Tom Keating
Thomas Patrick Keating was an English artist, art restorer and art forger. Considered the most prolific and versatile art forger of the 20th century, he claimed to have faked more than 2,000 paintings by more than 160 different artists of unprecedented scope—ranging from the Renaissance to Modernism, Expressionism and Fauvism —with heavy emphasis on English landscape Romanticists and the French Impressionists. Total estimated profits from his forgeries amount in today's value to more than $10 million.
He claimed his aim was not material gain, but rather a crusade against art dealers he believed were only interested in fine art as a commodity, for which an impressive provenance, often dubious or wholly invented, always trumped the masterful artistry and intrinsic beauty of any particular drawing or painting.
He began flooding the London art market in the early 1950s with hundreds of consistently convincing fakes, often by giving them to friends and acquaintances, with tacit expectation that many would soon end up in a posh Bond Street auction house, or gallery.
He escalated his crusade in the late 1960s and early 1970s by directing his business partner and lover, Jane Kelly, to sell several fakes of then little known romanticist, Samuel Palmer. As a result of these sales, both Keating and Kelly ended up on trial, in 1979, at the top criminal court in Britain, charged with art fraud. Kelly pleaded guilty and received an 18-month sentence, suspended for two years. After two days giving evidence, Keating ended up in hospital for a motorbike injury. He returned for a third day in court, during which he collapsed in the witness box, and was taken back to hospital. He was released without charge two weeks later due to failing health.
In 1982, he starred in an award-winning Channel 4 television series in which he instructed viewers in the intricately detailed painting techniques of his favourite Old Masters. A followup series, focusing on the Impressionists, began airing two days after his death, in 1984.
Early life
Keating was born into a working-class family in an overcrowded flat in Forest Hill, South London. As a youth, living hand to mouth on his father's shilling-and-sixpence hourly wage as a house painter, he helped his mother make ends meet by collecting and selling horse manure, running errands for neighbours, and taking parcels to the local pawn shop. Growing up he worked as a delivery boy, lather boy, lift boy and bellboy before finally joining the family business as a house painter.Art classes
He discovered his love and early talent for picture-making at Eltham College primary school in Kent. Having run away from home to visit his grandmother seven miles away, he ended up staying for three years, trading persistent poverty and grim prospects for regular home-cooked meals and a headmistress who was also an art teacher, who encouraged him to spend as much time as he liked drawing and painting owls, foxes, badgers, and a sailing ship. When his grandmother died, he returned to Forest Hill.At the age of 14, he passed an entrance exam for the nearby, prestigious, St Dunstan's College, but was crestfallen when told the impossible sum required for clothes and books needed just to start. He returned to odd jobs and house painting, developing his own talent for detailing woodwork, graining, marbling, and sign writing.
Navy tour
Keating was called up to the Royal Navy in the spring of 1940, finishing his training in time to face combat at Dunkirk, before setting off for Singapore aboard the SS Strathmore. He spent the next three years in the South China Sea on a variety of vessels, also spending time in hospital for a range of illnesses, including shock, and injuries he attributed to the abuse of fellow crewmen and officers dubious of a sailor who spent all his free time on his own, reading and drawing, instead of carousing with the rest of them.On 15 September 1943, he was posted to the frigate HMS Lagan as a stoker first class, and sent into the Battle of the Atlantic, escorting a convoy of merchant supply ships from Liverpool to New York. After suffering major defeats four months earlier, the German U-boat offensive had been withdrawn from the North Atlantic, awaiting tactical and technical improvements, which were now complete. In the small hours of 20 September 1943, the Lagan became the first Allied warship to be hit by the new T5 acoustic torpedo, which tore off her entire stern, killing more than a quarter of the crew, and leaving the remainder dead in the water southwest of Iceland, about a third of the way into their journey. The Lagan was towed back to Merseyside. Nerves shattered and his back badly injured by Hedgehog shrapnel, Keating was sent home to hospital for psychiatric treatment – a fortnight in an induced coma, then discharged with a disability pension of 17 shillings a week. He soon married his wife Ellen, with whom he had two children, Douglas, and Linda. They separated in 1952.
Self-taught
Keating always claimed he learned his most important skills as an artist through independent study and experimentation on his own. His early sources of inspiration were chiefly Venetian School father of the Renaissance, Titian; Baroque Dutch master Rembrandt, pioneering British portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough, and the Romanticists Goya, Turner and Constable. He divined their secrets by spending countless hours scrutinising and sketching examples of their work in Britain's greatest museums, especially the National Gallery, The Royal Academy and the Tate.In 1950, he was given for his service in the war a two-year course at Goldsmiths' College, and a grant from the Ministry of Labour of £4 and 5 shillings a week. He supplemented this by working nights and weekends, but was seldom able to simultaneously manage all the expenses of essential art supplies and feeding his family. He then discovered he lacked the prerequisite A-levels to qualify for a teaching certificate. He was disappointed with the calibre of technical training on offer, and had little interest in the modern art movements in vogue at the time. He failed two final exams––praised for "painterly technique", thwarted by his composition's "insufficient originality".
