Tom Keating was an English picture restorer who, working out of London and Suffolk from roughly the early 1950s until his exposure in 1976, claimed to have produced some 2,000 forgeries in the manner of more than a hundred different artists — pictures he nicknamed “Sexton Blakes,” Cockney rhyming slang for “fakes.” Unlike forgers who chased a single lucrative master, Keating ranged across Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Renoir, Constable and many more, and he insisted he had built into many of them deliberate “time bombs”: flaws meant to betray the work as false once anyone looked closely enough. He never produced an accounting, and the true number remains his own unverifiable estimate, but enough genuine fakes surfaced to confirm a career of industrial scale.
The deception came apart not in a laboratory but in a newspaper office. In July 1976 Geraldine Norman, the sale-room correspondent of The Times, published the first of a series of articles questioning a cluster of recently surfaced works attributed to the early-nineteenth-century visionary Samuel Palmer. Thirteen previously unknown “Palmers” had reached the market over the preceding decade, and several — including a drawing of Sepham Barn — traced back to a single seller, Jane Kelly, Keating’s former partner and apprentice. Rather than fight the allegation, Keating wrote to The Times and admitted that he was the author of the fakes, recasting the confession as a political act against a corrupt art trade.
Keating and Kelly were charged with conspiracy to defraud, and in 1979 they stood trial at the Old Bailey — the first art-fraud case ever heard there. Kelly pleaded guilty and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence; Keating, his health already broken by years of breathing solvent fumes and by heavy smoking, collapsed in the witness box, and the prosecution was abandoned on medical grounds. He never served a day. He died of a heart attack on 12 February 1984, aged 66, having spent his final years as an unlikely television celebrity teaching the techniques of the Old Masters to a national audience.
The case endures less as a story of technical wizardry than as a study in how a sympathetic narrative can disarm scrutiny. Keating’s “time bombs” — messages in lead white legible only under X-ray, anachronistic modern pigments, a layer of glycerine that would dissolve the picture the moment a restorer cleaned it — were offered as proof that he had never truly meant to deceive. In practice they were rarely found until he confessed, because no one in the chain of dealers and buyers was looking. The deception worked not because the fakes were undetectable but because the market had no incentive to detect them.
Between roughly 1986 and 1994, the painter John Myatt and his partner John Drewe ran what investigators and the press came to call the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century — not because Myatt’s paintings were exceptional, but because Drewe attacked the thing that authenticates a painting rather than the painting itself. Myatt, a Staffordshire art teacher who had advertised honest “genuine fakes” in Private Eye, produced some 200 pictures in the manner of modern masters including Alberto Giacometti, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet and Roger Bissière. Drewe, born John Cockett, sold them through Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips and through dealers in London, Paris and New York, realising an estimated £1.8 million.
What set the scheme apart was Drewe’s assault on the documentary record. A painting’s value rests on its provenance — the paper trail proving who made it and who has owned it — and Drewe manufactured that trail at its source. Posing as a scholar and donor, he secured access to the archives of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s National Art Library and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he inserted forged catalogues, faked exhibition records and doctored photographs that “proved” Myatt’s inventions had a recorded history. He corrupted the very reference works that experts consult to verify authenticity, so that a sceptic who did the responsible thing and checked the archive would find Drewe’s forgery waiting there to reassure them.
The fraud unravelled through human relationships rather than connoisseurship. Mary Lisa Palmer of the Giacometti Association in Paris distrusted the works submitted to her — guided by the look of the pictures rather than their impeccable paperwork — and pressed her doubts. Decisively, Drewe’s estranged former partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, turned over to police a cache of documents revealing the operation. Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad built the case, and in a trial at Southwark Crown Court that ran from 1998 into 1999, both men were convicted. On 13 February 1999 Drewe received six years for conspiracy to defraud and Myatt one year; Myatt served four months and Drewe about two years.
The case remains a landmark because of what it permanently damaged. Roughly 60 of Myatt’s fakes were recovered, but well over a hundred are believed still to be circulating, and Drewe’s forged insertions polluted institutional archives so thoroughly that curators could not always be certain which records were genuine. By targeting provenance itself, the pair did lasting harm not only to the buyers they defrauded but to the trustworthiness of the documentary record on which the whole field depends.
Eric Hebborn was an English painter and draughtsman who, from the early 1960s until his death in 1996, produced what he claimed were more than a thousand forged old-master drawings — sheets in the manner of Mantegna, Van Dyck, Piranesi, Castiglione, Corot and many others — good enough to be bought and sold by the most respected dealers and museums in the world. Trained at the Royal Academy Schools and the recipient of the British Prix de Rome in engraving in 1959, Hebborn possessed exactly the skills a forger of master drawings needs: a deep technical command of line and an intimate knowledge, gained as a restorer, of how old paper, ink and chalk behave. He sold many of his drawings through the venerable London dealer P. & D. Colnaghi, from where they passed into distinguished collections, including a “Van Dyck” preparatory study bought by the British Museum.
The first crack appeared in 1978, when Konrad Oberhuber, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, examined two drawings he had acquired through Colnaghi — one attributed to Francesco del Cossa, the other to Sperandio — and noticed they had been drawn on the same paper. Two artists of different generations could not have used a single identical sheet; the match meant at least one, and probably both, were modern fakes. Oberhuber alerted colleagues, a related “Cossa” surfaced at the Morgan Library having passed through several experts, and the trail led back through Colnaghi to Hebborn as the common source. Colnaghi, fearing libel, did not publicly name him.
