La cena de Emaús

In 1937 the most respected Vermeer scholar alive, Abraham Bredius, was shown a large, sober painting of Christ breaking bread with two disciples. He was in his eighties, and he wept over it. In The Burlington Magazine he called it the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, every inch a Vermeer and unlike anything else the master had done. He was right about that last part. The picture had been made the year before, at a rented villa near Nice, by a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren, who had studied exactly which gap in Vermeer's known work the experts most longed to fill. He mixed his colours with a plastic resin and baked the canvas hard so it would crack like a 300-year-old surface. In 1938 the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam bought it for around 520,000 guilders, an enormous sum then, as a newly discovered Vermeer. It hangs there still, catalogued now under the forger's own name.