Han van Meegeren was a mediocre Dutch painter in the 1920s with ambitions and a grudge. Critics dismissed his original work. So he decided to humiliate them. He would paint fake Vermeers, pass them off as lost masterpieces, and reveal the deception only after the experts had declared them authentic. His revenge plan took years of preparation.

He studied Vermeer's pigments, recipes, and techniques obsessively. He used 300-year-old canvases with period frames. He invented a method of baking his paintings in ovens to simulate centuries of drying. His first fake, 'Supper at Emmaus,' emerged in 1937. Critics hailed it as one of Vermeer's greatest works. Van Meegeren never revealed the trick — partly because he wanted to paint more, and partly because he wanted the money.

Then the Nazis arrived. Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, was an obsessive art collector. He bought 'Christ and the Adulteress' — another van Meegeren fake — for 1.65 million guilders. When the Allies won and Göring's collection was catalogued, van Meegeren was arrested for selling Dutch cultural treasures to the enemy. The charge was collaboration with the Nazis, punishable by death.

To save himself, van Meegeren had to confess to a worse-sounding crime: forgery. Nobody believed him. So a Dutch court ordered him to paint one more Vermeer, under supervision, in a six-week trial. He did. The new painting, 'Jesus Among the Doctors,' was indistinguishable in technique from his earlier fakes.

He was convicted of fraud, sentenced to a year, and died before serving it. Göring, when told his prized Vermeer was fake, reportedly looked as if 'for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.'