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Getty kouros
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/12/22


The Getty Kouros

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros.[1] The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, in 1985 for ten million dollars and first exhibited there in October 1986.[2][3][4]

Despite initial favourable scientific analysis of the patina and aging of the marble, the question of its authenticity has persisted from the beginning. Subsequent demonstration of an artificial means of creating the de-dolomitization observed on the stone has prompted a number of art historians to revise their opinions of the work. If genuine, it is one of only twelve extant complete kouroi. If fake, it exhibits a high degree of technical and artistic sophistication by an as-yet unidentified forger. Its status has remained undetermined: latterly the museum's label read "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery".[5] Although the statue was removed from public display after the 2018 renovations, Dr. Timothy Potts, the current director of the Getty, reinforces that the kouros has still not been confirmed of its authenticity. Dr. Potts states that the sculpture was taken off of display due to the dubious nature around the work.[6]

Provenance

The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiří Frel.

In the early 1980s, the antiquities department at the J. Paul Getty Museum was a hotbed of whispered political intrigue. Rumors swirled that the department’s Czech curator, Jiri Frel, was a Communist spy. And many believed the deputy curator, former State Department official Arthur Houghton, was a CIA plant tasked with keeping an eye on Frel’s activities....

As for Houghton and his ties to the CIA, the rumors were not far off. Before coming to the Getty in 1982, he had spent a decade working for the State Department, including time in its bureau of intelligence and research as a Mid East analyst. Houghton was fond of cultivating his image as a man of mystery. In truth, he had burned out on the diplomatic bureaucracy and chose a career that brought him closer to his long time passion — ancient coins. Houghton remains active in the field to this day.

-- Jiri Frel: Scholar, Refugee, Curator…Spy?, by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

-- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman

Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Pacific Palisades along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue's authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer. No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851). Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.[7]

The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate fake and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983. At the time of acquisition, the Getty Villa's board of trustees split over the authenticity of the work. Federico Zeri, founding member of board of trustees and appointed by Getty himself, left the board in 1984 after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought was rejected.[8][9]

[Narrator] But Peter Nahum wasn't the only person who was suspicious. The cracks in Myatt and Drewe's con were beginning to show.

[Narrator] Giacometti was a Swiss Italian artist who moved to Paris, France in 1922. The Giacometti Institute in Paris is responsible, among other things, for cataloguing the artist's work, as well as uncovering and stopping would-be forgers. Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, had been sent a catalogue by Sotheby's in the UK, featuring a Giacometti standing nude. She instantly questioned its authenticity.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The painting that I saw was inconsistent. Like, the head looked like a man's head on a woman's body; the background was poor; the strokes were wishy-washy. When an artist paints, there's a lot of energy that goes into the painting. When a person copies, he's copying the work of somebody else. It's not at all the same energy in the painting itself. Then it was signed, also; and the signature resembled other fake signatures, and not the real signature. When Albert Giacometti used to sign, he would sign quickly, you know. Get rid of it! He didn't like to sign paintings or drawings, so he did it quickly. The signature is very applied, you know, so copied. So I went to London to look at the work. I looked at the front of the canvas, the back of the canvas. I asked for an X-ray. Then I told the people at Sotheby's that I thought it was a fake. And then they told me, "But, ah -- there are experts that think that it's okay, and you will find documents at the Tate gallery proving the provenance as being correct." So I went to the Tate Gallery to look at these documents. I did see a photograph of this painting slipped into the Tate Gallery archives. And from that moment on, I felt that they were being tampered with. Basically, if the painting was fake, then the provenance had to be fake. Well, I sort of had to play the detective part, because people would not believe that the provenance was fake, because they were "very well done," quote unquote. I had to try to prove that the paper was not from the 50s. So I had to look at the watermarks, and contact the paper companies. I had to check with the libraries whether this catalogue was in their archives. I had to write to the printers, to see if they printed the catalogue. I had to check with another foundation whether they had received the same provenance material. And I found out that they had a different date for the same catalogue. I also wrote to the post office in England to see if the stamps were used in the 50s. I went on and on and on in this sort of detail.

[Narrator] That sort of detail resulted in Mary Lisa Palmer's success. Experts confirmed that the paper used in the suspected fake catalogues was not from the 1950s, as they stated. She now had evidence that the provenance was corrupt.

-- Inside Criminal Minds ... Con Men, [The Cunning Genius Who Fooled The Art World: John Myatt], Narration by Anthony Wilson

Stylistic analysis

The Getty kouros is highly eclectic in style. The development of kouroi as delineated by Gisela Richter[10] suggests the date of the Getty youth diminishes from head to feet: At its top, the hair is braided into a wig-like mass of 14 strands, each of which ends in a triangular point. The closest parallel here is to the Sounion kouros (NAMA 2720) of the late 7th century/early 6th century, which also displays 14 braids, as does the New York kouros (NY Met. 32.11.1). However, the Getty kouros's hair exhibits a rigidity, very unlike the Sounion Group. Descending to the hands, the last joints of the fingers turn in at right angles to the thighs, recalling the Tenea kouros (Munich 168) of the 2nd quarter of the 6th century. Further down, a late archaic naturalism becomes more pronounced in the rendering of the feet similar to kouros No. 12 from the Ptoon sanctuary (Thebes 3), as is the broad oval plinth which in turn is comparable to a base found on the Acropolis. Both Ptoon 12 and the Acropolis base are assigned to the Group of Anavyssos-Ptoon 12 and dated to the third quarter of the 6th century. Anachronizing elements are not unknown in authentic kouroi, but the disparity of up to a century is a strikingly unusual feature of the Getty sculpture.

Technical analysis


Side view of the kouros

Despite being of Thasian marble, the kouros cannot be securely ascribed to an individual workshop of northern Greece nor indeed to any ancient regional school of sculpture. Archaic kouroi conform to a canon of measurement and proportion (albeit with strong local accents) to which the Getty example also adheres; a comparison of like elements in other kouroi is both a test of authenticity and additional clue to the origin of the sculpture. There is little in the tool marks, carving methods and detailing to contradict an ancient origin of the piece. Although there is a small sample with which to compare (some 200 fragments and only twelve complete statues of the same type) there are atypical aspects of the Getty work that may be observed. The oval plinth is an unusual shape and larger than in other examples, suggesting the figure was free-standing rather than fixed with lead in a separate base. Also, the ears are not symmetrical: they are at different heights with the left oblong and the right rounder, implying the sculptor was using two distinct schema or none at all.[11] Furthermore, there are a number of flaws in the marble, most prominently on the forehead, which the sculptor has worked around by parting the hair curls at the centre; ancient examples survive of projects being abandoned by sculptors when such flaws in the stone were revealed.[12]


Frontal view

Perhaps the most striking evidence suggestive of the kouros's antiquity is a subtlety regarding the direction of motion of the figure. Even though the youth presents square to the viewer, all kouroi have understated indicators of a turn either to the left or the right depending on where they were originally placed in the temple sanctuary; i.e., they would seem to turn towards the naos. In the case of the Getty youth the left foot is parallel with the step axis of the right foot rather than turning outwards as would occur if the figure were moving directly forwards. Therefore, the statue is making motion toward his right, which Ilse Kleemann asserts is "one of the strongest pieces of evidence of its authenticity".[13] Other features that suggest a similarity with known originals include the helicoid curls of the hair, closest in form to the west Cyclidian Kea kouros (NAMA 3686), the Corinthian form of the hands and the sloping shoulders akin to the Tenea kouros and the broad plinth and feet comparable to the Attic or Cyclidian Ptoon 12. That the Getty kouros cannot be identified with any one local atelier does not disqualify it as a genuine, but if real it admits a lectio difficilior into the corpus of archaic sculpture.

Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for "the more difficult reading is the stronger") is a main principle of textual criticism. Where different manuscripts conflict on a particular reading, the principle suggests that the more unusual one is more likely the original. The presupposition is that scribes would more often replace odd words and hard sayings with more familiar and less controversial ones, than vice versa.

-- Lectio difficilior potior, by Wikipedia

Some indication of tool marks remain on the work. Though the surface is weathered (or artificially abraded) and it is not clear if emery was used, there are heavy claw marks on the plinth and the use of a point in some of the finer detailing. For example, there are point marks in the outline of the curls, between the fingers and in the cleft of the buttocks, also traces of the point in the arches of the feet and at random over the plinth. Though the tools evident here (fine point, slope chisel, claw chisel) are not inappropriate for a late 6th century sculpture their application might be problematic. Stelios Triantis remarks, "no sculptor of kouroi would hollow out with a fine point, nor incise outlines with this tool".[14]

In 1990, Dr. Jeffrey Spier published the discovery of a kouros torso,[15] a certain forgery that exhibited notable technical similarities to the Getty kouros. After samples were taken that determined the fake torso was of the same dolomitic marble as the Getty piece, the torso was purchased by the museum for study purposes. The fake's sloping shoulders and upper arms, volume of chest, rendering of the hands and genitals all suggest the same hand as the Getty's example, although the aging had been crudely done with an acid bath and the application of iron oxide. Further investigation has shown the torso and the kouros are not from the same block and the sculpting techniques are dramatically different (down to the use of power tools on the torso).[16] Their relationship if any is still to be determined.

[T]o these four considerations one might add one final point, that of seriality. Seriality and repetitiveness can often be identified as markers of forgery. Forgers often fabricated more than one sample of their counterfeit products, which may now be inadvertently considered to be genuine artifacts in different parts of the world. For instance, in archaeological museums. So, of course, there are inscriptions which were produced in more than one copy in ancient times, but generally speaking, one should always be cautious when identical, or even slightly different texts, can be found on different physical objects. And this final aspect was already remarked in the 1990s when a similar tablet was detected by a colleague, Antonio Sartori, who saw it on sale in a shop in Paris. This second tablet was sold on the antiquarian market, so we don't know where it is today. And we only have a cast of it on kitchen foil, which was made for my colleague by the art dealer. Actually, a long investigation carried out both in libraries and in museums across Europe, has led me to discover that the copies of this inscribed tablet are not only two, but several. Some of them are still existing, while others are known only through manuscript tradition. So far, aside from the Tortello Tablet, and the lost Paris Tablet, I was able to locate three more copies of the same inscription. One in Arezzo, one in Madrid, and one more in Basel. To these three objects, one may add some others, which were published in different parts of the CIL of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, where they were unanimously judged as forged. In particular, the Eleventh volume of the Corpus, published by Eugen Bormann, and devoted two inscriptions from Aemilius ... and Etruria -- so from central and northern Italy -- is very rich with information. Bormann had spotted a group of nine small bronze tablets inscribed with different texts in Bologna. That's the entry that you're looking at now. And he defined them -- and I'm translating from the Latin -- several bronze tablets inscribed with false copies of genuine inscriptions: the tabellae aereae inscriptae exemplis falsis titulorum genuinorum. Well, he mentioned that he had personally seen them in the archaeological museum in Bologna, while formerly they belonged to the university collection of the same city. And you can see among these inscriptions -- in the fifth position -- a copy of the dedication to Druso. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts, it has been impossible to locate this group of tablets.

-- Epigraphic Criticism and the Study of Forgeries: A Historical Perspective, by Lorenzo Calvelli

Archaeometry

The Getty commissioned two scientific studies on which it based its decision to buy the statue. The first was by Norman Herz, a professor of geology at the University of Georgia, who measured the carbon and oxygen isotope ratios, and traced the stone to the island of Thasos. The marble was found to have a composition of 88% dolomite and 12% calcite, by x-ray diffraction. His isotopic analysis revealed that δ18O = -2.37 and δ13C = +2.88, which from database comparison admitted one of five possible sources: Denizli, Doliana, Marmara, Mylasa, or Thasos-Acropolis. Further, trace element analysis of the kouros eliminated Denizli. With the high dolomite content Thasos was determined to be the likeliest source with a 90% probability.[17] The second test was by Stanley Margolis, a geology professor at the University of California at Davis. He showed that the dolomite surface of the sculpture had undergone a process called de-dolomitization, in which the magnesium content had been leached out, leaving a crust of calcite, along with other minerals. Margolis determined that this process could occur only over the course of many centuries and under natural conditions, and therefore could not be duplicated by a forger.

In the early 1990s, the marine chemist Miriam Kastner produced an experimental result which cast doubt on Margolis's thesis by artificially inducing de-dolomitization in the laboratory, a result since confirmed by Margolis. Although this does admit the possibility that the kouros was synthetically aged by a forger, the procedure is a complicated and time-consuming one. The unlikeliness of a forger using such experimental methods in what is still an uncertain science has prompted the Getty's antiquities conservator to remark "when you consider a forger actually repeating the procedure you begin to leave the realm of practicality".[18]

[Narrator] The Museum of ancient art in Basel is the only Museum in Switzerland to exhibit exclusively classical antiques. The two sculptures Stephan Lehmann believes to be highly suspicious, stood here, considered stars of the exhibition. Museum Director Andrea Bignasca has sent one of them to the workshop to have it examined once again by conservators.

