Jésus parmi les docteurs

In the summer of 1945 a Dutch painter sat down to work under police guard, with reporters and court-appointed witnesses watching. Han van Meegeren had been arrested that May and charged with collaboration, for selling what everyone believed was a national treasure, a Vermeer, to Hermann Goering. His defence was strange. The Goering picture was no Vermeer at all, he said. He had painted it himself, along with the others the experts had celebrated. To prove it, over roughly five months he produced this large canvas of the young Christ questioning the elders in the temple, in the same faked Vermeer manner, in front of his accusers. It worked. The treason charge fell away and he was convicted only of forgery, sentenced in November 1947 to a single year. He died that December, before serving a day of it.