A forgery of a Pieter de Hooch picture painted in the 20th century by Han Van Meegeren.
“Head of Christ” by Van Meegeren.
“Van Meegeren was well acquainted with these methods. He scraped the paint from old paintings that weren’t worth much just to get the canvas and tried to use pigments that Vermeer would have used. He knew that old paint was very, very hard and impossible to dissolve; so he cleverly mixed a chemical (phenolformaldehyde) into his paint, and this hardened into Bakelite when he heated the finished painting in an oven.
“For some of the paintings, Van Meegeren became careless and the experts did find traces of a modern pigment (cobalt blue) in the paint. They also found the Bakelite. For one or more paintings, Van Meegeren did so well that, in spite of all this evidence, a few people still weren’t convinced that these paintings were painted by Van Meegeren and not by Vermeer.”
Bill, who by this time was bursting with questions, interrupted, “You mean they still aren’t sure about some of those paintings after 25 years? Aren’t there better ways of telling whether a painting is genuine or not? You’re a scientist. Can’t scientists like you do something about it now?”
“Yes, recently a method was developed to settle just such a question. It’s based on measurements of natural radioactivity in one pigment that all artists used hundreds of years ago. And the method was applied to some of the Van Meegeren paintings including the best one of them all.”
“How did it come out?” asked Martin.
An X ray of part of the Van Meegeren forgery, “Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus”. In the white circle are traces of paint from the original painting that Van Meegeren scraped off to obtain the old canvas. When the painting was believed to be a genuine Vermeer, it was sold for about $300,000.