[Music] The museum received the sculptures as part of a private legacy gift from the Ludwig Collection in Aachen. Stephan Lehmann thinks the sculpture is the work of the Spanish master.

[Andrea Bignasca, Basel Museum of Ancient Art] I have to say, this all surprised me. We didn't know that Lehmann was conducting such investigations, and that he had included our two bronze sculptures from the Ludwig Collection.

[Narrator] Their former owners Peter and Irene Ludwig, collected art and acquired this bronze sculpture on the art market. But the Museum has no information about exactly where it comes from. The idea of classical works with no known origin, or provenance, making their way into public museums via the art market, is something Stefan Lehmann deplores.

[Andrea Bignasca, Basel Museum of Ancient Art] Herr Lehmann is a classical archeologist. He's a professor at a university. He's a curator at the Archaeological Museum. But he's no specialist in bronze statues, although he seems to think so. What I don't like in this case is this broadside on me personally, on the Museum, on my colleagues. So far, there's absolutely no proof. So, I'm sticking to the version that these objects are original, classical, works of art.

[Stefan Lehmann, Archaeologist] Yes, of course, the museums are never amused -- obviously -- when important artifacts that are shown in their main chamber are cast into doubt. It always leads immediately to personal differences. That's normal. You can't avoid that entirely. But I think the question of whether they are original sculptures, or modern forgeries, is so important, that we have to be above these trifles.

[Narrator] Back at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute, preparations are underway for a second scan of the Swiss collector's Augustus. After the failure of the first attempt to get a CT scan, Material Scientist Harold Miller is now getting the bronze head x-rayed again in Europe's most powerful linear accelerator. Until now, no Museum collector was prepared to hand over a suspected forgery for such an examination. So no work ascribed to the Master has yet been proved fake by these scientific methods.

The scientists have to leave the hall, because of the extremely high radiation from the linear accelerator. The examination is focused on the metal alloy in the bronze sculpture. Is it really from antiquity? Does it have the same characteristics as a bronze statue made 2,000 years ago? one suspicion is that the forgers melt down ancient coins to cast new heads -- a clever approach.

[Man] What is this device?

[Harold Muller, Materials Scientist] It's a Perkin Elmer Detector, with 200 micrometer pixel pitch. We believe, because of a range of material characteristics that correspond with antiquity, that this sculpture is made of genuine ancient material. There is ancient material available for things like this, and it would not be an entirely new idea to use, or to have used, old material for forgeries.

[Narrator] This time, the process works. Muller looks at the cross-sectional images of the head, and he notices that the patina on the head is only on the outside surface. That's strange.

[Harold Muller, Materials Scientist] You can see that that this material has a different density from the material around it, which has a different alloy composition. We've carried out metallographic tests, meaning on a cross-section of the material, and the outer crust, and determined, for one thing, that the corrosion, which looks very bad to the naked eye, is only on the surface. That leads us to the conclusion that this artefact was created in modern times, and designed to look very old.

-- The Mystery Conman: The Murky Business of Counterfeit Antiques, directed by Sonje Storm

See also

• List of artworks with contested provenance

References

1. Getty Villa, Malibu, inv. no. 85.AA.40.
2. Thomas Hoving. False Impression, The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, 1997, p. 298.
3. Sorensen, Lee. Frel, Jiří K. In The Dictionary of Art Historians. Accessed 28/8/2008.
4. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN. [1] In "ART; Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?". Accessed 26/1/2014
5. J. Paul Getty Museum. Statue of a kouros. Retrieved September 2, 2008.
6. L.A. Times Review: Something’s missing from the newly reinstalled antiquities collection at the Getty Villa retrieved 03/05/2020.
7. Marion True. The Getty Kouros: Background on the Problem, in The Getty Kouros Colloquium, 1993, p. 13.
8. Hanley, Anne (1998-10-07). "Obituary: Federico Zeri". The Independent. Retrieved 2014-01-09.
9. "Zeri, Federico". Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
10. G.M.A. Richter. Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths. A Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture. 1970.
11. I. Trianti. Four Kouroi in One?, in The Getty Kouros Colloquium, 1993.
12. In the quarries of Naxos at Apollonas, Melanes and Flerio.
13. Ilse Kleemann, On the Authenticity of the Getty Kouros, in The Getty Kouros Colloquium, 1993, p. 46
14. Stelios Triantis. Technical and Artistic Deficiencies of the Getty Kouros in The Getty Kouros Colloquium, p. 52.
15. J. Spier. "Blinded by Science", The Burlington Magazine, September 1990, pp. 623–631.
16. Marion True, op. cit, pp. 13–14.
17. Norman Herz and Marc Waelkens. Classical Marble, 1988, p. 311.
18. Michael Kimmelman Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?, NYT, August 4th, 1991. Accessed 29/8/2008

Sources

• Bianchi, Robert Steven (1994). "Saga of the Getty Kouros". Archaeology. 47 (3): 22–23. JSTOR 41766561.
• Podney, J. (1992). A Sixth Century B.C. Kouros in the J. Paul Getty Museum. J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Kokkou, A, ed. (1993). The Getty Kouros Colloquium: Athens, 25-27 May 1992. J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Herz, N.; Waelkens, M. (1988). Herz, Norman; Waelkens, Marc (eds.). Classical Marble: Geochemistry, Technology, Trade. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-7795-3. ISBN 978-90-481-8313-5.
• Spier, Jeffrey (1990). "Blinded by Science: The Abuse of Science in the Detection of False Antiquities". The Burlington Magazine. 132: 623–631. JSTOR 884431.
• True, Marion (1987). "A Kouros at the Getty Museum". The Burlington Magazine. 129 (1006): 3–11. JSTOR 882884.

***********************

The “Getty Kouros” was removed from view at the museum after it was officially deemed to be a forgery.
by Isaac Kaplan
via The New York Times
Apr 16, 2018 9:38AM

The authenticity of the kouros (a freestanding Greek sculpture of a naked youth) has been debated since the Getty acquired the object in the mid-1980s for around $9 million. Despite the controversy, the work remained on view at the Los Angeles museum, next to a plaque reading “Greek, about 530 B.C. or modern forgery,” the New York Times reported. But it will no longer be up to viewers to weigh whether the object is authentic or not. Following a renovation of the Getty Villa, the sculpture was moved to storage where it will be on view by appointment only. “It’s fake, so it’s not helpful to show it along with authentic material,” said Getty director Timothy Potts. The removal is the final chapter in a decades-long saga that began when the Getty museum performed a battery of scientific tests on the piece to confirm its authenticity prior to purchase, only to buy the work and watch the faith in its authenticity slowly erode over time, the Times reported in 1991. A chemical process that occurred on the exterior of the sculpture led scientists to believe the work must have been centuries old, but such a reaction was actually shown to be replicable in a lab.The additional investigation came after an indisputably fake torso similar to that of the Getty Kouros was discovered, causing some experts to reverse their position on the authenticity of the piece.

[T]o these four considerations one might add one final point, that of seriality. Seriality and repetitiveness can often be identified as markers of forgery. Forgers often fabricated more than one sample of their counterfeit products, which may now be inadvertently considered to be genuine artifacts in different parts of the world. For instance, in archaeological museums. So, of course, there are inscriptions which were produced in more than one copy in ancient times, but generally speaking, one should always be cautious when identical, or even slightly different texts, can be found on different physical objects. And this final aspect was already remarked in the 1990s when a similar tablet was detected by a colleague, Antonio Sartori, who saw it on sale in a shop in Paris. This second tablet was sold on the antiquarian market, so we don't know where it is today. And we only have a cast of it on kitchen foil, which was made for my colleague by the art dealer. Actually, a long investigation carried out both in libraries and in museums across Europe, has led me to discover that the copies of this inscribed tablet are not only two, but several. Some of them are still existing, while others are known only through manuscript tradition. So far, aside from the Tortello Tablet, and the lost Paris Tablet, I was able to locate three more copies of the same inscription. One in Arezzo, one in Madrid, and one more in Basel. To these three objects, one may add some others, which were published in different parts of the CIL of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, where they were unanimously judged as forged. In particular, the Eleventh volume of the Corpus, published by Eugen Bormann, and devoted two inscriptions from Aemilius ... and Etruria -- so from central and northern Italy -- is very rich with information. Bormann had spotted a group of nine small bronze tablets inscribed with different texts in Bologna. That's the entry that you're looking at now. And he defined them -- and I'm translating from the Latin -- several bronze tablets inscribed with false copies of genuine inscriptions: the tabellae aereae inscriptae exemplis falsis titulorum genuinorum. Well, he mentioned that he had personally seen them in the archaeological museum in Bologna, while formerly they belonged to the university collection of the same city. And you can see among these inscriptions -- in the fifth position -- a copy of the dedication to Druso. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts, it has been impossible to locate this group of tablets.

-- Epigraphic Criticism and the Study of Forgeries: A Historical Perspective, by Lorenzo Calvelli

Further investigation revealed that the curator who presented the kouros to the Getty for purchase forged the accompanying provenance documents.

[admin]

New Findings by National Gallery of Art Suggest the Existence of a Studio of Vermeer
by National Gallery of Art
October 7, 2022

Press Release


A composite image of a color photograph of Johannes Vermeer’s "Girl with the Red Hat" (c. 1669) with an infrared reflectance image. National Gallery of Art

Washington, DC—In a press conference today, the National Gallery of Art will share groundbreaking new findings about Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) to be explored in the exhibition Vermeer’s Secrets, opening on October 8. These findings led an interdisciplinary team of curators, conservators, and scientists to determine that the painting Girl with a Flute was made by an associate of Vermeer [???!!!]—not by the Dutch artist himself, as was previously believed.

The idea that Vermeer worked with studio associates challenges the long-held belief that he was a lone genius and, instead, posits him as an instructor or mentor to the next generation of artists. In part because Vermeer’s oeuvre contains only about 35 accepted paintings, scholars have generally considered it unlikely that he had students or assistants.

With no surviving documents to provide evidence of a workshop—no records of pupils registered by the Delft painters’ guild, no mention of assistants in the notes of visitors to Vermeer’s studio—it was believed that he must have worked alone. Until now.

“The existence of other artists working with Johannes Vermeer is perhaps one of the most significant new findings about the artist to be discovered in decades. It fundamentally changes our understanding of Vermeer,” [???!!!] said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “I am incredibly proud of the interdisciplinary team of National Gallery staff who worked together to study these paintings, building on decades of research and using advanced scientific technology to uncover exciting discoveries that add new insight to what we know about the enigmatic artist.”

Research also led curators to determine that Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat was made at a turning point in the artist’s career. The painting shows Vermeer experimenting with new techniques—vivid colors, a bolder manner of applying the paint—that presage paintings produced in the final phase of his career. As a result, they believe the painting should be dated slightly later, to circa 1669 (the work was previously dated to circa 1666/1667).

Many of the findings expand our understanding of the earliest stages of Vermeer’s painting process. One of the most exciting discoveries, made by comparing the results of different scientific imaging techniques with microscopic analysis, was the realization that Vermeer began his paintings with broad strokes in a quickly applied underpaint that established a robust foundation for his characteristically smooth and refined surface paint.

Building on a half-century of previous technical study on Vermeer’s works at the National Gallery, researchers took advantage of the museum’s COVID-related closures in 2020/2021 to examine the museum’s four paintings by and attributed to Johannes Vermeer, which are rarely taken off view, especially at the same time. On view through January 8, 2023, Vermeer’s Secrets offers audiences a behind-the-scenes look at how National Gallery curators, conservators, and scientists investigated the museum’s four treasured paintings—as well as two 20th-century forgeries—to understand “what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer.” The exhibition outlines some of the most exciting findings along with scientific images of the paintings, and even one of the specialized technical instruments used to conduct the imaging.

Vermeer’s Studio

Following decades of study, the National Gallery team concluded that Girl with a Flute (c. 1669/1675) is not, in fact, by Johannes Vermeer. Instead, they believe, the painting was made by an associate of Vermeer—someone who understood the Dutch artist’s process and materials but was unable to completely master them. Exactly who that person might be remains to be determined, but the implication that Vermeer worked closely with other artists is significant,[???!!!] as it revises the long-held belief that Vermeer worked in isolation. The mystery artist could have been a pupil or apprentice, an amateur who paid Vermeer for lessons, a freelance painter hired on a project-by-project basis, or even a member of Vermeer’s family.

