The Art Forger, the Nazi, and "The Pope"
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Abraham Bradyus was nobody's fool. He was the world's leading scholar of Dutch painters and particularly of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most admired and most mysterious figures in European art. When Bradyus was younger, as an art critic and collector, he'd made his name by spotting works wrongly attributed to Vermeer. Now, at the age of 82, he was enjoying a retirement swan song in Monaco

He'd just published a highly respected book in which he'd identified 200 fake or misattributed Dutch masters. His opinions were viewed as so authoritative that he'd been dubbed "the Pope". It was at this moment in Bredius' life, in 1937, that Gerard Beaune paid a visit to his Monaco villa.

Boon was also a pillar of the Dutch establishment, a member of parliament who had spoken out earlier than most against fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe. Boon had come to Abraham Bradyus on a mission of mercy. He told Bradyus that a Dutch family of anti-fascists were living in Mussolini's Italy and they needed to raise money to emigrate to the safety of the United States. But they had something to sell that might be of value, possibly.

Only Bradyus had the expertise to judge. And so, Bone unpacked the crate he'd brought out of Italy. Inside it was a large canvas, still on its ancient wooden stretcher. The picture depicted Christ at Emmaus. And in the top left-hand corner was the magical signature: I.V. Johannes Vermeer himself. But Bone was eager to know: what did Bradyus think?

He was the expert. The old man was spellbound. He delivered his verdict. Christ at Emmaus was not only a genuine Vermeer, it was the Dutch master's finest work. We have here, I am inclined to say, the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. Quite different from all his other paintings, and yet every inch a Vermeer

When this masterpiece was shown to me, I had difficulty controlling my emotion. Abraham Bradyus used an interesting word to describe his discovery. Almost reverently, he called it 'ongerept', the Dutch word to describe something virginally pure and untouched. It was an ironic choice of words because Emmaus could hardly have been more corrupt.

It was a rotten fraud of a painting, stiffly applied to an old canvas just a few months before Gradius caught sight of it. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. The trickery may have been crude, but Abraham Gradius wasn't the only one to be fooled. Gerard Bone had been lied to as well. When he visited Gradius, it was as the unsuspecting accomplice of a master forger.

And soon enough, the entire Dutch art world was sucked into the con. Christ at Emmaus sold to the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, which was desperate to establish itself on the world stage.

Bradyus urged the museum on and even contributed to help pay for the picture. "There are only 40 Vermeers and this is the most important one, and in my judgement the most beautiful one. If we wait, we'll lose it." The total cost was 520,000 guilders. Compared to the wages of the time, that is well over $10 million today.

Emmaus drew admiring crowds and rave reviews. Several other paintings in a similar style soon emerged in the Netherlands. Once the first forgery had been accepted as a Vermeer, it was easier to pass off these other fakes. They didn't fool everyone, but like Emmaus, they fooled the people who mattered.

Critics certified the fakes. Museums exhibited them. Collectors paid vast sums for them. A total of more than $100 million in today's money. In financial terms alone, this was a monumental fraud. It is also a puzzle. The Dutch art world revered Vermeer as one of the greatest painters who ever lived.

He painted mostly in the 1660s and had been rediscovered only in the late 1800s. As Brady has said, only 40 Vermeer paintings were thought to have survived. So the apparent emergence of half a dozen newly discovered Vermeers in just a few years was a major cultural event, but also an event that should have strained credulity. But it did not. Why?

Don't look to the paintings themselves for an answer. If you compare a genuine Vermeer to the first forgery, Emmaus, it's hard to understand how anyone was fooled, let alone anyone as discerning as Abraham Bradius. Vermeer was a true master. His most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, a luminous portrait of a young woman, seductive, innocent, adoring and anxious all at once.

In The Milkmaid, a simple scene of domesticity is lifted by details such as the rendering of a copper pot and a display of fresh baked bread that looks good enough to grab out of the painting. Then there's Woman reading a letter. She stands in the soft light of an unseen window. Is she perhaps pregnant? We see her in profile as she holds the letter close to her chest, eyes cast down as she reads.

there's a dramatic stillness about the image. We feel that she's holding her breath as she scans the letter for news. We hold our breath too. A masterpiece. And Christ at Emmaus? It's a static, awkward image by comparison. Rather than seeming to be an inferior imitation of Vermeer, it doesn't look like Vermeer at all.

