Frederik H. Kreuger

On 10 January 2015, NRC Handelsblad announced Kreuger died in Delft, aged 86.

Kreuger was also the inventor of a system for gaining solar power from sea by large floating algea fields producing biofuel (European Patent EP07110895 – 22 June 2007). This project is managed by the Botanical Garden of the Department Biotechnology of the Delft University of Technology; several departments of the University are cooperating herein.

The resulting English biography A New Vermeer. Life and Work of Han van Meegeren 2007 was named after a notorious article A New Vermeer, where the great art-expert Dr. Abraham Bredius praised the Van Meegeren fake Emmaus as the finest Vermeer painting ever seen. In this book he also describes the life of Van Meegeren's son Jacques van Meegeren; he discovered that Jacques in his turn had forged the work of his father.

In 2006 followed De Arrestatie van een Meestervervalser, again in Dutch, in which the many reactions on his first biography were incorporated.

In 2004, he published his findings in Dutch in Han van Meegeren, Meestervervalser, where new facts and newly found works of Van Meegeren were collected.

Kreuger started in 2001 to study the life of the famous Dutch forger Han van Meegeren. His first book on Van Meegeren was a Dutch novel.

He was educated in Haarlem HBS B (a bèta-oriented secondary school), took his Engineer's degree at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and received there his Ph.D. degree in 1961. He worked as a high voltage scientist in Sweden, England and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands he was employed by the electrical industry and became later managing director of the Nederlandse Kabelfabriek in Delft. In 1986 he became a high voltage professor of his Alma mater in Delft and worked there until 1995.

Kreuger was in an opportune position to write his biography about Van Meegeren because his native language is Dutch and also because he lived in the Netherlands at the time when Van Meegeren was active. He searched for primary sources – especially in the Netherlands – and added in this way to the knowledge gained by John Godley, 3rd Baron Kilbracken, who was a pioneer in this field, and to that of Marie Louise Doudart de la Grée, who interviewed Van Meegeren in 1946 and wrote a Dutch biography in 1966.

Frederik Hendrik Kreuger (14 May 1928 – 10 January 2015), was a Dutch high voltage scientist and inventor, lived in Delft, the Netherlands, and was professor emeritus of the Delft University of Technology. He was also a professional author of technical literature, nonfiction books, thrillers and a decisive biography of the master forger Han van Meegeren.