The team compared Girl with a Flute to Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat. Both are small paintings previously hypothesized to be a pair due to similarities in subject, size, and use of a wood panel support—unusual for Vermeer. However, the paint application in Girl with a Flute is very different from Girl with the Red Hat. Not only does it lack the precision for which Vermeer is known, but the artist seems not to have had Vermeer’s control: the brushwork is awkward, and the pigments used in the final paint are coarsely ground, giving the surface an almost granular character. Vermeer ground his pigments coarsely for his underpaint and more finely for the final paint layers to achieve their delicate surfaces. The artist of Girl with a Flute inexplicably reversed this order. Despite the different handling, microscopic pigment analysis showed that both compositions used the same pigments, even including green earth shadows of the face—an idiosyncratic feature characteristic of Vermeer’s paintings. Taken together, these findings clearly show that, although Vermeer did not paint Girl with a Flute, this artist was intimately familiar with Vermeer’s unique working methods.

Vermeer’s Bold Underpaint

A combination of microscopic analysis and advanced imaging techniques provides a greater understanding of exactly how Vermeer built up his paintings. Prior microscopic examination showed that the artist began with a monochrome painted sketch. Imaging spectroscopy and microscopic examination revealed a quickly applied bold underpaint to plot out forms, colors, and patterns of illumination within the composition. In Woman Holding a Balance, a false-color infrared reflectance image shows freely brushed highlights on the back wall, now hidden by the smoothly brushed final paint. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging spectroscopy and microscopic paint analysis showed that Vermeer added a copper-containing material to hasten the drying of black underpaint. The XRF chemical element map for copper reveals Vermeer’s broad brushstrokes at this underpaint stage, a dramatic difference from his handling in the final paint.

By contrast, microscopic examination of the final paint layer shows that Vermeer used comparatively fluid paints to create his signature smooth surfaces. Together, the microscopic analysis of paint samples and the pigment maps obtained from imaging spectroscopy show how he combined pigments to create his remarkable surface effects. In A Lady Writing, Vermeer used as many as four different yellow pigments in the woman’s jacket sleeve alone.

Girl with the Red Hat

The new research led the team to recognize Girl with the Red Hat as a pivotal work that points to Vermeer’s late style. Marjorie E. Wieseman, curator and head of the department of northern European paintings, Alexandra Libby, associate curator in the department of northern European paintings, E. Melanie Gifford, retired research conservator of painting technology, and Dina Anchin, associate paintings conservator, determined that Girl with the Red Hat represents a turning point in Vermeer’s career. They point to this work as the artist’s experiment: the moment when he began to paint his final image with a schematic rendering of forms and exaggerated contrasts of dark and light—features he had previously limited to the underpaint, but that came to characterize his late style.

The National Gallery’s senior imaging scientist, John K. Delaney, imaging scientist Kathryn A. Dooley, and retired conservation scientist Lisha Deming Glinsman, were also able to create clearer images of the portrait of a man underneath Girl with the Red Hat, first discovered in an x-ray taken in the early 1970s. A better understanding of how the man was painted and some of the pigments used was obtained with reflectance and x-ray fluorescence imaging spectroscopies. Specifically, using x-ray fluorescence imaging spectroscopy, scientists mapped the use of pigments containing the chemical element lead in the composition. By processing the image to minimize materials present in the visible surface layer, they produced an image that clearly reveals details of the man’s broad-brimmed hat, long hair, white collar, and billowy cloak.

Research Team

Marjorie E. Wieseman, curator and head of the department of northern European paintings

Alexandra Libby, associate curator, department of northern European paintings

Dina Anchin, associate paintings conservator

E. Melanie Gifford, retired research conservator of painting technology

Lisha Deming Glinsman, retired conservation scientist

Kathryn A. Dooley, imaging scientist

John K. Delaney, senior imaging scientist

Exhibition Dates and Location

October 8, 2022–January 8, 2023
West Building, Ground Floor

Exhibition Organization and Collaborators

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is organized by Marjorie E. Wieseman, curator and head of the department of northern European paintings, Alexandra Libby, associate curator, department of northern European paintings, Kathryn A. Dooley, imaging scientist, John K. Delaney, senior imaging scientist, and Dina Anchin, associate paintings conservator, all of the National Gallery of Art.

Exhibition Overview

Vermeer’s Secrets, curated by Marjorie E. Wieseman and Alexandra Libby, offers visitors an inside look at how the National Gallery’s curators, conservators, and scientists work together to understand artists’ techniques, materials, and processes. In this instance, an intensive study of four paintings by and attributed to Johannes Vermeer yielded surprising information, which will be shared for the first time in the exhibition. The exhibition also includes two 20th-century forgeries, The Lacemaker (c. 1925) and The Smiling Girl (c. 1925), which were attributed to Vermeer when they first entered the museum’s collection in 1937 as part of Andrew Mellon’s original bequest, but were later determined not to be by the artist.

The juxtaposition of these two 20th-century works and the 17th-century Girl with a Flute with paintings firmly attributed to the Dutch artist—Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), A Lady Writing (c. 1665), and Girl with the Red Hat (c. 1669)—will show how curators draw on research from a range of disciplines to evaluate works of art, determine attributions, and understand the qualities that make a Vermeer a Vermeer.

The exhibition invites visitors to take a closer look at Vermeer’s paintings through vivid technical images made using innovative technologies pioneered by two leaders in the field of scientific imaging—the National Gallery’s John K. Delaney and Kathryn A. Dooley. Using hyperspectral reflectance imaging techniques first developed to map minerals for remote sensing of Earth and, subsequently, the moon and Mars, as well as x-ray fluorescence imaging spectroscopy, Delaney and Dooley were able to identify and map pigments—and also to reveal what lies beneath the surfaces of these paintings, including images of brushstrokes in the underpaint stage, some of which are shown in the exhibition.

Vermeer’s Secrets pairs those images with microsample analyses and x-ray fluorescence spot analyses by Melanie Gifford and Lisha Glinsman, which allowed the two to study the stages in Vermeer’s working methods. The exhibition shows how the seven-person team of National Gallery curators, conservators, and scientists drew on these findings to expand, or in some cases alter, our understanding of Vermeer and his working process.

Related Programming

Concerts
Sonnambula
November 13, 1:00 and 3:00 p.m.
West Building, Main Floor, West Garden Court
Registration is required and opens Friday, November 4 at noon at nga.gov/concerts

Celebrate the exhibition Vermeer’s Secrets with music from Johannes Vermeer’s lifetime, performed by the early music ensemble Sonnambula. In A Portrait in Music: Sounding the Dutch Baroque, Sonnambula explores the exceptional music of the Low Countries during the 17th century. Taking Dutch and Flemish paintings as inspiration, the ensemble presents five sonic portraits of musical life.

*********************************

Art Researchers Discover One of Dutch Artist Vermeer's Paintings is Not Actually His
by Juliana Kim
NPR News
10.08.22 4:18pm
NPR News/ Sat, 08/10/2022 - 4:18pm

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Praised for being a lone genius, Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer is now believed to have had an associate — possibly an assistant or a student — who painted one of his most iconic works.

The discovery was made by a team of curators, conservators and scientists from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting in question, Girl with a Flute, along with his authenticated works for comparison, is on view at the museum in a new exhibition called Vermeer's Secrets.

"It fundamentally changes our understanding of Vermeer," Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery of Art, said in a press release.

Vermeer is known for capturing the subtle beauty of Dutch domestic life in the mid-17th century. He's most widely known for Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been called the "Dutch Mona Lisa."

For a long time, scholars believed Vermeer worked alone. There were no records of students registered by the guild in Vermeer's hometown and no mention of assistants by visitors in his studio.

But over the last two years, researchers took advantage of the museum's COVID-related closures to take a closer look at Vermeer's artwork.

That's when the team concluded that Girl with a Flute could not have been made by Vermeer because the painting lacked the artist's signature precision and paint application.

The discovery is in part shocking because only about 35 known paintings have been attributed to Vermeer.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

Han van Meegeren
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/30/22

Han van Meegeren, Paris life, a far cry from his 17th century art but a truer picture of the life he preferred.

-- Lawrence Jeppson, "The Fabulous Frauds, Fascinating Tales of Great Art Forgeries."

Han van Meegeren
Van Meegeren painting Jesus Among the Doctors in 1945
Born: Henricus Antonius van Meegeren, 10 October 1889, Deventer, Netherlands
Died: 30 December 1947 (aged 58), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Occupation: Painter, art forger
Spouse(s): Anna de Voogt, ​(m. 1912; div. 1923)​; Jo Oerlemans ​(m. 1928)​
Children: Jacques Henri Emil

Henricus Antonius "Han" van Meegeren (Dutch pronunciation: [ɦɛnˈrikʏs ɑnˈtoːnijəs ˈɦɑɱ vɑˈmeːɣərə(n)]; 10 October 1889 – 30 December 1947)[1] was a Dutch painter and portraitist, considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century.[2] Van Meegeren became a national hero after World War II when it was revealed that he had sold a forged painting to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.[3]

As a child, Van Meegeren developed an enthusiasm for the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, and he set out to become an artist. Art critics, however, decried his work as tired and derivative, and Van Meegeren felt that they had destroyed his career. He decided to prove his talent by forging paintings by 17th-century artists including Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer. The best art critics and experts of the time accepted the paintings as genuine and sometimes exquisite. His most successful forgery was Supper at Emmaus, created in 1937 while he was living in the south of France; the painting was hailed as a real Vermeer by leading experts of the day such as Dr Abraham Bredius.[4]


The Supper at Emmaus (1937)

During World War II, Göring traded 137 paintings for one of Van Meegeren's false Vermeers, and it became one of his most prized possessions. Following the war, Van Meegeren was arrested, as officials believed that he had sold Dutch cultural property to the Nazis. Facing a possible death penalty, Van Meegeren confessed to the less serious charge of forgery. He was convicted on falsification and fraud charges on 12 November 1947, after a brief but highly publicised trial, and was sentenced to one year in prison.[5] He did not serve out his sentence, however; he died 30 December 1947 in the Valerius Clinic in Amsterdam, after two heart attacks.[6] A biography in 1967 estimated that Van Meegeren duped buyers out of the equivalent of more than US$30 million (approximately US$254 million in 2022); his victims included the government of the Netherlands.[7][8]

Early years

Han (a diminutive version of Henri or Henricus) van Meegeren was born in 1889 as the third of five children of middle-class Roman Catholic parents in the provincial city of Deventer. He was the son of Augusta Louisa Henrietta Camps and Hendrikus Johannes van Meegeren, a French and history teacher at the Kweekschool (training college for schoolteachers) in the city of Deventer.[4][9]

Early on, Han felt neglected and misunderstood by his father, as the elder Van Meegeren strictly forbade his artistic development and constantly derided him. His father often forced him to write a hundred times,"I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing."[10][11] While attending the Higher Burger School, he met teacher and painter Bartus Korteling (1853–1930) who became his mentor. Korteling had been inspired by Johannes Vermeer and showed Van Meegeren how Vermeer had manufactured and mixed his colours. Korteling had rejected the Impressionist movement and other modern trends as decadent, degenerate art, and his strong personal influence probably led van Meegeren to rebuff contemporary styles and paint exclusively in the style of the Dutch Golden Age.[12]


Han van Meegeren designed this boathouse (the building in the centre, adjoining an old tower in the town wall) for his Rowing Club D.D.S. while studying architecture in Delft from 1907 to 1913.

Van Meegeren's father did not share his son's love of art; instead, he compelled him to study architecture at the Technische Hogeschool (Delft Technical College) in Delft in 1907, the hometown of Johannes Vermeer.[4] He received drawing and painting lessons, as well. He easily passed his preliminary examinations but he never took the Ingenieurs (final) examination because he did not want to become an architect.[9] He nevertheless proved to be an apt architect and designed the clubhouse for his rowing club in Delft which still exists (see image).[9]

In 1913, Van Meegeren gave up his architecture studies and concentrated on drawing and painting at the art school in The Hague. On 8 January 1913, he received the prestigious Gold Medal from the Technical University in Delft for his Study of the Interior of the Church of Saint Lawrence (Laurenskerk) in Rotterdam.[10] The award was given every five years to an art student who created the best work, and was accompanied by a gold medal.

On 18 April 1912, Van Meegeren married fellow art student Anna de Voogt who was expecting their first child.[13] The couple initially lived with Anna's grandmother in Rijswijk, and their son Jacques Henri Emil was born there on 26 August 1912. Jacques van Meegeren also became a painter; he died on 26 October 1977 in Amsterdam.

Career as a legitimate painter


The Deer (or "Hertje") is one of Han van Meegeren's best-known original drawings.

