Retrato de un hombre

Vermeer was not the only old master Han van Meegeren studied his way into. This portrait of a man is a pastiche in the manner of Gerard ter Borch, a Dutch painter of the 1600s admired for his cool, precise handling of faces and silk. Van Meegeren made it in the mid-1930s, the same years he was teaching himself to counterfeit the whole 17th-century Dutch world, from Vermeer's interiors to the loose brush of Frans Hals. This one he never sold. It stayed among his own effects until the fraud collapsed after the war, and then, like several of his unsold experiments, it went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which keeps a group of these trial pieces.