The Head of Christ

A forger's cleverest move is sometimes the small one. Around 1940 Han van Meegeren painted this quiet head of Christ and passed it off not as a finished Vermeer but as a study, a preparatory sketch for a larger Last Supper. That made the whole story hang together. A great master would have worked up to a big religious scene through drawings and studies, so a modest head like this helped vouch for the entire invented body of late Vermeers. It was sold in 1941 to the Rotterdam collector D. G. van Beuningen for something near 400,000 guilders. It reached Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam with the van Beuningen collection in 1958, and hangs there now beside the very forgeries it was meant to support.