In the summer of 1914, Van Meegeren moved his family to Scheveningen. That year, he completed the diploma examination at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.[9] The diploma allowed him to teach, and he took a position as the assistant to Professor Gips, the Professor of Drawing and Art History, for the small monthly salary of 75 guldens. In March 1915, his daughter Pauline was born, later called Inez.[9] To supplement his income, Han sketched posters and painted pictures for the commercial art trade, generally Christmas cards, still-life, landscapes, and portraits.[13] Many of these paintings are quite valuable today.[14]

Van Meegeren showed his first paintings publicly in The Hague, where they were exhibited from April to May 1917 at the Kunstzaal Pictura.[15] In December 1919, he was accepted as a select member by the Haagse Kunstkring, an exclusive society of writers and painters who met weekly on the premises of the Ridderzaal. Although he had been accepted, he was ultimately denied the position of chairman.[16] He painted the tame roe deer belonging to Princess Juliana in his studio at The Hague, opposite the Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch.[13][14] He made many sketches and drawings of the deer, and painted Hertje (The fawn) in 1921, which became quite popular in the Netherlands. He undertook numerous journeys to Belgium, France, Italy, and England, and acquired a name for himself as a talented portraitist. He earned stately fees through commissions from English and American socialites who spent their winter vacations on the Côte d'Azur. His clients were impressed by his understanding of the 17th-century techniques of the Dutch masters. Throughout his life, Van Meegeren signed his own paintings with his own signature.[17]

By all accounts, infidelity[who?] was responsible for the breakup of Van Meegeren's marriage to Anna de Voogt; the couple were divorced on 19 July 1923.[18][19] Anna left with the children and moved to Paris where Van Meegeren visited his children from time to time. He now dedicated himself to portraiture and began producing forgeries to increase his income.[20]

He married actress Johanna Theresia Oerlemans in Woerden in 1928, with whom he had been living for the past three years. Johanna was also known under her stage name of Jo van Walraven, and she had previously been married to art critic and journalist Dr. C H. de Boer (Carel de Boer). She brought their daughter Viola into the Van Meegeren household.[13]

The forgeries



Han van Meegeren's mansion Primavera in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where he painted his forgery The Supper at Emmaus in 1936, which sold for about US$300,000

Van Meegeren had become a well-known painter in the Netherlands, and Hertje (1921) and Straatzangers (1928) were particularly popular.[13] His first legitimate copies were painted in 1923, his Laughing Cavalier and Happy Smoker, both in the style of Frans Hals. By 1928, the similarity of Van Meegeren's paintings to those of the Old Masters began to draw the reproach of Dutch art critics, who were more interested in Cubism, Surrealism, and other modern movements. It was said that his gift was an imitation and that his talent was limited outside of copying other artists' work.[11]

One critic wrote that he was "a gifted technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school, he has every virtue except originality."[21] In response to these comments, Van Meegeren published a series of aggressive articles in his monthly magazine De Kemphaan ("The Ruff"). Jonathan Lopez writes in his book on the forger that in the magazine he "denounced modern painting as 'art-Bolshevism,' described its proponents as a 'slimy bunch of woman-haters and negro-lovers,' and invoked the image of 'a Jew with a handcart' as a symbol for the international art market."[4][22]

His father was said to have once told him, "You are a cheat and always will be." He sent a signed copy of his own art book to Adolf Hitler, which turned up in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin complete with an inscription (in German): "To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942". He only admitted the signature was his own, although the entire inscription was by the same hand.

-- Han van Meegeren, by Wikipedia

Along with journalist Jan Ubink, this periodical was published between April 1928 and March 1930.[23]

Van Meegeren felt that his genius had been misjudged, and he set out to prove to the art critics that he could more than copy the Dutch Masters; he would produce a work so magnificent that it would rival theirs. He moved with Jo to the South of France and began preparations for this ultimate forgery, which took him from 1932 to 1937. In a series of early exercises, he forged works by Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, and Johannes Vermeer.[24] Finally, he chose to forge a painting by Vermeer as his masterpiece. Vermeer had not been particularly well known until the beginning of the twentieth century; his works were both extremely valuable and scarce, as only about 35 had survived.[25]

Van Meegeren delved into the biographies of the Old Masters, studying their lives, occupations, trademark techniques, and catalogues. In October 1932, art connoisseur and Rembrandt expert Dr. Abraham Bredius published an article about two recently discovered alleged Vermeer paintings, which he defined as Landscape and Man and Woman at a Spinet. He claimed the former to be a fake, and described it as "a landscape of the eighteenth century into which had been imported scraps of the 'View of Delft'" (mostly the Delft New Church's tower). On the contrary, the Man and Woman at a Spinet not only was judged as an "authentic Vermeer", but also "very beautiful", and "one of the finest gems of the master's œuvre".[26] The painting was later sold to Amsterdam banker Dr. Fritz Mannheimer.

The "perfect forgery"

In 1932, Van Meegeren moved to the village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin with his wife. There he rented a furnished mansion called "Primavera" and set out to define the chemical and technical procedures that would be necessary to create his perfect forgeries. He bought authentic 17th century canvases and mixed his own paints from raw materials (such as lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, and cinnabar) using old formulas to ensure that they could pass as authentic. In addition, he created his own badger-hair paintbrushes similar to those that Vermeer was known to have used. He came up with a scheme of using phenol formaldehyde (Bakelite) to cause the paints to harden after application, making the paintings appear as if they were 300 years old. Van Meegeren would first mix his paints with lilac oil, to stop the colours from fading or yellowing in heat. (This caused his studio to smell so strongly of lilacs that he kept a vase of fresh lilacs nearby so that visitors wouldn't be suspicious.)[27] Then, after completing a painting, he would bake it at 100 °C (212 °F) to 120 °C (248 °F) to harden the paint, and then roll it over a cylinder to increase the cracks. Later, he would wash the painting in black India ink to fill in the cracks.[5][28]

It took Van Meegeren six years to work out his techniques, but ultimately he was pleased with his work on both artistic and deceptive levels. Two of these trial paintings were painted as if by Vermeer: Lady Reading Music, after the genuine paintings Woman in Blue Reading a Letter at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam;

Left: Vermeer's "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter" (1666-1664); Right: "Woman Reading Music" by Han van Meegeren, 1935-1936.


Woman Reading Music 57 x 48 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1935-36


Left: A detail of head of Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter; Right: a similar figure in Woman Reading by Van Meegeren, both currently housed in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

and Lady Playing Music, after Vermeer's Woman With a Lute Near a Window hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Left: Woman with a Lute near a Window; Right: Girl Playing a Lute Han van Meegeren


Woman Playing Music 63 x 49 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1935-36

Van Meegeren did not sell these paintings; both are now at the Rijksmuseum.[29]

Following a journey to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Van Meegeren painted The Supper at Emmaus using the lapis lazuli (ultramarine blues) and yellows used by Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch Golden Age painters. In 1934 Van Meegeren had bought a seventeenth century mediocre Dutch painting, The Awakening of Lazarus, and on this foundation he created his masterpiece à la Vermeer. The experts assumed that Vermeer had studied in Italy, so Van Meegeren used the version of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus located at Italy's Pinacoteca di Brera as a model.[13] He had always wanted to walk in the steps of the masters, and he felt that his forgery was a fine work in its own right. He gave it to his friend, attorney C. A. Boon, telling him that it was a genuine Vermeer, and asked him to show it to Dr. Abraham Bredius, the art historian, in Monaco. Bredius examined the forgery in September 1937 and, writing in The Burlington Magazine, he accepted it as a genuine Vermeer and praised it very highly as "the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft".[30][4] The usually required evidences, such as resilience of colours against chemical solutions, white lead analysis, x-rays images, micro-spectroscopy of the colouring substances, confirmed it to be an authentic Vermeer.[31]

The painting was purchased by The Rembrandt Society for fl.520,000 (€235,000 or about €4,640,000 today),[32] with the aid of wealthy shipowner Willem van der Vorm, and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 1938, the piece was highlighted in a special exhibition in occasion of Queen Wilhelmina's Jubilee at a Rotterdam museum, along with 450 Dutch old masters dating from 1400 to 1800. A. Feulner wrote in the "Magazine for [the] History of Art", "In the rather isolated area in which the Vermeer picture hung, it was as quiet as in a chapel. The feeling of the consecration overflows on the visitors, although the picture has no ties to ritual or church", and despite the presence of masterpieces of Rembrandt and Grünewald, it was defined as "the spiritual centre" of the whole exhibition.[33][31]


Painting The Last Supper I by Han van Meegeren on 11th art and antiques fair in Rotterdam August 31, 1984. - In the summer of 1938, van Meegeren moved to Nice. 1939 he painted The Last Supper I in the style of Vermeer.

The Last Supper (1st version) 146 x 267 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1938-39


The Last Supper (2nd version) 174 x 244 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1940-41


At one point Van Meegeren stole directly from Vermeer, using the head of the Girl with a Pearl Earring for his head of Saint John

In the summer of 1938, Van Meegeren moved to Nice, using the proceeds from the sale of The Supper at Emmaus to buy a 12-bedroom estate at Les Arènes de Cimiez. On the walls of the estate hung several genuine Old Masters. Two of his better forgeries were made here, Interior with Card Players and Interior with Drinkers, both displaying the signature of Pieter de Hooch. [34]

The Card Players, 1938-39, HVM forgery, Museum Boymans


Interior with Drinkers; A Drinking Party

During his time in Nice, he painted his Last Supper I in the style of Vermeer.

He returned to the Netherlands in September 1939 as the Second World War threatened. He remained at a hotel in Amsterdam for several months and moved to the village of Laren in 1940. Throughout 1941, Van Meegeren issued his designs, which he published in 1942 as a large and luxurious book entitled Han van Meegeren: Teekeningen I (Drawings nr I). He also created several forgeries during this time, including The Head of Christ, The Last Supper II, The Blessing of Jacob, The Adulteress, and The Washing of the Feet—all in the manner of Vermeer. On 18 December 1943, he divorced his wife, but this was only a formality; the couple remained together, but a large share of his capital was transferred to her accounts as a safeguard against the uncertainties of the war.[35]

In December 1943, the Van Meegerens moved to Amsterdam where they took up residence in the exclusive Keizersgracht 321.[36]

321 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam

His forgeries had earned him between 5.5 and 7.5 million guilders (or about US$25–30 million today).[37][38] He used this money to purchase a large amount of real estate, jewellery, and works of art, and to further his luxurious lifestyle. In a 1946 interview, he told Marie Louise Doudart de la Grée that he owned 52 houses and 15 country houses around Laren, among them grachtenhuizen, mansions along Amsterdam's canals.[10]

Hermann Göring


Han van Meegeren's Jesus among the Doctors, also called Young Christ in the Temple (1945).

In 1942, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, one of Van Meegeren's agents sold the Vermeer forgery Christ with the Adulteress to Nazi banker and art dealer Alois Miedl. Experts could probably have identified it as a forgery; as Van Meegeren's health declined, so did the quality of his work. He chain-smoked, drank heavily, and became addicted to morphine-laced sleeping pills. However, there were no genuine Vermeers available for comparison, since most museum collections were in protective storage as a prevention against war damage.[39]

Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring traded 137 looted paintings for Christ with the Adulteress,[40] and showcased it at his residence in Carinhall (about 65 kilometers; 40 miles north of Berlin). On 25 August 1943, Göring hid his collection of looted artwork, including Christ with the Adulteress, in an Austrian salt mine, along with 6,750 other pieces of artwork looted by the Nazis. On 17 May 1945, Allied forces entered the salt mine and Captain Harry Anderson discovered the painting.[41][failed verification]

In May 1945, the Allied forces questioned Miedl regarding the newly discovered Vermeer. Based on Miedl's confession, the painting was traced back to Van Meegeren. On 29 May 1945, he was arrested and charged with fraud and aiding and abetting the enemy.

Han Van Meegeren: This Dutch painter (1889-1947), is probably the best-known forger of the 20th century. At the end of World War II, an Allied art commission discovered a previously unknown work of Jan Vermeer in the collection of Nazi leader Hermann Goering. The sale of the painting was traced to van Meegeren, who was charged in May 1945 with selling a Dutch national treasure and collaborating with the enemy. Van Meegeren subsequently confessed to having forged the painting, a less serious offense; and to prove it he painted another “Vermeer” in his prison cell. In all, van Meegeren is known to have produced 14 forgeries of works by Vermeer and Pieter De Hooch, several of which had been proclaimed masterpieces by scholars before it was learned that they all were fakes.
http://www.mystudios.com/gallery/forger ... ry-17.html

He was remanded to the Weteringschans prison as an alleged Nazi collaborator and plunderer of Dutch cultural property, threatened by the authorities with the death penalty.[21] He labored over his predicament, but eventually confessed to forging paintings attributed to Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch.[14] He exclaimed, "The painting in Göring's hands is not, as you assume, a Vermeer of Delft, but a Van Meegeren! I painted the picture!"[42] It took some time to verify this and Van Meegeren was detained for several months in the Headquarters of the Military Command at Herengracht 458 in Amsterdam.[43]

Van Meegeren painted his last forgery between July and December 1945 in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses: Jesus among the Doctors, also called Young Christ in the Temple[44] in the style of Vermeer.[45][46] After completing the painting, he was transferred to the fortress prison Blauwkapel. Van Meegeren was released from prison in January or February 1946.

Trial and prison sentence

Han van Meegeren listens to the evidence at his trial in Amsterdam. In the background is The Blessing of Jacob, sold in 1942 as the work of Vermeer.


Van Meegeren (center) with his hands on his head

The trial of Han van Meegeren began on 29 October 1947 in Room 4 of the Regional Court in Amsterdam.[47] The collaboration charges had been dropped, since the expert panel had found that the supposed Vermeer sold to Hermann Göring had been a forgery and was, therefore, not the cultural property of the Netherlands. Public prosecutor H. A. Wassenbergh brought charges of forgery and fraud and demanded a sentence of two years in prison.[5]


Evidence against Han van Meegeren: a collection of pigments.

The court commissioned an international group of experts to address the authenticity of Van Meegeren's paintings. The commission included curators, professors, and doctors from the Netherlands, Belgium, and England, and was led by the director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Paul B. Coremans.[5][48][49] The commission examined the eight Vermeer and Frans Hals paintings which Van Meegeren had identified as forgeries. With the help of the commission, Dr Coremans was able to determine the chemical composition of van Meegeren's paints.

He found that Van Meegeren had prepared the paints by using the phenolformaldehyde resins Bakelite and Albertol as paint hardeners.[5][19][50] A bottle with exactly that ingredient had been found in Van Meegeren's studio. This chemical component was introduced and manufactured in the 20th century, proving that the alleged works by Vermeer and Frans Hals examined by the commission were in fact fabricated by Van Meegeren.[51]

The commission's other findings suggested that the dust in the craquelure was too homogeneous to be of natural origin. The matter found in the craquelure appeared to come from India ink, which had accumulated even in areas that natural dirt or dust would never have reached. The paint had become so hard that alcohol, strong acids, and bases did not attack the surface, a clear indication that the surface had not been formed in a natural manner. The craquelure on the surface did not always match that in the ground layer, which would certainly have been the case with a natural craquelure. Thus, the test results obtained by the commission appeared to confirm that the works were forgeries created by Van Meegeren, but their authenticity continued to be debated by some of the experts until 1967 and 1977, when new investigative techniques were used to analyze the paintings (see below).

On 12 November 1947, the Fourth Chamber of the Amsterdam Regional Court found Han van Meegeren guilty of forgery and fraud, and sentenced him to a minimal one year in prison.[52]

Death

While waiting to be moved to prison, Van Meegeren returned to his house at 321 Keizersgracht, where his health continued to decline. During this last month of his life, he strolled freely around his neighbourhood.[53]

Van Meegeren suffered a heart attack on 26 November 1947, the last day to appeal the ruling, and was rushed to the Valeriuskliniek, a hospital in Amsterdam.[54] While at the hospital, he suffered a second heart attack on 29 December, and was pronounced dead at 5:00 pm on 30 December 1947 at the age of 58. Soon after his death, a plaster death mask was made, which was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 2014.[55] His family and several hundred of his friends attended his funeral at the Driehuis Westerveld Crematorium chapel. In 1948, his urn was buried in the general cemetery in the village of Diepenveen (municipality of Deventer).[56]

Aftermath

After his death, the court ruled that Van Meegeren's estate be auctioned and the proceeds from his property and the sale of his counterfeits be used to refund the buyers of his works and to pay income taxes on the sale of his paintings. Van Meegeren had filed for bankruptcy in December 1945. On 5 and 6 September 1950, the furniture and other possessions in his Amsterdam house at Keizersgracht 321 were auctioned by order of the court, along with 738 other pieces of furniture and works of art, including numerous paintings by old and new masters from his private collection. The house was auctioned separately on 4 September, estimated to be worth 65,000 guilders.

The proceeds of the sale together with the house amounted to 123,000 guilders. Van Meegeren's unsigned The Last Supper I was bought for 2,300 guilders, while Jesus among the Doctors (which Van Meegeren had painted while in detention) sold for 3,000 guilders (about US$800 or about US$7,000 today.)[37] Today the painting hangs in a Johannesburg church. The sale of the entire estate amounted to 242,000 guilders[57] (US$60,000, or about US$500,000 today).[37]

Throughout his trial and bankruptcy, Van Meegeren maintained that his second wife Jo had nothing to do with the creation and sale of his forgeries. A large part of his considerable wealth, the estimated profits of his forgery having exceeded US$50 million in today's value,[58] had been transferred to her when they were divorced during the war, and the money would have been confiscated if she had been ruled to be an accomplice. Van Meegeren told the same story to all authors, journalists, and biographers: "Jo didn't know", and apparently most believed him. Some biographers believe, however, that Jo must have known the truth.[11] Her involvement was never proven and she was able to keep her substantial capital. Jo outlived her husband by many years, in luxury, until her death at the age of 91.

M. Jean Decoen's objection

M. Jean Decoen, a Brussels art expert and restorer, stated in his 1951 book he believed The Supper at Emmaus and The Last Supper II to be genuine Vermeers. Decoen went on to state that conclusions of Dr. Paul Coremans's panel of experts were wrong and that the paintings should again be examined. He also claimed in the book that Van Meegeren used these paintings as a model for his forgeries.[59][60] Daniel George Van Beuningen was the buyer of The Last Supper II, Interior with Drinkers, and The Head of Christ, and he demanded that Dr. Paul Coremans publicly admit that he had erred in his analysis. Coremans refused and van Beuningen sued him, alleging that Coremans's wrongful branding of The Last Supper II diminished the value of his "Vermeer" and asking for compensation of £500,000 (about US$1.3 million or about US$10 million today).[37]

The first trial in Brussels was won by Coremans just because the court adopted the same reasoning of the court ruling at the time of the Amsterdam trial against Van Meegeren. A second trial was set for 2 June 1955 but was delayed owing to Van Beuningen's death on 29 May 1955. In 1958 the court heard the case on behalf of Van Beuningen's heirs. Coremans managed to give the definitive evidence of the forgeries by showing a photograph of a Hunting Scene, attributed to A. Hondius, exactly the same scene which was visible with X-ray under the surface of the alleged Vermeer's Last Supper. Moreover, Coremans brought a witness to the courtroom who confirmed that Van Meegeren bought the Hunt scene in 1940.[61] The court found in favour of Coremans, and the findings of his commission were upheld.[62]

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Part 2 of 2

Further investigations

In 1967, the Artists Material Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh examined several of the "Vermeers" in their collection, under the direction of Robert Feller and Bernard Keisch. The examination confirmed that several of their paintings were in fact created using materials invented in the 20th century. They concluded that the "Vermeers" in their possession were modern and could thus be Van Meegeren forgeries. This confirmed the findings of the 1946 Coremans commission, and refuted the claims made by M. Jean Decoen.[63] The test results obtained by the Carnegie Mellon team are summarized below.

Han van Meegeren knew that white lead was used during Vermeer's time, but of course he had to obtain his stocks through the modern colour trade, which had changed significantly since the 17th century. During Vermeer's time, Dutch lead was mined from deposits located in the Low Countries; however, by the 19th century, most lead was imported from Australia and the Americas, and differed from the white lead that Vermeer would have used both in the isotope composition of the lead and in the content of trace elements found in the ores. Dutch white lead was extracted from ores containing high levels of trace elements of silver and antimony,[64] while the modern white lead used by Van Meegeren contained neither silver nor antimony, as those elements are separated from the lead during the modern smelting process.[65]

Forgeries in which modern lead or white lead pigment has been used can be recognized by using a technique called Pb(Lead)-210-Dating.[66] Pb-210 is a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of lead that is part of the uranium-238 Radioactive decay series, and has a half-life of 22.3 years. To determine the amount of Pb-210, the alpha radiation emitted by another element, polonium-210 (Po-210), is measured.[67] Thus it is possible to estimate the age of a painting, within a few years' span, by extrapolating the Pb-210 content present in the paint used to create the painting.[65][68]

The white lead in the painting The Supper at Emmaus had polonium-210 values of 8.5±1.4 and radium-226 (part of the uranium-238 radioactive decay series) values of 0.8±0.3. In contrast, the white lead found in Dutch paintings from 1600 to 1660 had polonium-210 values of 0.23±0.27 and radium-226 values of 0.40±0.47.[63]

In 1977, another investigation was undertaken by the States forensic labs of the Netherlands using up-to-date techniques, including gas chromatography, to formally confirm the origin of six van Meegeren forgeries that had been alleged to be genuine Vermeers, including the Emmaus and the Last Supper. The conclusions of the 1946 commission were again reaffirmed and upheld by the Dutch judicial system.[69]

In 1998, A&E ran a program called Scams, Schemes & Scoundrels highlighting Van Meegeren's life and art forgeries, many of which had been confiscated as Nazi loot. The program was hosted by skeptic James Randi and also featured the stories of Victor Lustig and Soapy Smith.



In July 2011, the BBC TV programme Fake or Fortune investigated a copy of Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress owned by the Courtauld Institute.[70] Opinion had been divided as to whether it was a 17th-century studio work or a Van Meegeren fake.[70] The programme used chemical analysis of the paint to show that it contained bakelite and thus confirmed that the painting was a 20th-century fake.[70]

-- Fake or Fortune, by BBC TV

Legacy


A collection of genuine and fake signatures of Han van Meegeren

Van Meegeren played different roles, some of which were shrouded in fraudulent intentions, as he sought to fulfill his goal of besting his critics. His father was said to have once told him, "You are a cheat and always will be."[71] He sent a signed copy of his own art book to Adolf Hitler, which turned up in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin complete with an inscription (in German): "To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942". He only admitted the signature was his own, although the entire inscription was by the same hand.[4][22] (The book by Jonathan Lopez confirmed the accuracy of Jan Spierdijk's article in De Waarheid in which Spierdijk reported details about Van Meegeren's book Tekeningen 1 being found in Hitler's library.) He bought up homes of several departed Jewish families in Amsterdam and held lavish parties while much of the country was hungry. On the other hand, his brothers and sisters perceived him as loyal, generous, and affectionate, and he was always loving and helpful to his own children.

In 2008, Harvard-trained art historian Jonathan Lopez had become fluent in Dutch and published The Man Who Made Vermeers, Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren. His extensive research confirmed that Van Meegeren started to make forgeries, not so much by feeling misunderstood and undervalued by art critics as for the income that it generated, income which he needed to support his addictions and promiscuity.

Van Meegeren continued to paint after he was released from prison, signing his works with his own name. His new-found profile ensured quick sales of his new paintings, often selling at prices that were many times higher than before he had been unmasked as a forger. Van Meegeren also told the news media that he had "an offer from a Manhattan gallery to come to the U.S. and paint portraits 'in the 17th-century manner' at US$6,000 a throw."[72]

A Dutch opinion poll conducted in October 1947 placed Han van Meegeren's popularity second in the nation, behind only the Prime Minister's and slightly ahead of Prince Bernhard, the husband of Princess Juliana.[73] The Dutch people viewed Van Meegeren as a cunning trickster who had successfully fooled the Dutch art experts and, more importantly, Hermann Göring himself. In fact, according to a contemporary account, Göring was informed that his "Vermeer" was actually a forgery and "[Göring] looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world".[21] Lopez, however, suggests Göring may never have known the painting was a fake.[4]

Lopez indicates that Han van Meegeren's defence during his trial in Amsterdam was a masterpiece of trickery, forging his own personality into a true Dutchman eager to trick his critics and also the Dutch people by pretending that he sold Christ and the Adulteress, a fake Vermeer, to Göring because he wanted to teach the Nazi a lesson.[citation needed]

The Woman Taken in Adultery 96 x 88 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1941-42

Van Meegeren remains one of the most ingenious art counterfeiters of the 20th century.[38] After his trial, however, he declared, "My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as [a] creative artist."[74]

List of forgeries

Known forgeries


Han van Meegeren's forgery of The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen


Malle Babbe

List of known forgeries by Han van Meegeren (unless specified differently, they are after Vermeer):[75][76][77]

• A counterpart to Laughing Cavalier after Frans Hals (1923) once the subject of a scandal in The Hague in 1923, its present whereabouts is unknown.


