Van Meegren - Forger

I love a good con:

Fool the Art World
Launching his career in the 1920s and 30s, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren utterly failed to take critics by storm. Apparently committed to toiling on realistic portraiture while everybody else was trying to be Picasso, van Meegeren seemed doomed to the fate of a "never was." But when a critic derided his work as "lacking originality," the frustrated artist hatched a plan that would prove his talent and make his foes look like idiots. Ironically, the plan involved abandoning any pretense at originality whatsoever. Instead, van Meegeren set out to become the greatest art forger who ever lived; not merely copying known works of his hero, Jan Vermeer, but producing new paintings that would combine Vermeer's literal and artistic signatures with van Meegeren's own critically panned style of painting. Van Meegeren originally planned to create just one of these paintings, make it an international sensation and then reveal the truth to a very small and sorry art world. But plans--as plans are wont to do--went awry.