undemanding charm.