Tom Keating — the restorer who salted his fakes with deliberate self-destruct clues

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.