> Van Meegeren was tried, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison in 1947. Nearly two months later, he died of a heart attack without serving even a day. W

> Van Meegeren was tried, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison in 1947. Nearly two months later, he died of a heart attack without serving even a day. What the article doesn’t say is that he originally was charged with selling Dutch cultural property to the Nazis, for which he could have gotten the death penalty. That made him confess that he sold a forgery. They didn’t believe it, so he “painted his last forgery between July and December 1945 in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses: Jesus among the Doctors, also called Young Christ in the Temple in the style of Vermeer.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#Trial_and_prison_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#Trial_and_pri...) That got him of the hook for the death penalty, but also, of course, 100% unmasked him as a forgerer.