It's not a terrible painting, but it's not a brilliant one either. Set alongside Vermeer's works, it seems dour and clumsy. Yet it fooled the world, and might continue to fool the world to this day, had not the forger been caught out by a combination of recklessness and bad luck. For the forger, the beginning of the end was a knock on the door. It was just past nine o'clock in the evening.

On the 29th of May 1945, the war in Europe was at an end. The aftershocks were not. An officer and an armed soldier from the Allied Art Commission were the ones doing the knocking. They were standing at the top of the steps leading to the door of 321 Kaisersgracht, one of Amsterdam's most exclusive addresses. Mr Van Meegeren? Gentlemen, you have the advantage of me.

Lieutenant Joseph Piller of the Provisional Military Government. I see. Well, do come in. The house was lit by kerosene lamps. War-ravaged Amsterdam would have no electricity for weeks to come. The Dutch had just endured what they called the Hunger Winter, with some people reduced to eating gruel made from tulip bulbs to try to stave off starvation. But Lieutenant Piller could see that at 321 Kaisersgracht,

There was plenty of everything. Piller got to the point. A masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer, The Woman Taken in Adultery had been found in the possession of a German Nazi. And not just any Nazi, but Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Goering. The Germans being Germans had kept good records.

Piller followed the money through various middlemen and eventually traced five different Vermeer paintings back to deals with van Meegeren. At that point, the trail went cold. Where had he obtained these Dutch treasures? I am not able to help. I know nothing of this. And this mansion, Mr. van Meegeren, where did the money come from? It wasn't just the one mansion.

Van Meegeren owned 56 other properties in Amsterdam alone. Commercial properties, private homes, apartment blocks, even a hotel. At number 738 Kaisersgracht, a 15-minute stroll away, he hosted regular orgies at which sex workers were rewarded for their exhausting efforts by being offered the chance to grab a fistful of jewels in the hallway as they left.

Decades before the war, the young Van Meegeren had enjoyed some brief success as an artist. In middle age, as his jowls had loosened and his hair had silvered, he'd grown rich as an art dealer. Very rich indeed, it seems. Van Meegeren was arrested and marched at gunpoint across town to prison. He responded with furious denials, trying to bluster his way to freedom.

But after a round-the-clock interrogation, Van Meegeren cracked. Idiots! You think I sold a Vermeer to that fat Goering? But it's not a Vermeer. I painted it myself. That's absurd. I can prove it. There's another painting underneath the one Goering has. I painted right over it.

Give me paper and charcoal and I'll sketch the composition for you. X-ray the fake Vermeer and you'll see. It's not the only one either. I painted other Vermeers and a couple of de Huches. And Vermeer's Emmaus in the Boymans? That's mine too. The fraud had unravelled, not because anyone spotted these forgeries, but because the forger himself confessed. And why wouldn't he?

The alternative was worse. Selling an irreplaceable Vermeer masterpiece to Hermann Goering was treason, and treason could carry the death penalty. Better for van Meegeren to admit to the less heinous crime of forgery and claim that the Vermeers had never actually existed. All van Meegeren had to do was to prove it.

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When I first heard the story of the fake Vermeer, I was charmed by the idea that the despicable Goering had been duped by a master forger. I loved the irony of the situation Van Meegeren found himself in. In order to avoid a firing squad, he needed to prove that he'd committed a different crime. We'll get back to that. I want us to focus first on Abraham Bradius, the art critic who first fell for the fraud.

I began my new book, The Data Detective, with the story of this forgery. The Data Detective is a book about how to think clearly about the world. And I wanted to start with Bradyus. Because I had a question. How could a man as expert as Abraham Bradyus have been fooled by so crass a forgery? The answer is this. When we're trying to interpret the world around us,

We need to realise that our expertise can be drowned by our feelings. When Bradyus wrote: "I had difficulty controlling my emotion" he was, alas, correct. Nobody had more knowledge of Vermeer than Bradyus. But van Meegeren understood how to turn Bradyus' knowledge into a disadvantage. The story of how van Meegeren fooled Bradyus is much more than a footnote in the history of art.