Hebborn was not formally unmasked so much as he stepped forward. From 1984 he began publicly admitting his forgeries, using the attention to attack an art establishment he held in contempt for valuing names and labels over the quality of the work itself. He elaborated the boast in his 1991 autobiography Drawn to Trouble and, most provocatively, in The Art Forger’s Handbook, a how-to manual for deceiving experts. He was never convicted of any forgery offence. On 8 January 1996, days after the Italian edition of the Handbook appeared, he was found in a street in Rome with severe head injuries, apparently from a blunt instrument; he died three days later, on 11 January, aged 61. The killing has never been solved.
The Hebborn case is the purest demonstration of a forger exploiting the gap between an attribution and the object. His drawings were judged less on their own merits than on the names attached to them and the prestige of the dealer offering them, and because old-master drawings are sparsely documented and stylistically various, a skilled new “discovery” could slot into the canon without contradicting anything. The discipline of connoisseurship, which prides itself on the trained eye, was defeated for years by a man who knew exactly what that eye wanted to see.
In Hamburg on 25 April 1983, the West German weekly Stern announced and began serializing what it called the historical sensation of the century: sixty-two handwritten volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries, spanning 1932 to 1945, which it had bought for some 9.3 million Deutsche Marks. Within roughly two weeks the diaries were exposed as crude forgeries, written by the Stuttgart dealer and habitual faker Konrad Kujau (born 1938) and brokered to Stern by its own star reporter, Gerd Heidemann (born 1931), who had skimmed a large share of the money for himself. The diaries did not survive a single proper laboratory test.
The forgery was not subtle. Kujau wrote in school exercise books bound with polyester thread unavailable before the 1950s, on paper containing an optical whitener that postdated the war, with ink whose evaporation showed it had been applied recently. He even botched the cover monogram, embossing the imitation-leather notebooks with Gothic initials that read “FH” rather than “AH.” The content was largely copied and embellished from a published chronology of Hitler’s speeches and movements, reproducing the source’s own errors. What carried the fraud was not its craft but the colossal commercial and journalistic appetite for an authentic Hitler scoop, which led Stern to skip the chemical tests it later claimed to have run.
Reputable names were drawn in. Stern sold serialization rights abroad, and the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), an independent director of The Sunday Times, initially pronounced the diaries genuine — then publicly reversed himself, expressing grave doubts at the very press conference where they were unveiled. Newsweek and others examined them. The decisive verdict came from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) and forensic analysts, who within days of receiving volumes identified the modern paper, binding and ink.
Kujau confessed. He and Heidemann were tried in Hamburg from August 1984 into 1985; Heidemann was sentenced to four years and eight months and Kujau to four years and six months for fraud and related offenses. The affair humiliated Stern, dented Trevor-Roper’s reputation, and entered journalism as the standard cautionary tale of a scoop too large to scrutinize. Kujau, briefly a celebrity forger, died of cancer in 2000.
In 1936 a young store clerk named Beryle Shinn picked up a corroded brass rectangle near San Francisco Bay, and the following spring the most distinguished historian of the Spanish borderlands in America, Herbert Eugene Bolton of the University of California, Berkeley, announced it to the world as one of history’s lost treasures. The plate appeared to be the brass tablet that Sir Francis Drake had nailed to a post in 1579 to claim “Nova Albion” — the California coast — for Queen Elizabeth I. Bolton declared on 6 April 1937 that “the authenticity of the tablet seems to me beyond all reasonable doubt,” and the California Historical Society bought it for $3,500. It became a centerpiece of the Bancroft Library and a fixture of California’s founding story for forty years.
It was a fraud, and an accidental one. The plate had been manufactured around 1933 by members of E Clampus Vitus, a jovial California fraternity of history enthusiasts, as a private practical joke aimed at Bolton, himself a member, who was known to dream of finding Drake’s plate. The hoaxers even painted the initials “ECV” on the back in fluorescent paint, invisible in ordinary light, intending Bolton to discover the gag once he turned the plate over under ultraviolet. He never did. By the time the plate surfaced in his office, the joke had escaped its makers’ control, and none of them could find a way to confess without humiliating a colleague and a major institution.
The forgery was finally and definitively exposed in 1977, when Helen Michel and Frank Asaro of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory subjected the metal to neutron activation analysis. The brass contained far more zinc than any sixteenth-century alloy — zinc was not isolated and added to brass deliberately until centuries after Drake — and far too little of the trace nickel, lead, gold, and iron that period brass carried. X-ray and gamma-ray tests showed the plate had been rolled smooth by modern machinery, not hammered by hand. The metal was modern American brass, most likely made between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2002–03, historians Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen, and James M. Spitze published the full reconstruction of who made the plate and why.
The case is a study in how a respected expert’s longing for a particular discovery can override every warning sign. Doubts about the plate’s spelling, lettering, and manufacture were raised almost immediately, yet the authority of Bolton’s name carried it past them for a generation. The joke’s intended punchline — the hidden “ECV” — sat on the object the whole time, unread.