“Who’s the lady?” I startled George so badly she nearly fell out of her chair.

“Nancy! I didn’t see you!”

“Hi, sorry. I was just curious what you were working on. Isn’t that the same woman in both portraits?”

“Yeah. Sort of.” George zoomed in even closer on the image on the right. As she moused over the painted face, I noticed that in this version, the woman was wearing a large pearl earring and a pearl necklace, but the woman on the left was not. “The painting on the left is a genuine Vermeer, made in 1663. This one is fake. A really good fake, but still.”

“Do you know who painted it?” I asked. I scooted in, trying to get as close to the screen as I could, looking for other inconsistencies. It was hard to tell. Even the brushstrokes seemed to match. There were just the two giveaways—that supersize pearl earring and the necklace.

George told me the counterfeit had been made in the 1930s by a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren, who’s now considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of all time.

“We learned about forgeries in art class a couple of years ago, and I got so curious I had to know more. Van Meegeren’s copies of Vermeer fooled the Nazis!”

“That’s crazy! How did he get away with it?”

“Van Meegeren always used old canvases and paints, just like Vermeer used. He even made his own brushes out of badger hair, because that’s what Vermeer did. Every stroke is identical to Vermeer’s style.”

“That seems like a lot of work just to copy an artist’s style or a painting.”

“If you do it well, that forged painting might sell for millions of dollars. Plus, you get to fool everyone into thinking you’re as good as an old master. That’s the real payoff.”

“Van Meegeren wouldn’t get away with this today, would he?” I asked.

“Probably not. It’s much harder to fool art buyers now. Scientists can use carbon dating and lasers and X-rays to discover hidden layers of paint and verify when the artwork was created.”

“It’s funny. Even though van Meegeren was obsessed with getting the brushstrokes right, he couldn’t help but add some glamour of his own. That big honking earring. Why do you think he did that?”

George shrugged. “Maybe he wanted people to think his version was better. Maybe he wanted them to know he was the one who painted it, and not Vermeer.”

“I guess that makes sense, in a twisted kind of way. You wouldn’t want to show up somewhere fancy without your pearl earrings, would you?”

“I never wear earrings,” said George, squinting at the screen.

“But you might, if you were, say, invited to a fancy party?”

“Mm, I’d probably just wear my nice jeans and a button-down shirt.”

“Even if the invitation said ‘suitable dress politely requested’ and you had a beautiful strawberry-blond date on your arm?”

“All right, all right. I think I see what you’re getting at.”