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In the 27 years that James Meyer worked for the Pop Art master Jasper Johns, the assistant answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes and even drew lines on his canvases.

During the time they sat together in Manhattan, St. Maarten and most recently in Sharon, Conn., Mr. Johns mentored his apprentice, teaching him how to construct a work of art, how to trace and reuse his drawings, and the technique of painting with thick drops of hot wax, known as encaustic. “Most important,” Mr. Meyer once said, was that “Jasper has taught me to think about what I’m making before I make it.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Meyer was arrested for stealing at least 22 works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Mr. Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official compendium of the artist’s work, known as the catalogue raisonné. Mr. Meyer kept $3.4 million of that, according to the indictment, with purchasers agreeing to keep the art private for at least eight years, without exhibiting or reselling it.

Arraigned in a Hartford courtroom, Mr. Meyer pleaded not guilty to federal charges, and was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond.

An artist himself, Mr. Meyer, now 51, has talked about how lucky he was to find himself working with one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. In an unpublished interview from the 1990s with the writer Matthew Rose, Mr. Meyer recounted how he made a cold call to Mr. Johns’s studio in 1984, when he was 22 and painting knockoffs of van Gogh and Matisse at $6 an hour to hang on the walls of Beefsteak Charlie’s.

With his résumé and slides of his work in hand, Mr. Meyer said, “I put on a suit, too, and went over to Johns’s Houston Street studio — this large old bank building — tapped on the door.”

Though he didn’t get through the front entrance, he dropped off his package. When he returned the next day to retrieve his slides, Mr. Johns opened the door and invited him in for coffee.

“Come back tomorrow and we’ll take it day by day,” Mr. Meyer remembered Mr. Johns saying. He said that he sometimes drew lines on Mr. Johns’s canvases, which the artist would later erase and redraw. According to the indictment, while employed at the Johns art studio, Mr. Meyer also “maintained a file drawer containing pieces of art that were not yet completed,” and began removing the works from September 2006 to February 2012.

In 2011 Mr. Meyer had a show of his own work — figurative ink drawings on Mylar — at Dorfman Projects, a gallery on West 20th Street in Chelsea. An owner of the gallery, Fred Dorfman, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Mr. Meyer, with other artists, has helped develop an art studio at a high school near his home in Salisbury. He lives with his wife, Amy Jenkins, in a house with peeling paint and a rusted and dented mailbox. A woman who answered a knock on the door said she had no comment.

Mr. Johns, now 83, is probably best known for his collage and encaustic paintings of the American flag, one of which hangs in the fourth-floor gallery of the Museum of Modern Art.

An assistant at Mr. Johns’s studio in Sharon said the artist had no comment on Mr. Meyer. The charges include one count of interstate transportation of stolen property, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Last year the foundry owner Brian Ramnarine, who created a wax cast of the mold for Mr. Johns’s 1960 metallic collage “Flag,” was charged with using the artist’s original mold to make a bronze sculpture that he attributed to Mr. Johns — and trying to sell it for $11 million.

Carol Vogel contributed reporting from London, Kristin Hussey from Sharon, Conn., and Randy Kennedy from New York.