Laughing Cavalier by Hals Groninger Museum, forged by van Meegeren

• The Happy Smoker after Frans Hals (1923) hangs in the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands
• Man and Woman at a Spinet 1932 (perhaps without misleading intentions,[78] sold to Amsterdam banker, Dr. Fritz Mannheimer)



• Lady reading a letter[79] 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum)



• Lady playing a lute and looking out the window[80] 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum)


Woman Playing Music 63 x 49 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1935-36

• Portrait of a Man[81] 1935–1936 in the style of Gerard ter Borch (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum)



• Woman Drinking (version of Malle Babbe)[82] 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)


Woman Drinking, 78 x 66 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1935-36

• The Supper at Emmaus, 1936–1937 (sold to the Boymans for 520,000 – 550,000 guldens, about US$300,000 or US$4 Million today)


The Disciples at Emmaus 115 x 127 cm, painted around 1936-37


Director and chief restorer of Museum Boymans in Rotterdam admiring the newly discovered Emmaus by Johannes Vermeer that eight years later would appear to be a fake made by Han van Meegeren. https://www.meegeren.net/

• Interior with Drinkers 1937–1938 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 219,000 – 220,000 guldens about US$120,000 or US$1.6 million today)


Interior with Drinkers, 80 x 69 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1937-38

• The Last Supper I, 1938–1939


The Last Supper (1st version) 146 x 267 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1938-39

• Interior with Cardplayers 1938 - 1939 (sold to W. van der Vorm for 219,000 – 220,000 guldens US$120,000 or US$1.6 million today)


Interior with Cardplayers, 75 x 62 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1939

• The Head of Christ, 1940–1941 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 400,000 – 475,000 guldens about US$225,000 or US$3.25 million today)


Head of Christ, 48 x 30 cm, painted around 1940

• The Last Supper II, 1940–1942 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 1,600,000 guldens about US$600,000 or US$7 million today)


The Last Supper (2nd version) 174 x 244 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1940-41

• The Blessing of Jacob 1941–1942 (sold to W. van der Vorm for 1,270,000 guldens about US$500,000 or US$5.75 million today)


The Blessing of Jacob 125 x 115 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1941-42

• Christ with the Adulteress 1941–1942 (sold to Hermann Göring for 1,650,000 guldens about US$624,000 or US$6.75 million today, now in the public collection of Museum de Fundatie[83])


The Woman Taken in Adultery 96 x 88 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1941-42

• The Washing of the Feet[84] 1941–1943 (sold to the Netherlands state for 1,250,000 – 1,300,000 guldens about US$500,000 or US$5.3 million today, on display at the Rijksmuseum)


The Washing of the Feet 115 x 95 cm, oil on canvas, painted around 1942-43

• Jesus among the Doctors September 1945 (painted during trial under Court's control, and sold at auction for 3,000 guldens, about US$800 or US$7,000 today)


Jesus Among the Doctors 157 x 202 cm, oil on canvas, painted July - September 1945

Three views of Han Van Meegeren at work on “The Young Christ”, after Vermeer. This is the painting that Van Meegeren created in the style of Vermeer in three months in 1945 to prove to authorities that he was the forger who created the fake Vermeer Christ at Emmaus, which was discovered after the end of the War to have been in the collection of the Nazi Herman Goering, and which was believed to be an original Vermeer. Had Van Meegeren been convicted of selling the painting to Goering, he could have faced the death penalty for treason. Admitting the forgery, and proving it by executing this painting, was the lesser of the two evils. Photographs from The Master Forger by John Godley; New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc. 1950.

• The Procuress given to the Courtauld Institute as a fake in 1960 and confirmed as such by chemical analysis in 2011.



Posthumously, Van Meegeren's forgeries have been shown in exhibitions around the world, including exhibitions in Amsterdam (1952), Basel (1953), Zurich (1953), Haarlem in the Kunsthandel de Boer (1958), London (1961), Rotterdam (1971), Minneapolis (1973), Essen (1976–1977), Berlin (1977), Slot Zeist [nl] (1985), New York (1987), Berkeley, CA (1990), Munich (1991), Rotterdam (1996), The Hague (1996) and more recently at the Haagse Kunstkring, The Hague (2004) and Stockholm (2004), and have thus been made broadly accessible to the public.[85][86][87]

Potential forgeries

It is possible that other fakes hang in art collections all over the world, probably in the style of 17th-century Dutch masters, including works in the style of Frans Hals and the school of Hals, Pieter de Hooch, and Gerard ter Borch. Jacques van Meegeren suggested that his father had created a number of other forgeries, during interviews with journalists[88] regarding discussions with his father.[89] Some of these paintings include:


Smiling Girl may have been painted by Van Meegeren

• Boy with a Little Dog and The Rommelpotspeler after Frans Hals. The Frans Hals catalogue by Frans L. M. Dony[90] mentions four paintings by this name attributed to Frans Hals or the "school of Frans Hals". One of these could easily be by Van Meegeren.
• A counterpart to Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. A painting called Smiling Girl hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (bequest Andrew W. Mellon) that could fit with Jacques’ description and has been recognized by the museum as a fake. It was attributed to Theo van Wijngaarden, friend and partner of Van Meegeren, but may have been painted by Van Meegeren.
• Lady with a Blue Hat after Vermeer which was sold to Baron Heinrich Thyssen in 1930. Its present whereabouts are unknown. This painting was owned by John Ringling and Paul Cassirer who sold it to Thyssen. it is often referred to as the “Greta Garbo” Vermeer.

So called because of its resemblance to Garbo film posters, this painting is otherwise known as The Girl in Antique Costume or The Girl in the Blue Hat. The Paul Casirer Gallery of Berlin arranged the sale of the picture to Baron Heinrich Thyssen, who later became suspicious of the work and returned it to the gallery. Again, Jonathan Lopez suggests that the picture’s “Thirties” look was intended by van Meegeren to appeal subliminally to the tastes of the time.
https://webartacademy.com/forgery-dutch ... d-vermeers

Original artwork

Van Meegeren was a prolific artist and produced thousands of original paintings in a number of diverse styles. This wide range in painting and drawing styles often irritated art critics. Some of his typical works are classical still lifes in convincing 17th century manner, Impressionistic paintings of people frolicking on lakes or beaches, jocular drawings where the subject is drawn with rather odd features, Surrealistic paintings with combined fore- and backgrounds. Van Meegeren's portraits, however, are probably his finest works.[9][89]

Among his original works is his famous Deer, pictured above. Other works include his prize-winning St. Laurens Cathedral;[91]

Han Van Meegeren, St. Laurens Kirk, Amsterdam, early architectural painting

a Portrait of the actress Jo Oerlemans[92] (his second wife);

This portrait of his second wife JO was made by Van Meegeren in the roaring twenties. It bears a fake date - 1946 - one of the mysteries Van Meegeren left us. (But unveiled by Frederik H. Kreuger in his "Life and Work of Han van Meegeren" at page 162).

his Night Club;[93]

x

from the Roaring Twenties;

Roaring Twenties

the cheerful watercolor A Summer Day on the Beach[94]

x

and many others.

Nachtlokaal 2


Nachtlokaal 1, Private Collection, Netherlands


Vrouw voor de spiegel, Private Collection, Netherlands


Nachtlokaal 3, Private Collection, Netherlands



Work also known as Glorification of Labor, Han van Meegeren, 1940-41, Juvenile Hall, Connecticut


The painting above is one of Van Meegeren’s infamous fake Vermeers.
https://artislimited.wordpress.com/2012 ... t-forgery/


De Declame, No. 11, Nov 1929


https://www.meegeren.net/


https://www.meegeren.net/


Jopie Breemer (1875-1957) was a well-known Bohémien in pre-war Holland. Jopie Breemer as the Praying Jew.


"Rembrandtje" (A small Rembrandt). Han van Meegeren made this drawing of a country-inn, with a goose-quill, in the style of Rembrandt. He was studying architecture in Delft when he made this picture. The picture is not a fake – Han van Meegeren signed it with his full name – it is his own interpretation of the style of Rembrandt. https://www.meegeren.net/


"Self portrait" Age about 35

The forger forged

Main article: Jacques van Meegeren § Fake van Meegerens

Van Meegeren's own work rose in price after he had become known as a forger, and it consequently became worthwhile to fake his paintings, as well. Existing paintings obtained a signature "H. van Meegeren", or new pictures were made in his style and falsely signed. When Van Meegeren saw a fake like that, he ironically remarked that he would have adopted them if they had been good enough, but regrettably he had not yet seen one.

Later on, however, his son Jacques van Meegeren started to fake his father's work. He made paintings in his father's style – although of much lower quality – and was able to place a perfect signature on these imitations. Many fakes – both by Jacques and by others – are still on the market. They can be recognized by their low pictorial quality, but are not always regarded as such.

Notes and references

1. "Han van Meegeren". RKD (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
2. Dutton, Denis (2005). "Authenticity in Art". In Jerrold Levinson (ed.). The Oxford handbook of aesthetics. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. pp. 261–263. ISBN 0-19-927945-4. Archived from the original on 2021-05-08. Retrieved 2016-09-23.
3. Keats, Jonathon (2013). Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. p. 69. ISBN 9780199279456. Archived from the original on 2021-05-08. Retrieved 2016-09-23.
4. Peter, Schjeldahl (October 27, 2008). "Dutch Master". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 28 February 2009. Retrieved 20 July 2009.
5. Williams, Robert C. (2013). The forensic historian: using science to reexamine the past. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-0765636621. Archived from the original on 4 September 2015. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
6. "Janet Wasserman – Han van Meegeren and his portraits of Theo van der Pas and Jopie Breemer (3)". Rob Scholte Museum. 24 September 2014. Archived from the original on 22 May 2015. Retrieved 2 September 2015.
7. Equivalent of the total amount in dollars stated by Kilbracken in Appendix II, a biography published in 1967.
8. "Calculate the Value of $30 in 1967. How much is it worth today?".
9. Kreuger, 2007.p 22.
10. Doudart de la Grée, Marie-Louise (Amsterdam 1966) Geen Standbeeld voor Van Meegeren (No Statue for Van Meegeren). Nederlandsche Keurboekerij Amsterdam. OCLC 64308055
11. Godley, John (Lord Kilbracken) (1951). Van Meegeren, master forger. p:127 - 129. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. LC call number: ND653.M58 K53 1966. OCLC 31674916
12. Godley, 1951:129 - 134
13. Dutton, Denis (1993). "Han van Meegeren (excerpt)". In Gordon Stein (ed.). Encyclopedia of hoaxes. Detroit: Gale Research. ISBN 0-8103-8414-0.
14. Kreuger 2007
15. Tentoonstelling van schilderijen, acquarellen, en teekeningen door H. A. van Meegeren. The Hague: Kunstzaal Pictura, 1917.
16. "Han van Meegeren", Wikipedia (in Dutch), 2021-11-28, retrieved 2022-02-23
17. Kreuger 2007:208
18. Godley, 1951:143–147
19. Bailey, Anthony (2002). Vermeer: A View of Delft. Clearwater, Fla: Owl Books. p. 253. ISBN 0-8050-6930-5.
20. Kreuger 2007:46 and 56
21. Wynne, Frank (8 May 2006). "The forger who fooled the world". The Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 2019-04-04. Retrieved 2012-06-15.
22. Campbell-Johnston, Rachel (19 February 2021). "The Last Vermeer: how one man's counterfeits duped the art world". The Times. London. Archived from the original on 20 February 2021. Retrieved 20 February 2021.(subscription required)
23. Van Meegeren, Han (partly under alias) (April 1928–March 1930). De Kemphaan.
24. Goll, Joachim (1962). Art counterfeiter. p.183. Leipzig: E.A.Seemann Publishing House. Language: German (with pictures Number 106 – 122 and literature pp. 249 – 250).
25. Bailey, 2003:233
26. Bredius, Abraham (October 1932). "An unpublished Vermeer". Archived from the original on October 28, 2009. Retrieved 2007-05-26.. Burlington Magazine 61:145.
27. Godley, John (1951). Master Art Forger: The Story of Han Van Meegeren. Wilfred Funk. pp. 12–13.
28. Godley, 1951: pp. 43-56, 86–90
29. "Rijksmuseum Amsterdam - Nationaal Museum voor Kunst en Geschiedenis". Rijksmuseum.nl. Archived from the original on 2011-06-09.
30. Bredius, Abraham (November 1937). "A new Vermeer". The Burlington Magazine. pp. 210–211. Archived from the original on October 28, 2009.
31. Bianconi, Piero (1967). Vermeer. Gemeinshaftsausgabe Kunstkreis Luzern Buchclub Ex Libris Zürich. p. 100.
32. To obtain the relative present value the amount in Dutch Guilders was given for the year 1938 at inflation calculator from/to Guilders or Euros Archived 2017-09-02 at the Wayback Machine.
33. Schueller, 1953: p. 28
34. The Last Supper I was recovered in September 1949, during a search of the estate of Dr. Paul B. Coremans; x-ray examinations revealed that van Meegeren had reused the canvas of a painting by Govert Flinck.
35. Kreuger 2007: p. 136
36. Boissevain, Jeremy (1996) Coping With Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism. Berghahn Books. p233. ISBN 1-57181-878-2
37. To obtain the present value in U.S. currency for a given year the number of guilders was divided by the rate of exchange (guilders or pounds per dollar) Archived 2010-09-04 at the Wayback Machine for that year. The value in U.S. currency for a given year was then entered into the formula at What is the Relative Value? Archived 2006-05-14 at the Wayback Machine to obtain the present value (Consumer Price Index for 2005).
38. Bailey, 2002:234
39. Bailey 2003:255
40. "How Mediocre Dutch Artist Cast 'The Forger's Spell'". NPR.org. Archived from the original on 2018-11-24. Retrieved 2018-04-03.
41. Nutting, Alissa (2009-05-31). ""Bamboozling Ourselves" Errol Morris, New York Times, 1 June 2009". Morris.blogs.nytimes.com. Archived from the original on 2015-09-28. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
42. Schueller, 1953:16
43. Kreuger 2007:146
44. Kreuger 2007:152–155
45. "tnunn.ndo.co.uk". ndo.co.uk. Archived from the original on August 24, 2013.
46. "Van Meegeren's Fake Vermeer's". essentialvermeer.com. Archived from the original on 2015-08-26. Retrieved 2012-07-08.
47. Godley, 1951:268–281
48. Coremans, Paul B. (1949). Van Meegeren's faked Vermeers and De Hooghs: a scientific examination. Amsterdam: J. M. Meulenhoff. OCLC 2419638.
49. Schueller, 1953: 18–19
50. A.H. Huussen, Cahiers uit het Noorden, Zoetermeer 2009; the texts of the original experts report of 10 Jan. 1947 and that of the sentence of the Amsterdam district court 12 Nov 1947 were retrieved by prof. Huussen in 2009.
51. Roth, Toni (1971). "Methods to determine identity and authenticity". The art and the beautiful home 83:81–85.
52. TIME magazine "Truth & Consequences" Monday, Nov. 24, 1947.
53. Wallace, Irving. 'The Man Who Swindled Goering', in The Sunday Gentleman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965 (originally published 1946).
54. Godley, 1951:282
55. "Zoeken". Rijksmuseum (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-02-27.
56. ten Dam, René. "Dood in Nederland (Dead in the Netherlands)" (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2007-05-25.
57. TIME Magazine "Not for Money" Monday, Sep. 18, 1950.
58. "Authentication in Art List of Unmasked Forgers". Archived from the original on 2017-12-22. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
59. Decoen, Jean (1951). Retour à la véritè, Vermeer-Van Meegeren: Deux Authentiques Vermeer (Back to the truth, Vermeer-Van Meegeren: Two genuine Vermeers). Rotterdam: Editions Ad. Donker. Illustrations: b/w. OCLC 3340265.
60. Schueller, 1953:48–58
61. Bianconi, Piero (1967). Vermeer. Gemeinshaftsausgabe Kunstkreis Luzern Buchclub Ex Libris Zürich. p. 101.
62. Godley, 1951:256–258
63. Keisch, B.; Feller, R. L.; Levine, A. S.; Edwards, R. R. (1967). "Dating and Authenticating Works of Art by Measurement of Natural Alpha Emitters". Science. 155 (3767): 1238–1242. Bibcode:1967Sci...155.1238K. doi:10.1126/science.155.3767.1238. PMID 17847535. S2CID 23046304.
64. Strauss, R.(1968). "Analysis of investigations of pigments from paintings of south German painters in the 17th and 18th century." (With 62 slides). Thesis. Technical University Munich.
65. Exhibition catalog Essen and Berlin. Falsification and Research (1976) "Museum Folkwang, Essen and Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin". Berlin. Language: German. ISBN 3-7759-0201-5.
66. Keisch, B. (1968). "Dating Works of Art through Their Natural Radioactivity: Improvements and Applications". Science. 160 (3826): 413–415. Bibcode:1968Sci...160..413K. doi:10.1126/science.160.3826.413. PMID 17740234. S2CID 38078513.
67. Flett, Robert (8 October 2003). Understanding the Pb-210 Method. Archived 2017-10-19 at the Wayback Machine
68. Froentjes, W., and R. Breek (1977). "A new study into the identity of the [portfolio] of Van Meegeren". Chemical Magazine: 583–589.
69. Nieuw onderzoek naar het bindmiddel van Van Meegeren (New investigations in the chemicals of Han van Meegeren), Chemisch Weekblad Nov. 1977. (in Dutch).
70. "Rembrandt". Fake or Fortune?. Episode 4. 2011-07-10. BBC. Archived from the original on 2011-08-06. Retrieved 2011-08-04.
71. Doudart de la Grée, 1946a:145, 230
72. TIME Magazine The Price of Forgery Monday, Nov. 18, 1946.
73. Lopez, Jonathan (2008). The Man who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren. Harcourt. p. 214. ISBN 9780151013418. Retrieved 27 March 2021.
74. Doudart de la Grée, 1946a:224
75. Van Brandhof, Marijke (1979). Early Vermeer 1937. Contexts of life and work of the painter/falsifier Han van Meegeren. (Catalogue of Han van Meegeren work pp. 153–163, with numerous illustrations of the pictures with the signature H. van Meegeren.) Dissertation. Utrecht: The Spectrum.
76. De Boer, H., and Pieter Koomen (1942). Photographs of the paintings of Han van Meegeren: Han van Meegeren (Teekeningen I). With a preface by Drs-Ing. E. A. van Genderen Stort. 'sGravenhage: Publishing House L. J. C. Boucher.
77. Kostelanetz, Richard; H. R. Brittain; et al. (2001). A dictionary of the avant-gardes. New York: Routledge. p. 636. ISBN 0-415-93764-7.
78. Bianconi, Piero (1967). Vermeer. Gemeinshaftsausgabe Kunstkreis Luzern Buchclub Ex Libris Zürich. p. 102.
79. "Brieflezende vrouw - Het Geheugen van Nederland - Online beeldbank van Archieven, Musea en Bibliotheken". Geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2013-12-29.
80. "Cisterspelende vrouw - Het Geheugen van Nederland - Online beeldbank van Archieven, Musea en Bibliotheken". Geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2013-12-29.
81. "Portret van een man - Het Geheugen van Nederland - Online beeldbank van Archieven, Musea en Bibliotheken". Geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2013-12-29.
82. "Malle Babbe". geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
83. [1][dead link]
84. "De voetwassing - Het Geheugen van Nederland - Online beeldbank van Archieven, Musea en Bibliotheken". Geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2013-12-29.
85. Mondadori, Arte Arnaldo (1991). "Genuinely wrong" (Villa Stuck, München). Fondation Cartier.
86. Schmidt, Georg (ed.) (1953). "Wrong or genuine?" (Basel, Zurich). Basel Art Museum.
87. Van Wijnen, H. (1996). "Exhibition catalog Rotterdam". Han van Meegeren. (With 30 black-and-white and 16 colour pictures.) The Hague. Language: Dutch.
88. Schueller, 1953:46–48
89. Kreuger, Frederik H. (2004). The life and work of Han Van Meegeren, master-forger page 173. (Published in Dutch as Han van Meegeren, Meestervervalser. Includes 130 illustrations, some in colour, many of them new.) OCLC 71736835.
90. Frans L.M. Dony (1976) Frans Hals (1974, Rizolli Editore Milano) (1976, Lekturama Rotterdam). Note: This book is considered by the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem to be the best survey of the works of Frans Hals.
91. "St. Laurens Cathedral image". Archived from the original on 2012-03-11. Retrieved 2012-05-05.
92. "Portrait of the actress Jo Oerlemans image". Archived from the original on 2012-03-11. Retrieved 2012-05-05.
93. "Night Club". Archived from the original on 2012-03-11. Retrieved 2012-05-05.
94. [2] Archived March 27, 2009, at the Wayback Machine

• Kreuger, Frederik H. (2007) A New Vermeer, Life and Work of Han van Meegeren. Rijswijk, Holland: Quantes. ISBN 978-90-5959-047-2

Further reading

List of Works

• Kreuger, Frederik H. (2013). Han van Meegeren Revisited. His Art & a List of his Works., Fourth enlarged edition. Quantes Publishers Rijswijk, Delft 2013. ISBN 978 90 5959 065 6

Source

• Arend Hendrik Huussen Jr.: Henricus (Han) Antonius van Meegeren (1889 - 1945). Documenten betreffende zijn leven en strafproces. (Cahiers uit het noorden 20), Zoetermeer, Huussen 2009.
• Arend Hendrik Huussen Jr.: Henricus (Han) Antonius van Meegeren (1889 - 1945). Documenten, supplement. (Cahiers uit het noorden 21), Zoetermeer, Huussen 2010.

Han van Meegeren biographies

• Baesjou, Jan (1956). The Vermeer forgeries: The story of Han van Meegeren. G. Bles. A biography/novel based on the author's conversations with van Meegeren's second wife. OCLC 3949129
• Brandhof, Marijke van den (1979): Een vroege Vermeer uit 1937: Achtergronden van leven en werken van de schilder/vervalser Han van Meegeren. Utrecht: Spectrum, 1979. The only scholarly biography of van Meegeren. An English-language summary is offered by Werness (1983).
• Dolnick, Edward (2008). The forger's spell: a true story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the greatest art hoax of the twentieth century. New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-082541-6.
• Godley, John Raymond Lord Kilbracken (1967). Van Meegeren: A case history. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd. 1967, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. The standard English-language account, based on the author's literature research and conversations with van Meegeren's son and daughter.OCLC 173258
• Guarnieri, Luigi (2004). La Doppia vita di Vermeer. Arnoldo Mondadori S.p.A., Milan. This "novel" ("romanzo") itself is a sort of forgery. As Henry Keazor in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau could show in 2005 (see: "Gefälscht!", April 12, 2005, No. 84, Forum Humanwissenschaften, p. 16), Guarnieri has copied large parts of his book (sometime word by word) from Lord Kilbracken's 1967-biography. Since Guarnieri's brother Giovanni works as a translator, [see: "What are translators reading?". Translatorscafe.com. Archived from the original on 2016-01-02. Retrieved 2012-05-05.] Luigi easily could have had the English text translated into the Italian. Keazor shows that Guarnieri tried to cover his tracks by not referring to the book by Kilbracken – he only mentions (p. 212) his earlier and different book (Master Art Forger. The story of Han van Meegeren, New York 1951) which, however, was published under Kilbracken's civil name "John Godley".
• Isheden, Per-Inge (2007). van Meegeren—konstförfalskarnas konung [van Meegeren—king of art forgeries]. Kvällsstunden: Hemmets och familjens veckotidning 69(38), 3, 23. (In Swedish, with side-by-side examples of originals and van Meegeren's forgeries.)
• Kreuger, Frederik H. (2007). A New Vermeer: Life and Work of Han van Meegeren. Quantes Publishers, Rijswijk 2007. ISBN 978-90-5959-047-2
• Lopez, Jonathan (2008). The Man Who Made Vermeers. New York: Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-101341-8.
• Moiseiwitsch, Maurice (1964). The Van Meegeren mystery; a biographical study. London: A. Barker. OCLC 74000800
• Werness, Hope B. (1983). Denis Dutton (ed.). "Han van Meegeren fecit" in The forger's art: forgery and the philosophy of art. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05619-1.
• Wynne, Frank (2006). I was Vermeer: the rise and fall of the twentieth century's greatest forger. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-58234-593-2.

Novels about or inspired by Han van Meegeren

• Gaddis, William (1955). The Recognitions. William H. Gass (Introduction). Penguin Classics (1993-reprint). ISBN 3-442-44878-6.
• Kreuger, Frederik H. (2005). The Deception. Novel and His Real Life. The Netherlands: Quantes Uitgeverij. ISBN 90-5959-031-7.

Films about or inspired by Han van Meegeren

• Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts (1985). In this film Gerard Thoolen plays "Van Meegeren", a surgeon and painter modeled after Han van Meegeren.
• Jan Botermans and Gustav Maguel (1951). Van Meegeren's false Vermeers [Film]. (See Sepp Schueller, p. 57.)
• Fritz Kirchhoff (1949). Verführte Hände (literally: Enticed hands) (Film). Germany.
• Antonín Moskalyk (director) (1990). Dobrodružství kriminalistiky: Paprsek 16/26 (literally: Adventures of Criminology: The Ray) (TV series). Czechoslovakia, West Germany: Czechoslovakian television, Sudwestfunk Baden-Baden, Westdeutsches Werbefernsehen.
• Dan Friedkin's The Last Vermeer (2019), in which Han van Meegeren is played by Guy Pearce.
Plays inspired by Han van Meegeren
• Bruce J. Robinson (2007). Another Vermeer [Play]. Produced by the Abingdon Theatre Company of New York City
• Ian Walker (playwright). Ghost in the Light [Play]. Produced by Second Wind Productions of San Francisco.
• David Jon Wiener. "The Master Forger" [Play]. Produced by Octad-One Productions Lakeside, CA and The Tabard Theatre London, England.

External links

• Pictures in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam[permanent dead link]
• Photo from Van Meegeren's trial
• The Meegeren website with many examples of Van Meegeren's own paintings, as well as updated information regarding his personal and professional life, compiled by Frederik H. Kreuger.

**********************

For decades the tale of how and why Han van Meegeren began painting bogus paintings was as fraudulent as the bogus works of art that made him the most famous forger of the 20th Century.
by Lawrence Jeppson
Nauvoo Times
September 16, 2013

Here, in a nutshell, is the beginning of his easel fakery as I reported it in my 1970 book The Fabulous Frauds, Fascinating Tales of Great Art Forgeries. My account was more thorough than anything that had been published, and part of it was picked up and published as authoritative in the Dutch press. Turns out, decades later, that I had swallowed Van Meegeren’s tale as he had confessed it to newspapers and the court. The truth was much more nefarious.

