THE DETECTION OF FAKES and the unmasking of forgers always excites public interest and usually for one reason only – the consequent fooling of experts. The attendant headlines and reports emphasise the ‘acute embarrassment’ of dealers, auctioneers, collectors and museum personnel in having been so roundly duped. The forger rarely suffers opprobrium and is in fact lauded for his ability to pull wool over expert eyes, even if his activities lead to a prison sentence. All forgers are failed artists. Their motives, however, are extremely mixed and although many of them have protested that they only wanted to ‘get back’ at the world of dealing and connoisseurship, financial gain is a cornerstone of their flourishing new careers. But forgery is no compartmentalised activity. The many figures representative of deception – those gods of attribution, faked provenance, pastiche and copy – gather on the lower slopes of their very own Parnassus whose top is occupied by the great forgers from Bastianini, Marcy and Dossena to Keating, Hebborn and Greenhalgh. Some of these names appear in this issue of the Burlington, published to coincide with the National Gallery’s exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30th June to 12th September).

Although the Burlington is no stranger to the forger’s art, its more usual bedfellow, over the years, has been the mistaken attribution. The business of attributing can sometimes sail dangerously close to forgery or, at least, conscious deceit. Scholars’ reputations and dealers’ profits can sink or swim on the upgrading of a work from minor to major; and sufficient inducements can attract even the most high-minded historian or connoisseur. The relatively sudden appearance of a work with a plausible name attached but little or no trace of a provenance is nearly always a matter of suspicion (it is one of the chief reservations people may hold over ‘La Bella Principessa’, for which see pp.420–21).

The most notorious forgery to be associated with the Mag­azine, one backed by the flimsiest attribution, is the Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, an early ‘masterpiece’ by Vermeer. It was published in the Magazine (November 1937, p.211) in a short article by Abraham Bredius who could hardly help but exclaim at its perfect preservation – ‘just as it left the painter’s studio!’. This, of course, was true; it was the studio of Han van Meegeren, rather than the master of Delft, and had been painted the year before. Five years earlier Bredius had also published in these pages (October 1932, p.145) a Dutch interior with two figures which, again, he gave to Vermeer. This too was a Van Meegeren; ironically Bredius prefaces his discovery of this ‘very beautiful authentic Vermeer’ with impatient remarks on how many fake Vermeers had recently been shown to him. The   was a grave mistake and the reputation of those who agreed with Bredius suffered when some years later the painting was revealed as a pastiche by the wily and embittered Van Meegeren.1 One of those who agreed with Bredius was the prominent Dutch connoisseur and museum director Dirk Hannema who is seen (on the right) admiring the very picture in the photograph on the cover of this issue (and Fig.35). Hannema was no forger but a willing dupe who was so enamoured of his own eye for quality that he filled his collection with fakes and misattributions. Any schadenfreude is, however, tempered by the revelation that at least one of his four ‘Van Goghs’ was actually right (see pp.393–405).

A glance through back numbers of the Burlington with their frequent ‘new attributions’ and tantalising advertisements can often produce derisive astonishment. On file at the Burlington is a list of works on paper by a variety of old masters which were illustrated in the Magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. A good number of these are undoubtedly the work of Eric Hebborn and several are reproduced in his autobiography, Drawn to Trouble. Hebborn was undoubtedly gifted but lacked any distinct artistic personality of his own, a sine qua non of the successful forger. Unconventional in the leading of his life, in the studio he was a well-mannered graduate of the Royal Academy Schools. But he had an enviable fluency of line and a convincing ability to place an image on paper with aplomb. Strictly speaking he was a superb pasticheur. The laborious business of forgery was not for him. Instead, he was a master of emulation, particularly of artists whose drawings were spon­taneous and volatile. For Hebborn, the fakery was all in the attribution and provenance. In his autobiography he stresses his respect for many of the experts and art historians who attributed or authenticated his work. He needed them and they bolstered the pride he had in his productions, the sale of which enabled him to live in a certain amount of comfort and style in Italy, in strong contrast to his early hand-to-mouth existence. He was even able to afford THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, many copies of which were found after his death, with numerous illustrations cut from their pages. These served a dual purpose as both an extensive visual bank and as a record of his own drawings that featured in dealers’ and auctioneers’ advertisements and in announcements of museum acquisitions. Hebborn had his own business, the Pannini Gallery, and it must surely have given him greater satisfaction to see his ‘Bruegel the Elder’ landscape illustrate an advertisement for his business than his ‘Van Dyck’ that announced Colnaghi’s Summer Exhibition in 1970.

While Hebborn mostly faked works on paper by artists from about 1500 to 1900, Shaun Greenhalgh and his family covered a huge stretch of time and disparate media, from an Egyptian alabaster sculpture (see Figs.54 and 55) to twentieth-century paintings by Peploe and Lowry. Almost equally ingenious was their forging of provenances, which calls for considerable knowledge, technical know-how and cunning; it was these that allowed Shaun Greenhalgh to profit from his garden-shed hobby, even though the family continued to live in almost ostentatious modesty in their Bolton council house.

All art retains an element of repetition and copy; all copies retain an element of originality. In forgeries it is the amount of the latter – the forger’s own personality – in proportion to the rest of the work that determines its reception, one way or the other. Once detected, however, the forgery, commercially and aesthetically, is dead in the water. Nevertheless it continues to fascinate and, along with the spectacular deattribution, can provide us considerable insight into period taste, the needs of an era and our often desperate desire to believe.