Eric Hebborn — the draughtsman whose fake Old Masters fooled the British Museum

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.