Mrs Smith Reads The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick, #CBR5 Review #9

Christ at Emmaus, Han van Meegeren, 1937, one of his many “Vermeers”

The True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

The Forger’s Spell took me a long time to read. It’s one of those books that was interesting to me in its subject matter, but meandered and wandered all over the place, often heading down parallel paths that honestly had nothing to do with the main story.

Edward Dolnick plays out for us the story of Han van Meegeren, a mediocre Dutch painter with a flair for mimicking the styles of more famous artists such as Vermeer and de Hooch. He managed to become fabulously wealthy proffering his work to Dutch museums, wealthy collectors and, famously, fooling both Hitler and Herman Goering into competitively pursuing his Vermeer forgeries during the Nazi occupation of Holland during WWII.

Mrs Smith Reads The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick