- Amsterdam 1945: 20 years in prison for collaborating with the enemy, or a few years for art fraud? The police are not convinced van Meegeren is a genius forger, as he claims. They think he is just trying to avoid a much stiffer sentence.
- Amsterdam 1945: after the end of WW2, a Vermeer painting is returned to the Netherlands, seemingly having been sold to Hermann Göring himself by Dutch art dealers. Faced with a charge of high treason, the man behind the sale claims that he did not sell part of the "national heritage" to the enemy, because the painting is a fake, painted - in fact - by himself. The police are out of their depth, and so the man, Han van Meegeren, paints a fake Vermeer in front of a panel of art experts. They cannot deny the fact that he "could" have pulled it off - but they are reluctant to support his version of events. Mainly because he claims that many of the paintings they themselves authenticated in the past (and that are now hanging in museums and galleries) are actually forgeries of his as well. In the end, the police (and van Meegeren) are able to proof one of his claims, as a Vermeer painting is revealed to be a forgery through the fairly new scientific method of infra-red photography (revealing the original painting by an unknown artist hidden beneath the fake, as van Meegeren used old but worthless paintings instead of new canvas in order to make the forgeries look more authentic). #################################################################################################################### This plot is based on the real-life case of the van Meegeren trial in 1945, and the story closely follows the historical events. There are some liberties, such as van Meegeren's marital status, for example. And I am unable to confirm if infra-red photography really did play a part in the trial. More on van Meegeren's life and exploits can be found on wikipedia.—Scrugulus
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