It can teach us why we buy things we don't need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, and vote for politicians who betray our trust. It explains why so often we buy into statistical claims that, in a moment's thought, would tell us can't be true. Van Meegeren was not a brilliant artist, but he was a brilliant conman. He intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes,

We want to be fooled. In 2011, Guy Mayras, then a behavioural economist at the University of Oxford, conducted a test of wishful thinking. Mayras showed his experimental subjects a graph of a price rising and falling over time, and told them that the graphs showed recent fluctuations in the price of wheat.

He asked each person to make a forecast of where the price would move next, and offered them a small cash reward if their forecasts came true. But Mayraz had also divided his experimental participants into two categories. Half of them were told that they were farmers, who would be paid extra if wheat prices were high. The rest were bakers, who would earn a bonus if wheat was cheap.

The subjects could earn two separate payments then: one for making an accurate forecast, and the second a windfall if the price of wheat happened to move in their direction. Yet, Meraz found that the prospect of the windfall influenced the forecast itself.

The farmers hoped that the price of wheat would rise, and they also predicted that the price of wheat would rise. The bakers did the opposite. They hoped and predicted that the price of wheat would fall. This is wishful thinking in its purest form, letting our reasoning be swayed by our hopes. It's just one of many studies demonstrating what psychologists call motivated reasoning.

Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim of reaching a particular conclusion. Sometimes it's a conscious process, as with a lawyer in the courtroom or a candidate in a political debate. But we often don't know we're doing it. It can be something as simple as sports fans convincing themselves that game after game, referee after referee is biased against their team.

Wishful thinking isn't the only form of motivated reasoning, but it is a common one. A farmer wants to be accurate in his forecast of wheat prices, but he also wants to make money, so his forecasts are swayed by his avarice. And an art critic who loves Vermeer is motivated to conclude that the painting in front of him is not a forgery, but a masterpiece. It was wishful thinking that undid Abraham Gradius.

He knew and loved Vermeer better than anyone alive, and was keen to be the man to discover one final work by Vermeer. But it was more than that. Bradyus had a pet theory about Vermeer. He'd become fascinated by the gap between Vermeer's early works, which had biblical themes, and his later, more famous portrayals of everyday domestic life. No known paintings existed in that gap.

What lurked undiscovered in those apparently fallow years? Wouldn't it be wonderful if another biblical work were found? Bradyus also speculated that the Dutch master had, as a young man, travelled to Italy and been inspired by the religious works of the great Italian artist Caravaggio. This was conjecture. Not much was known about Vermeer's life. Nobody knew if he'd ever seen a Caravaggio.

Van Meegeren was a forger who understood his victim all too well. He created Emmaus to fulfil all of Bradyus' dreams. It was on a biblical theme, and just as Bradyus had argued all along, was a homage to Caravaggio. When Bradyus saw the picture, he had no doubts. Why would he?

Van Meegeren's unwitting stooge, Gerard Boone, wasn't just showing Bradyus a painting. Boone was showing him evidence that had been right all along. In the final years of his life, the old man had found the missing link at last. But is wishful thinking really this powerful?

Yes, Abraham Bradyus was emotionally involved. He loved Vermeer. He was proud of his record as a connoisseur. He was desperate not to miss the chance of a major discovery. But shouldn't his expertise have enabled him to spot such a crude con? The French satirist Molière once wrote, Perhaps Molière was right.

If people with deeper expertise fall into the trap of wishful thinking, they're able to muster more reasons to believe whatever they really wish to believe.

One recent study by Maggie Toplak and other psychologists found that intelligence was no defence against motivated reasoning. And an older study, something of a modern classic, also throws light on the question. The political scientists Charles Tabor and Milton Lodge looked at motivated reasoning about two political hot-button issues, gun control and affirmative action.

They asked people to evaluate various arguments for and against each position. And they found, as you might expect, that politics got in the way of people's ability to dissect the strengths and weaknesses of different points. More surprising, however, was that simply reading the arguments pushed people further towards political extremes. They grabbed onto arguments they liked, and quickly dismissed or forgot about counter-arguments.

Even more striking was that this polarising effect was stronger for people who already knew a lot about civics and politics. These well-informed people were better at cherry-picking the information they wanted than dismissing the rest. More information and more expertise produced more strongly motivated reasoning.

From his Monaco villa in 1937, Abraham Bradyus offers us the perfect warning about the dangerous combination of wishful thinking and deep expertise. Bradyus noticed details about the forgery that a less skilled observer would have missed, and those details supported the conclusion he wanted to reach.

