Jonathan Lopez

Who is Jonathan Lopez?

Jonathan Lopez is an American writer and art historian. Born in 1969 in New York City, he was educated there and at Harvard. He writes a monthly column for Art & Antiques called "Talking Pictures" and is a frequent contributor to London-based Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts. His noted December 2007 Apollo article "Gross False Pretences" related the details of an acrimonious 1908 dispute between the art dealer Leo Nardus and the wealthy industrialist Peter Arrell Brown Widener of Philadelphia. Lopez has also written for ARTnews, the Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, and the Dutch newsweekly De Groene Amsterdammer. His book, The Man Who Made Vermeers is a biography of the Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren.

Lopez has written extensively on Van Meegeren in both Dutch and English, including an Apollo article entitled "Han van Meegeren's Early Vermeers," which revealed that Van Meegeren was behind three Vermeer forgeries of the 1920s that had been floated on the international market by an organized ring of art swindlers based in London and Berlin.