Tom Keating

Keating was born into a working-class family in an overcrowded flat in South London.[11] 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.[12][13]

Navy tour

Keating was called up to the Royal Navy in the spring of 1940, finishing his training just in time to get a taste of combat at Dunkirk, before setting off for Singapore[11] 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.[15]

HMS Lagan, 1943.

On 15 September 1943 he was posted to the frigate HMS Lagan as a stoker[12] 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 After suffering major defeats four months earlier, the German U-boat offensive had been withdrawn from the North Atlantic, awaiting tactical and technical improvements, which were now complete.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 wee 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 over 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 seventeen shillings a week.[11][15] He soon married his wife Ellen, with whom he had two children, Douglas, and Linda. They separated in 1952.[11]

While studying at Goldsmith’s, Keating secured a part-time job as a restorer, at the well-respected Hahn Brothers, in Mayfair,[11] 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.[1] The typical instruction he got in these establishments was along the lines of, ‘here, show us what you can do with this’.[18]

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. Roberts was so impressed with several of Keating’s ‘repairs’ that he framed them, added a forged signature, and put them up in a nearby showroom for hundreds, even thousands of pounds,[12] all while paying Keating slave wages, generally £5 to £10 per week.[18]

Frank Moss Bennett: Cavaliers playing cards, 1912

When Keating discovered some Frank Moss Bennetts he’d nearly completely repainted for Roberts, on offer at a posh West End gallery for £1,500 to £3,000,[19] 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.[18]

When he later discovered that similar subterfuge was 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.[12] 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.[20][21]

Keating never attempted to get 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.[22][23]

His 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 he’d been ordered to ‘enhance’, 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 buy it from him, and asked him to do another, for which he paid him $15 each. Keating later learned they were sold at a London Gallery for over $3000.[24]

Cornelius Krieghoff: Trappers on the frontier.

Keating 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.[23] 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.[24]

Keating considered himself a socialist and used that mentality to rationalize his actions.[16] He planted "time bombs" in his products. He left clues of the paintings' true nature for fellow art restorers or conservators to find. For example, he might write text onto the canvas with lead white before he began the painting, knowing that x-rays would later reveal the text. He deliberately added flaws or anachronisms, or used materials peculiar to the 20th century. Modern copyists of old masters use similar practices to guard against accusations of fraud.

In Keating's book The Fake's Progress, discussing the famous artists he forged, he stated that "it seemed disgraceful to me how many of them died in poverty". He reasoned that the poverty he had shared with these artists qualified him for the job.[16] He added: "I flooded the market with the 'work' of Palmer and many others, not for gain, but simply as a protest against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead."[25] In 1962, Keating counterfeited Edgar Degas' self-portrait.[16]

Mastering an artist's style and technique, as well as getting to know the artist very well, was a priority for Keating. He bristled at being called a forger, claiming he never truly copied any pictures, rather he did new pictures that looked like they were done by others. In a 1977 BBC documentary[7] he described a kind of hierarchy of terms for various types of imitation:

Copy – an exact duplicate, such as those often displayed in place of an original kept safe in a vault

Repaint – the result of heedless, heavy-handed restoration

Pastiche – a variation of an existing painting, or a new picture that mimics another artist’s style

Fake – a pastiche that has been doctored up to look like an original

Forgery – a fake with another artist’s signature added and false provenance provided

Though not always consistent in his own use of these distinctions, by far his favourite term for what he did was, Sexton Blake.[22][26] The name of the long-running fictional detective was commonly used from the early twentieth century to mean, cake. Keating revised and popularized its use as rhyming slang for fake.[27][28][29][30][12]

Keating's preferred approach in oil painting was a Venetian technique inspired by Titian's practice, although modified and fine-tuned along Dutch lines. The resultant paintings, while time-consuming to execute, have a richness and subtlety of colour and optical effect, and a variety of textures and depth of atmosphere unattainable in any other way. Unsurprisingly, his favourite artist was Rembrandt.

For a "Rembrandt", Keating might make pigments by boiling nuts for 10 hours and filtering the result through silk; such colouring would eventually fade, while genuine earth pigments would not. As a restorer he knew about the chemistry of cleaning fluids; so, a layer of glycerine under the paint layer ensured that when any of his forged paintings needed to be cleaned (as all oil paintings need to be, eventually), the glycerin would dissolve, the paint layer would disintegrate, and the painting – now a ruin – would stand revealed as a fake.