Those tell-tale white dots on the bread, for instance. The bright speckles seemed a bit clumsy to the untrained eye, but they reminded Bradyus of Vermeer's highlights on that tempting loaf of bread in the milkmaid. The composition echoed a tense and understated painting of the Emmaus scene by Caravaggio. That resonance would have been lost on a casual viewer, but it was not lost on Bradyus.

He would have picked up other clues designed to show Emmaus was the real thing. There's a jug in the painting, just a jug to most observers, but Bradyus would have noted that it was in a 17th century style, not the sort of vessel available in biblical times. That is just the sort of anachronism that indicates an authentic work. But van Meegeren was a step ahead. He had obtained a 17th century antique and used it as a prop.

There were 17th century pigments too. Van Meegeren had duplicated Vermeer's colour palette and his materials. He had bought years worth of rare lapis lazuli paint from a London supplier in order to produce an authentic Vermeer blue. An expert such as Bradyus could spot a 19th or 20th century forgery simply by looking at the back of the painting and noting that the canvas was too new.

Van Meegeren knew this. He had painted his work on a 17th century canvas, carefully scrubbed of its surface pigments but retaining the undercoat and its distinctive pattern of cracking. And then there was the simplest test of all: was the paint soft? The challenge for anyone who wants to forge an old master is that oil paints take half a century to dry completely. If you dip a cotton swab into some pure alcohol and gently rub the surface of an oil painting,

and the cotton may come away stained with pigments. If it does, the painting is a modern fake. Only after several decades will the paint harden enough to pass this test. Bradyus had identified fakes using this method before, but the paint on Emmaus stubbornly refused to yield its pigment. This gave Bradyus an excellent reason to believe that Emmaus was old, and therefore genuine.

Van Meegeren had fooled him with a brilliant piece of amateur chemistry. The forger had figured out a way to mix 17th century oil paints with a very 20th century material, phenol formaldehyde, a resin that when gently cooked for two hours turned into the robust new material known as Bakelite. No wonder the paint was hard and unyielding. It was infused with industrial plastic.

Bradyus had half a dozen subtle reasons to believe that Emmaus was a Vermeer. They were enough to dismiss one glaring reason to believe otherwise, that the picture doesn't look like anything else Vermeer ever painted. I'm no art critic, but to my eyes, the painting is drab. The eyelids in particular catch my attention. They're droopy and strange, and very distinctive of Van Meegeren's other work.

But then, I'm looking for a van Meegeren. Bradyus was looking for a Vermeer. Listen again to that extraordinary rave review from Abraham Bradyus. We have here, I am inclined to say, the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, quite different from all his other paintings, and yet every inch a Vermeer.

Quite different from all his other paintings? Shouldn't that be a warning? But the old man desperately wanted to believe that this painting was the Vermeer he'd been looking for all his life. The one that would provide the link back to Caravaggio himself. Van Meegeren set a trap into which only a true expert could stumble. Wishful thinking did the rest.

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It's hard not to love the story of the clever forger who fooled the experts and scammed the Nazis. Hahn van Meegeren seemed to be David versus Goliath, Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled into one. Many biographies have been written about him, including two authoritative books by Edward Dolnick and by Jonathan Lopez. Several movies have been made too, including the recent The Last Vermeer.

Van Meegeren is box office. His early biographers made him out to be a misunderstood trickster, hurt by the unjust rejections of his own art, but happy to outsmart his country's occupiers. One oft-reported story is that Goering, awaiting trial in Nuremberg, when told he'd been duped by Van Meegeren, looked as if, for the first time, he'd discovered there was evil in the world.

and the authorities responsible for bringing van Meegeren to justice unwittingly helped make his story world famous. Forensic chemists quickly verified that, as van Meegeren claimed, the paintings were hardened with Bakelite and aged with India ink. But in an absurd stunt, prosecutors challenged van Meegeren to prove that he was the forger by painting a picture in the style of Emmaus. And of course, he did.

One breathless headline reported, He paints for his life. Newspapers in the Netherlands and around the world couldn't tear their gaze away from the great showman. By the time the trial came in 1947, the charge was forgery, not treason or collaboration. Everything was set for a media circus in which the charismatic Van Meegeren was the ringmaster. Call the next witness, Mr Rens Strebes.

