4. Van Meegeren carefully planned and prepared for his work as a forger
As an established artist, Han van Meegeren had an extensive network of agents who commissioned and sold his works throughout Europe. Well-known in the Netherlands, he relocated to France in the early 1930s, taking with him an extensive collection of books on the Dutch Masters of the 17th century. At the time, Vermeer’s works did not enjoy the fame and popularity they later achieved. He began to gain popularity about the same time van Meegeren decided to forge paintings and attribute them to Vermeer. For several years van Meegeren concentrated on studying the masters. Already well versed in their style, he pored over books describing their studios, the pigments they used, and the tools with which they created their masterpieces.
In 1932, Dr. Abraham Bredius, an acknowledged expert on Rembrandt and a noted curator and art collector, published an article in The Burlington Magazine. He described the growing number of forged Vermeer paintings appearing in Europe before describing a recently discovered Vermeer, “which may indeed be called a masterpiece of the Great Man of Delft”. The painting, described by Bredius as then hanging at The Hague, eventually became part of the collection of Dr. Fritz Mannheimer, a wealthy collector and banker in Amsterdam. Despite the gushing plaudits of Abraham Bredius, it was not a Vermeer at all. Instead, the painting, Man and Woman at a Spinet, represented the first effort by Van Meegeren to forge a Vermeer, one of several he created during the 1930s.