Word: meegeren
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Five world-famous authorities had originally certified the genuineness of Van Meegeren's "Vermeers" (TIME, Sept. 10, 1945). They didn't testify. Instead there were laboratory analysts with chemical and X-ray tests to prove that the paintings were fakes. As each expert finished, Van Meegeren would bob up to agree with everything he had said...
...Dutch Painter Hans van Meegeren, the fire felt better than the frying...
...accused of being a collaborationist because he had sold Hermann Göring a priceless Vermeer. Van Meegeren pleaded guilty to forging the picture: instead of trafficking with the enemy, he had tricked him. And Göring, had been only one of his victims : Van Meegeren confessed that six "Vermeers" and several "Pieter de Hoochs" lining the Palace of Justice walls were really the work of his hand. Last week Forger Van Meegeren was sentenced to a year in jail...
...Meegeren was less pleased when D. A. Hoogendijk, a trusted Amsterdam dealer, who had sold two of the forgeries, testified sadly: "Now that I look around this courtroom and see all these paintings together, I don't understand how I could ever have believed them to be Vermeers...
Last week Van Meegeren had been cleared of collaboration but not of forgery. He was out on bail, painting new pictures, signing his own name to them, and collecting heavily. Connoisseurs were beating a path to Van Meegeren's antiques-crammed mansion on an Amsterdam canal. His own paintings brought five times what they had before he confessed. Van Meegeren said he had an offer from a Manhattan gallery to come to the U.S. and paint portraits "in the 17th Century manner" at $6,000 a throw...