Occasionally, as a restorer, he would come across frames with Christie's catalogue numbers still on them. To help in establishing false provenances for his forgeries, he would call the auction house to ask whose paintings they had contained – and would then paint the pictures according to the same artist's style.[31]

Keating also produced a number of watercolours in the style of Samuel Palmer. To create a Palmer watercolor, Keating would mix the watercolor paints with glutinous tree gum, and cover the paintings with thick coats of varnish in order to get the right consistency and texture.[32] And oil paintings by various European masters, including François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Rembrandt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Kees van Dongen.

One of many artists associated with Kew, London, Keating had a strong desire to inspire more people to take up fine art painting. In the early 1960s, he started an informal school of his own, endeavouring to teach local teenagers elaborate techniques in his studio in Kew Village, in exchange for tobacco or second-hand art books.[32]

In the summer of 1963, forty-six year-old Keating, met sixteen-year-old Jane Kelly, in the Railway Café at Kew Gardens Station––opposite his flat, and just across an historic footbridge[33] from her family home. Having recently relocated from Llangyndeyrn, Wales, Kelly quickly joined a group of young people she found gathered round a charming older man perched at the end of the bar, regaling them with wild stories of war, protest, and Art World treachery. Keating gave informal painting lessons to several of them, but Kelly immediately stood out. From early childhood, she'd grown up studying a number of rare sketch books her great grandfather, Thomas Farr, had made in British Ceylon in the 1890s. The pioneering tea planter,[34][35] artist, and early conservationist made detailed field drawings and vivid watercolours, which inspired Kelly to become an artist. She soon became Keating's full-time student and apprentice. Four years later, the two began a life together in Suffolk, where they started an art restoration business.[8]

River landscape in the Porczyński Gallery in Warsaw, signed as Alfred Sisley, is claimed to be Keating's forgery

In February 1970, Geraldine Norman, sale room correspondent for The Times of London, reported the sale of a rare painting from Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham period, which mainly depicted moonlit scenes of shepherds and sheep from around his home in Shoreham, Kent. A nearly life-sized photo of the picture accompanied the article. Entitled Sepham Barn, it was purchased for £9,400, by Harold Leger, of Leger Galleries, Old Bond Street in London.[36]

A month later, The Times published a letter from art expert David Gould claiming the picture to be a fake. Mrs. Norman continued to receive reports of more new Palmer pictures appearing in the market, along with claims from David Gould that all of them were fakes. In March 1976, she began investigating them, enlisting the assistance of Palmer experts from the Ashmolean Museum, the Tate Museum, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as author Geoffrey Grigson.[37][38]

In July 1976 the first of Norman's series of articles on fake Palmers was published on page one of The Times.[38] Thirteen previously unknown Palmers that had appeared on the market in the past decade were all declared fake. Five of them had come from a single source: Jane Kelly. Norman was unable to reach Miss Kelly but received several phone calls with tips including one from Miss Kelly's brother, who brought photos from Keating's studio, revealing that Tom Keating was the forger she was looking for.

Soon after, she drove out to the house that Kelly's brother had told her about, and met Keating. He welcomed her inside and told her all about his life as a restorer and artist, not discussing his life as a forger. He also spent much of the time ranting about his fight against the art establishment as a working-class socialist.[32] A little over a week after their meeting (and a month after the first article), The Times published a further article written by Norman, writing about Keating's life and the many allegations of forgery against him.[39] In response, Keating wrote: "I do not deny these allegations. In fact, I openly confess to having done them."[32] He also declared that money was not his incentive.[32] Though Norman was the one to expose him, Keating did not feel resentment towards her. Instead, he said that she was sympathetic, respectful of his radical politics, and appreciative of him as an artist.[32]

When an article published in The Times discussed the auctioneer's suspicions about their provenance, Keating confessed that they were his. He also estimated that more than 2,000 of his forgeries were in circulation. He had created them, he declared, as a protest against those art traders who get rich at the artist's expense. He also refused to list the forgeries.

