Gentlemanly and discreet, with faces like silver teapots, the better art dealers and auctioneers around London's Bond Street have long maintained their immunity from the scandals of the art world. Circumspection is the motto, coupled with a standing policy—among members of the British Antique Dealers Association—to refund the price of any fake. Therefore, when the biggest art forgery scandal in years came to a head in London last fortnight, the embarrassment was acute. At a press conference, a rubicund, white-bearded cockney painter and restorer named Tom Keating, 59, revealed that over the past 25 years he had flooded the art market with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 pastiches of the work of dead artists, ranging from 17th century Dutch to Constable to German expressionists. He was, Keating blithely admitted, "a terrible faker. Anyone who sees my work and thinks it genuine, must be around the bend." Moreover, Keating said, he did not mean his phonies to pass close tests: before setting to work he would scrawl "fake," "Keating" or a suitable rude word on the blank canvas, in lead-based paint, which would show up under X rays. Nevertheless, many of the works ended up in leading galleries and auction rooms, where, endowed with signatures and solid pedigrees, they were sold for even more solid prices.
Nothing was to distress the trade more than Keating's versions of the work of Samuel Palmer (1805-81), whose moonlit landscapes of Shoreham are among the most sought-after works in English romantic landscape painting. Palmer made some 80 Shoreham watercolors, oils and drawings; Keating made 80 more—mainly by copying details of Palmers and cobbling them together. The first such "Palmer" was sold to a British museum by Colnaghi's, a major Bond Street dealer, in 1965. In 1969 another "Palmer," titled Sepham Barn, went at auction to the Leger Galleries for £9,400 ($22,560), a sum that staggered Keating and enabled him and his lover, Jane Kelly, the 23-year-old daughter of a retired British army major, to spend a year in the Canary Islands. Jane Kelly sold four "Palmers" to Leger Galleries, claiming they had been in her family's estate in Ceylon.
One of them, The Horse Chestnut Tree, went to Sotheby's in 1973 and was sold for £15,000 ($34,500), a record for Palmers, to a chocolate manufacturer in Hull. Sotheby's still claims it has not been proved a Keating fake.
Gradually, suspicions began to hatch. More than four years ago, Leger Galleries had a visit from a leading Palmer specialist, Sir Karl Parker, who pronounced Sepham Barn a fake. When The Horse Chestnut Tree appeared in Sotheby's, one of its former consultants, David Gould, wrote to Chairman Peter Wilson expressing doubts about it. But the scandal was finally exposed when Geraldine Norman, the London Times's auction-room correspondent, tracked Keating to his lonely cottage in Dedham. "I have so much contempt for the dealers who prostitute the art of genuine painters," Keating announced, "that I was willing to sell them any old rubbish."