Your Honor, I'm a little nervous. I don't know anything about art. Don't worry. These lawyers don't know anything either. Silence, Mr. Van Meegeren, please.

When Van Meegeren himself took the stand, he spun his story, that he'd only forged the art to prove his worth as an artist and to unmask the art experts as fools. But Mr Van Meegeren, you sold these fakes for high prices. Your Honour, had I sold them for low prices, it would have been obvious that they were fake. Van Meegeren had them all spelled out. Order! Order in the court!

In his closing statement to the court, he claimed again that he hadn't done it for the money, which had brought him nothing but trouble. The newspapers and the public lapped up his story. Van Meegeren was found guilty of forgery, but was cheered as he left the courtroom. A Dutch opinion poll found that, apart from the Prime Minister, Han Van Meegeren was the most popular man in the country. And that was his final bow.

A few days after being sentenced, van Meegeren was admitted to hospital with heart trouble. A few weeks later, he died. A hero. Without ever serving a day of his prison term. For a while. There was even talk of putting up a statue. Of the man who fooled Goering. There's just one problem with this picture of Han van Meegeren as a lovable rogue. He was, in fact, an enthusiastic Nazi.

Tegeningen 1 is a book illustrated and published by Han van Meegeren. It's so sinister looking that Jonathan Lopez, van Meegeren's biographer, has hidden his copy away so that visitors don't see it. It's an evil book, full of grotesque anti-Semitic poetry and illustrations, using Nazi iconography and colours. It's lavish, with no expense spared in the printing of the book.

No wonder, given whom van Meegeren hoped might read it. The copy was hand-delivered to Adolf Hitler, with a handwritten declaration in artist's charcoal. To my beloved Fuhrer, in grateful tribute, Han van Meegeren. Remember where we began our cautionary tale.

Gerard Boone came to Abraham Bradyus with Emmaus, at a story about an anti-fascist family with an old canvas in a back room, desperate to escape from Mussolini's Italy and hoping that the work might be worth something. They were a figment of van Meegeren's imagination. Boone was just another victim of the Forger's cynical gift for pushing all the right emotional buttons.

Boon had spoken out against fascism and antisemitism, and Van Meegeren, the secret fascist, cruelly span him a yarn about heroic dissidents, as a ruse to get the painting into the hands of Abraham Bradyus. Of course, Boon fell in love with the idea. After the war, the Dutch didn't have much time for collaborators.

There were too many of them, and some of their crimes, such as colluding in transportation of Jews to death camps, were too awful to ignore. There was little sense of reconciliation or forgiveness. The traitors were shamed in the streets, or worse. So what would have happened if Hitler's personally inscribed copy of Tegeningen 1 had been discovered before van Meegeren's trial? The discomforting truth remains.

is that it was discovered. A Dutch resistance newspaper had published the news that van Meegeren's personally dedicated book had been found in Adolf Hitler's library. Van Meegeren waved it away, claiming that he'd signed hundreds of copies of the book and the dedication must have been added by someone else. It's a ludicrous excuse. But people believed it. That seems incredible.

Han van Meegeren had prospered mightily under Nazi occupation, buying up a portfolio of expensive properties and holding those decadent parties. You don't get to act like that in German occupied territory unless you've made friends with a few Nazis.

But Han van Meegeren sensed that the Dutch people needed a new story, something upbeat, a light-hearted tale of boldness and trickery, in which a Dutchman had struck back against the Nazis. And he gave it to them. A man who should have been viewed as a traitor, reshaped his reputation into that of a patriot, even a hero.

He manipulated the emotions of the Dutch people as he'd manipulated the emotions of Abraham Bradyus before the war. Abraham Bradyus desperately wanted a Vermeer. The Dutch public desperately wanted symbols of resistance to the Nazis. Wishful thinking is a powerful thing. Han van Meegeren knew how to give people exactly what they wanted.

If you'd like to hear another cautionary tale about a trickster who captivated a nation, one of my favourite episodes is Cautionary Tales Season 1, Episode 2. The rogue dressed as a captain. Enjoy!

Key sources for this episode include The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez, The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick, and my own book, The Data Detective, 10 Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. For a full list of references, see timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nizar Eldorazi, Ed Gohan, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Coben Holbrook-Smith,

Greg Lockett, Masaya Munro and Rufus Wright. This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Aniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review.

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