After Keating and Jane Kelly were finally arrested in 1977, and both accused of conspiracy to defraud and obtaining payments through deception amounting to £21,416,[32] Kelly pleaded guilty, promising to testify against Keating. Conversely, Keating pleaded innocent, on the basis that he was never intending to defraud, rather he was simply working under the masters' guidance and in their spirit. The charges were eventually dropped due to his poor health after he was severely injured in a motorcycle accident. He then contracted bronchitis in the hospital, which was exacerbated by a heart ailment and pulmonary disease, leading the doctors to believe that he was not going to survive. The prosecutor dropped the case, declaring nolle prosequi.[32] Since Kelly had already pleaded guilty, she received an eighteen month sentence, suspended for two years.[40] However, Keating served no time, and shortly after the charges were dropped, Keating's health improved. Soon after, Keating was asked to star in a television show about the techniques needed to paint like the masters.

The same year Keating was arrested (1977), he published his autobiography with Geraldine and Frank Norman. A 2005 article in The Guardian stated that after the trial was halted, "the public warmed to him, believing him a charming old rogue."[2] Years of chain smoking and the effects of breathing in the fumes of chemicals used in art restoring, such as ammonia, turpentine and methyl alcohol, together with the stress induced by the court case, had taken their toll. Through 1982 and 1983, however, Keating rallied at the prospect of finally fulfilling a long-held ambition to be a teacher; to encourage others to paint. Though still in fragile health, he accepted a proposal to star in a (UK) Channel 4 television series called Tom Keating on Painters (see more below).[2][41]

A year before he died in Colchester at the age of 66, Keating stated in a television interview, that, in his opinion, he was not an especially good painter. Keating is buried in the churchyard of the parish church of St Mary the Virgin at Dedham (a scene painted numerous times by Sir Alfred Munnings), and his last painting, The Angel of Dedham, is to be found in the Muniment Library of the church.[31][42][43]

The grave of Tom Keating in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Dedham, Essex.

Even when he was alive, many art collectors and celebrities, such as the ex-heavyweight boxer Henry Cooper, had begun to collect Keating's work. After his death, his paintings became increasingly valuable collectibles. In the year of his death, Christie's auctioned 204 of his works. The amount raised from the auction was not announced, but it is said to have been considerable. Even his known forgeries, described in catalogues as "after" Gainsborough or Cézanne, attain high prices. Nowadays, Keatings sell for tens of thousands of pounds.

Keatings' work has itself been faked. The 2005 Guardian article states, "Dodgy paintings in Keating's original style, proudly bearing what-looks-like his signature, are finding their way into the market. If they manage to fool, they can claim £5,000 to £10,000. But if uncovered they are virtually worthless, much like Keating's 20 years ago. If you can pick them up for next to nothing, they may be a better investment than an original Keating counterfeit."[2]

• Major restoration of the Louis Laguerre murals depicting the Battle of Blenheim in the West Staircase at Marlborough House.[26]
• The Hay Wain in Reverse, his best known painting, is a pastiche of John Constable's celebrated, The Hay Wain. It is reportedly on display in the Granary Barn and Museum in Flatford.[44]
• Turner at Greenwich, the reverse Temeraire shown in the Turner episode of Tom Keating On Painters.
• A modest painting of the Greek sun god Helios in his chariot adorns a sign over The Sun Inn, in Dedham, Essex.[45]

In the 2002 film The Good Thief, Nick Nolte's character claims to own a painting Picasso did for him after losing a bet, when it is exposed as a fake he claims it was painted for him by Keating after meeting in a betting shop.

The fourth track, titled "Judas Unrepentant", on progressive rock band Big Big Train's 2012 album English Electric (Part One) is based on the life of Keating as an artist. According to the blog of Big Big Train vocalist David Longdon, the song walks through Keating's artistic life from his time as a restorer to his death and posthumous fame.[53]

• Tom Keating, Geraldine Norman and Frank Norman, The Fake's Progress: The Tom Keating Story, London: Hutchinson and Co., 1977.
• Associated Press obituary for Tom Keating
• Keats, Jonathon, Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age, New York: Oxford University Press., 2013. (Excerpt on Tom Keating published by Forbes, 13 December 2012).
• Paci, P., "A Forger's Career, Tom Keating – UK," in Masters of the Swindle: True Stories of Con Men, Cheaters & Scam Artists, edited by Gianni Morelli and Chiara Schiavano, Milano, Italy: White Star Publishers, 2016, pages 180–84.