L'Ultima Cena

By 1941 the hard part of forging a Vermeer was not the painting. It was the paint. A canvas three centuries old resists a swab of alcohol and a needle, and fresh oil does not. Han van Meegeren solved it by grinding his pigments with an early plastic, phenol formaldehyde, and baking the finished picture in an oven until the surface set rock hard and cracked. This large Last Supper, in Vermeer's manner, is one result. He sold it in 1941 to the shipping magnate D. G. van Beuningen for 1,600,000 guilders, the single biggest payment of the whole fraud. An earlier, first version he kept for himself. Today this one is in Deventer, the town where he was born in 1889, given to the city by a Dutch family in 2016.