Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [6]
When he was done with the first painting, he forged the artist’s signature on the front and added a note on the back naming his boss as the person who had commissioned the work. It was all in good fun, and it made him a little money. Myatt’s boss paid him £200 for each piece,1 then spent £1,600 on the frames. After he’d hung them, he invited the Marks & Spencer pair over to dinner. Without mentioning Myatt, he showed them the two paintings.
“These are better than the one we’ve got!” they exclaimed.
Others too were fooled by Myatt’s work, his boss told him. One art historian friend swooned when she saw the fake Dufys and swore she could detect Matisse’s influence. Myatt roared when he heard this.
In the meantime, Myatt’s brief career as a songwriter was hitting the skids. “Silly Games” turned out to be his only hit. He couldn’t produce a follow-up. Within two or three years, the music company went under, and Myatt’s royalties and retainers dried up. Soon after, his mother and father died, and then his wife had their second child, Sam, an event that had a drastically unsettling effect on her. She began to withdraw from the family, and several months after Sam’s birth she fell in love with a man who cut a romantic figure and announced that she was leaving Myatt and the kids.
At forty-one, Myatt felt his life was over. A failed songwriter, portraitist, and landscape painter, he’d been reduced to part-time work teaching children how to draw, and now he was a failed husband too. His productive years gone, he could no longer define himself by the nobility of his aspirations. Though he had never been overly ambitious, he felt a crushing disappointment in himself. When he found himself with less than £100 in the bank in 1986, he decided he had no choice but to try the fake-art route again, knowing from his experience with his former boss that there was a market.
Myatt took out an ad in London’s satirical biweekly Private Eye, a magazine with a cynical and well-heeled readership that he guessed would be drawn to his offer of “genuine fakes,” facsimiles of “19th and 20th century paintings, from £150.” To his relief, the ad brought in a trickle of interest and a few commissions. One client wanted a copy of his favorite Claude Monet landscape. Another wanted a Joseph Turner shipwreck. Most requests were a little more creative—a banquet or a woodland chase scene in the style of a particular artist, or a portrait of a client’s father, a retired naval commander, in the grand style of the eighteenth-century British artist Joshua Reynolds. In an art book, Myatt found a picture of a serious-looking old salt with a chestful of medals, copied it, and gave it a new face. Then there was the odd commission for a portrait of a relative or a family pet in an unusual setting—an uncle dodging bombs in the aerial blitz of London during World War II, a puppy chewing a bone during the Battle of Agincourt. One joker wanted a portrait of himself as a skeleton having intercourse with a fat nun in the ruins of a Gothic abbey.
There was nothing illegal or improper in what Myatt was doing. For centuries, copying paintings had been standard practice for artists and art students. In the studios of Rembrandt and Rubens, young assistants often copied the works of their masters to perfect their own technique and to aid the master painter. These studios functioned as workshops, producing paintings entirely by the master or sketched by him and then “filled in” by an assistant. Some assistants specialized in heads, others in backgrounds. When the work was complete, the master would study the canvas, make corrections, add a final detail, a glaze, and a signature. Art historians have devoted entire books to the task of categorizing the gradations of masters’ paintings, differentiating between those done solely by the master and workshop