Han van Meegeren: The Last Vermeer

In 1945, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested for selling a stolen Vermeer to Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. His defense: he hadn't sold a Vermeer at all. He'd painted it himself.

This episode tells the full story of the twentieth century's most audacious art forger — and the story most people don't know. Van Meegeren didn't just fool the art world's greatest experts with his fake Vermeers. He fooled them because he understood something about desire that they didn't: people don't see what's in front of them. They see what they've already decided is there.

What emerges is a story about Nazi ideology embedded in Old Master brushwork, a postwar nation desperate for a hero it could believe in, and a man who spent his entire life performing one role or another — right up until the moment he performed his way out of a death sentence.

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