Never immune to self-contradiction, Keating told a journalist in May 1977 he had to unlearn everything he was taught at Goldsmith's. In his autobiography published the following month, he credited some of the training he received there with getting him started on a career.
Art restorer
While studying at Goldsmith’s, Keating secured a part-time job as a restorer, at the well-respected Hahn Brothers, in Mayfair, where he began meticulously filling thousands of tiny cracks in old pictures. The breadth of his expertise in painting techniques quickly expanded, however, when he began taking more challenging jobs on the shady fringes of the London art market, where he learned to skilfully mimic the methods of scores of lesser-known artists, in the course of figuring out how to fix them. A typical instruction he got in such establishments was, ‘here, show us what you can do with this’.While working in a small shop for a man called Fred Roberts, he was asked to replace a herd of grazing cattle––that had been obliterated by the repair of a large tear in a 19th-century painting by Thomas Sidney Cooper––with laughing children dancing around a maypole, dramatically enhancing the picture's charm. So impressed was he with several of Keating's "repairs", Roberts framed them, added a forged signature, and put them up in a nearby showroom for hundreds, even thousands of pounds, all while paying Keating slave wages, generally £5 to £10 per week.
When Keating discovered some Frank Moss Bennetts he had nearly completely repainted for Roberts on offer at a posh West End gallery for £1,500 to £3,000, he was so disgusted he dashed back, gave Roberts an earful of expletives and quit on the spot, hurling a palette at him as a parting gesture.
When he later found evidence of similar subterfuge rampant throughout the trade—dealers raking in cash while his wife and children were stuck in a damp, dilapidated flat, with scant, tattered furniture and often little to eat—he decided he too could play at that game. A forger was born, with a sense of righteous indignation and a desire for vengeance that plagued him the rest of his life; baffling those who thought his tremendous talent could be put to far better use; landing him in the Old Bailey on charges for fraud; bringing him post-trial wealth and fame; and condemning him––through the stress on his health of violent mood swings and massive consumption of tobacco and alcohol––to an early death.
Crusade against the art world
Keating never got rich off the fakes he produced, rather he often gave them away as gifts, bartered them for food, booze, and rent, or sold them for a pittance to friends and acquaintances, even the local gas man.Keating's main objective was a vendetta against corrupt, predatory art dealers whom he believed victimised both artists and the buying public. Not long after finding a number of old pictures that he had been ordered to "enhance" were on sale nearby for inflated prices, he was taken in by an even more perfidious employer. Keating would often stay after hours painting pictures in the styles of other artists he admired, to study their techniques. One evening his boss discovered him finishing a pastiche of a wintry Canadian scene, à la Cornelius Krieghoff. The man offered to purchase it, and asked him to do another, for which he paid him $15 each. Keating later learned they were sold at a London Gallery for more than $3,000.
He retaliated by disseminating quantities of fakes of sufficient quality to fool the experts, hoping to destabilize the system. At one point in the 1950s, so many "newly-discovered" Krieghoffs had come on the market that prices were acutely depressed, over fears many were fake, neatly achieving two of Keating's goals: to reduce the profits of greedy art dealers, and to make beautiful pictures from one of his favourite artists more affordable to the buying public. Some twenty years later, a Sotheby's expert on Canadian art lamented, due to unceasing difficulties in making a firm identification of Krieghoff's work, that instead of listing them under the artist's full name – to indicate full confidence in their authenticity – they catalogued paintings in a 1976 auction as merely, "attributed to Krieghoff". Prices however, had made a handsome recovery; they sold for $11,000–$13,000.
Keating considered himself a socialist and used his political views to rationalize his actions. He deliberately left clues to equip fellow art restorers, conservators and merchants to discover his deception. Sometimes he would put a layer of glycerine under oil paint so that when a picture would be cleaned the solvents would dissolve the glycerin and the paint layer would disintegrate, revealing the picture as a fake. Or when beginning a picture, he would paint messages on canvases in lead white that could easily be revealed with x-rays. Occasionally he found frames still labelled with Christie's catalogue numbers and would contact the auction house to learn what paintings they had contained. He would then paint similar pictures in the same artist's style and use the frames to imply a false provenance for them. He would also use modern acrylics and varnishes on paintings supposedly from previous centuries. Contemporary copyists of old masters use similar practices to guard against accusations of fraud.