Van Meegeren (1889-1947) declared in court that his most famous forgery, The Supper at Emmaus, was his first forgery. For years the world believed him. For a brief period he gloried as a Dutch folk hero. He was a prodigious liar.


Han van Meegeren

Van Meegeren was an artist trapped in the 17th Century. (No falsehood there.) By the age of ten, drawing was an obsession, as was playing practical jokes, some of which got him into trouble. At 12, he locked the door to the local constabulary and threw the heavy key, which also served as the doorknob, into a nearby canal, keeping the inside policemen from getting out and the outside police from getting in.

His rigid schoolmaster father wanted him to become an architect. In the same year he locked up the policemen, Han began taking art lessons from Bartus Korteling (1853-1930), who trained him rigorously in the artistic methods, observations, and meticulous brushwork of earlier golden-age Dutch painters. Han lived all his spare moments reading, studying, painting, and trying to match the work of early masters.

Han’s regimenting father, still thinking architecture, said he would pay for the boy’s six years of university schooling if he could finish it in five. So Han went off to school in Delft, where Vermeer had painted. Free from paternal oversight, he studied hard, lived hard, and painted hard. The balance he struck allowed little time for architecture.

In 1911, he met Anna de Voogt, daughter of a Catholic Dutchman and a Muslim woman from Sumatra. She insisted he was wasting his time in architecture and should concentrate on his art. She was pregnant when they married the next year. He flunked his Delft exams but won a gold medal and $300 for a watercolor of the interior of a classic Rotterdam church.


Han Van Meegeren, St. Laurens Kirk, Amsterdam, early architectural painting

He accepted his father’s conditional offer to pay for the sixth year at the university, but when Han got to the finals he realized that if he passed he would be an architect forever. He quit.

He petitioned The Hague Academy of Art to give him its diploma in art. He passed the written portions of the test but failed in an exam for portraiture. He then had to paint a still life. While he painted this he noticed that the judges were ranged across the background. He added a portrait of each as the background to the still life. It was a tour de force, and they gave him his diploma.

He got his degree in 1914, on the day Britain went to war with Germany. He and Anna suffered terrible years again. He sold very little and spent far more than he earned. They continued to be helped by her grandmother.

He ran into Korteling, who became the Van Meegerens’ houseguest. He and Han huddled like two alchemists, grinding and brewing ingredients to duplicate the paints of the ancients.

Trying to sweeten a marriage that was going sour, Anne invited all her rich relatives to a show of Han’s art. Everything sold: a momentary success. At the show he met Johanna van Walraven, actress wife of Karel de Boer, an art critic who came to interview him. Han and Jo began living together long before Anna divorced him in 1923.

At another show, a critic offered to give Han a raving review in exchange for a substantial bribe. Van Meegeren refused. There was no review. Han began to see venality on every side. When an American dealer offered him a one-year contract of $15,000 and all expenses if Han would paint a portrait a week, the task seemed too onerous, and Han said no. He was already making more money as a forger.


Han van Meegeren, Paris life, a far cry from his 17th century art but a truer picture of the life he preferred.

To expose the rottenness of the Dutch art community, Han and his best friend, Theo Wijngaarden, and a writer name Jan Ubink decided to produce a monthly periodical De Kemphaan/The Fighting Cock, which, angry, sarcastic, and libelous, attacked critics, art historians, Surrealism, bribery, and the incompetence of experts. Although Hitler had not come to power, Van Meegeren was a sympathizer and shared many Fascist views.

His father was said to have once told him, "You are a cheat and always will be." He sent a signed copy of his own art book to Adolf Hitler, which turned up in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin complete with an inscription (in German): "To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942". He only admitted the signature was his own, although the entire inscription was by the same hand.

-- Han van Meegeren, by Wikipedia

Theo Wijngaarden claimed that he had mistakenly cleaned a genuine Vermeer using alcohol, which will not remove original, hardened paint from old paintings but will remove newer paint. Theo had cleaned the painting with alcohol and then retouched it. The retouching failed the alcohol test, and the painting was branded a fake. Then Theo presented another Vermeer to Dr. Abraham Bredius, the most illustrious art historian in Holland. When Bredius declared it genuine, Theo slashed it into pieces, declaring it was a genuine Wijngaarden!

Han van Meegeren got the idea of tricking the scholar by painting a fake Vermeer that would be so good Bredius would be forced to authenticate it.

This is where Han van Meegeren, who viewed himself as a misunderstood genius, wanted the world to believe that his life as a forger started. That and lots of other things he and Wijngaarden said were blatant lies.

In 2008, two exhaustibly researched books were published that reveal Van Meegeren’s deep involvement in the rotten stratum of the Dutch art community. One of these, written by Jonathan Lopez, was The Man Who Made Vermeer, “Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren.” Lopez spent three years searching archives in Holland, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany and interviewing descendants of Van Meegeren’s cabal:

I learned that Van Meegeren worked for decades with a ring of shady art dealers promoting fake old masters, some of which ended up in the possession of such prominent collectors as Andrew Mellow and Baron Heinrich Thyssen. All the while, Van Meegeren cultivated a fascination with Hitler and Naziism that, when the Occupation came, would provide him entree to the highest level of Dutch collaborators. (Lopez, p.2).

The other was written by Edward Dolnick, The Forger’s Spell, “A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century.” Dolnick’s approach is different but also is thoroughly researched. In his preface he succinctly presents Van Meegeren’s dilemma:

Where there was no crime, it stood to reason there was no criminal. For a villain who craved recognition, that made for a vicious dilemma. Keep his crime secret, and he would live rich and safe but unknown. Confess what he had done, on the other hand, and though he would find himself condemned to a prison cell, his genius would be proclaimed worldwide.

In both books the authors explode the details and extent of Han’s duplicity. He was a crook from the start.

Giving up a job teaching drawing at Delft, Han moved to The Hague, Holland’s fun-infested, wealthy capital. By making charcoal sketches of important people at a variety of public and private events, Han infiltrated the moneyed class and became in demand as a portrait painter.

Theo Wijngaarden was a The Hague art restorer who was part of a cabal that included several questionable individuals, including art dealer Leo Nardus, who in 14 years sold American collector P. A. B. [Peter Arrell Browne Widener] Widener 93 paintings, including three Vermeers. Suspicions aroused, Widener summoned three international experts to his 110-room Philadelphia mansion — Englishman Roger Fry, German Wilhelm Valentiner, and American Bernard Berenson. They denounced most of the collection.

Peter Arrell Browne Widener (November 13, 1834 – November 6, 1915) was an American businessman, art collector, and patriarch of the Widener family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Widener was ranked #29 on the American Heritage list of the forty richest Americans in history, with a net worth at death of $23 billion to $25 billion (in 1998 dollars)....

Art collection

Widener amassed a significant art collection that included works by Old Masters such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael and El Greco, British 18th- and 19th-century paintings, and works by French Impressionist artists such as Corot, Renoir, Degas and Manet.

About 1905, he purchased the crucifixion panel from Rogier van der Weyden's Crucifixion Diptych (c.1460) in Paris. The following year he sold it to John G. Johnson, who reunited the two halves and later donated them to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Widener's son Joseph donated more than 300 works—including paintings, sculpture, metalwork, stained glass, furniture, rugs, Chinese porcelains, and majolica—to the National Gallery of Art in 1942.

-- Peter Arrell Browne Widener, by Wikipedia

Art fraud includes adding artists’ names to questionable paintings, repainting or restoring old paintings so that they can be attributed to more important artists, and painting complete fakes. Nardus’s paintings included examples from all three classifications. As a restorer, Theo Wijngaarden was skilled in the first two, but was not sufficiently skilled to paint a really good fake that required portraiture.

Van Meegeren had to support Ann and the two children (they moved to Paris) and Jo and her child. He led a life of licentiousness, drinking, and carousing. His expenses stretched far beyond what he was making in portraiture. A hookup with Theo Wijngaarden was a natural, and, according to Lopez’s research, they began working together before 1921.

Neither man sold directly to the ultimate buyers. Instead they used a variety of finders, runners, other intermediaries, and dealers so that newly discovered paintings could not be traced back to them. In June, 1927, one of these runners, Harold B. Wright, an Englishman with dreams of wealth, showed up Kaiser Frederick Museum. He was carrying an unknown painting, The Lace Maker, by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) that he had discovered in an Amsterdam antique shop.

He sought authentication of the painting from the museum’s director Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, a respected authority. After close consideration, Bode wrote a certificate declaring the painting to be a “genuine, perfect, and very characteristic work of Jan Vermeer of Delft.” The painting was then exhibited in the museum.

Caught up in a Vermeer frenzy of the time, Sir Joseph Duveen, the most powerful art dealer in the world, bought two astonishing Vermeer oils, The Smiling Girl and The Lace Maker, and sold them to Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker.

When Mellon gave his art and his money to create the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (in appreciation, many of us still referred to it occasionally as the Mellon Museum), these two Vermeers were a valuable part of it. They hung in the Dutch rooms until the 1950s.

Both were Han van Meegeren fakes.

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

Mr. [Bernard] Houghton and Dr. [Alois Anton] Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences
by Andrew Huxley
South East Asia Research, 19, 1, pp 59–82
2011

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

-- A List of Inscriptions Found in Burma, by Charles Duroiselle, Part 1, 1921
-- Burma Research Society's Journal, Volume I, Part 1, June, 1911
-- The Journal of the Burma Research Society, Volume II, 1912
-- Burma Research Society's Journal, Volume III, Part 1, June, 1913
-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 23, 1894
-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 24, 1895
-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 25, 1896

-- Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist, by Andrew Huxley
-- Mr. [Bernard] Houghton and Dr. [Alois Anton] Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences, by Andrew Huxley
-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story. Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps
-- The Piprahwa Deceptions: Set-ups and Showdown, by T.A. Phelps
-- Investigation of the Correctness of the Historical Dating, by Wieslaw Z. Krawcewicz, Gleb V. Nosovskij and Petr P. Zabreiko
-- Alois Anton Führer, by Wikipedia
-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen
-- William Claxton Peppe: Persons of Indian Studies, by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen
-- Monograph On Buddha Shakyamuni's Birth-Place: The Nepalese Tarai, by Alois Anton Fuhrer
-- Georg Bühler, by Wikipedia
-- Archaeological Survey of India, by Wikipedia
-- Vincent Arthur Smith, by Wikipedia
-- ART. XXIX.—The Conquests of Samudra Gupta, by VINCENT A. SMITH, M.B..A.S., Indian Civil Service

Abstract: Between 1895 and 1921, the early history of Burma rested on a false premise: that the three oldest inscriptions found in Burma were genuine. Who forged these inscriptions? Why did they do so? By whom were the forgeries exposed? The answers to these questions prompt troubling thoughts about how state power impinged on the autonomous pursuit of knowledge during the high noon of the British Empire.

Keywords: epigraphy; forgery; scholarship; Burma

Author details: Andrew Huxley is the Senior Lecturer in the Laws of South East Asia, School of Law, SOAS, Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

The early 1920s in Burma were a time of ‘high political tension’.1 On 1 December 1920, Rangoon University came into existence, 47 years after it had first been proposed. Three days later, Burmese students launched their boycott of the new institution. The boycott turned into a conscience-raising campaign, which then became a national strike. By 1921, Burma was teetering on the edge of a people’s power revolution. The British responded by criminalizing each new form of protest as it arose. Measures such as the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1922) and the Anti-Boycott Act (1922) were effective in the short term, but in the long term, they could not save British rule. George Orwell joined the Burma Police Service in 1922, and soon realized ‘that the British Empire is dying’. He expressed this in an unforgettable image:

‘It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead … It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die …’2

The crisis began as two linked disputes over the ownership of knowledge. Would the British or the Burmese have the final say over student entry? The latter responded to British restrictions on student entry by setting up an alternative system of national schools outside colonial control. Would the British or the Burmese have the final say over the syllabus? Both sides acknowledged the superiority of British knowledge in engineering and medicine, but it was contested in the disciplines of Burmese literature, history and law.

Charles Duroiselle, the long-serving Government Archaeologist, joined the fray when he agreed to serve as Rangoon University’s first Professor of Oriental Studies. Within a year of appointment, he challenged the idea that the British knew best about Burmese history:

‘I must take this opportunity for exploding once for all the myth of a “large stone slab with a Sanskrit record in the Gupta alphabet of Samvat 108, or AD 416”; it purports to have been erected by one “Maharajadhiraja Jayapala, King of Hastinapura (Tagaung) in Brahmadesa on the Eravati (Irrawaddy)” … Similarly the two alleged Sanskrit inscripts said to be lying in the court-yard of the Kuzeit pagoda at Pagan, the first dated AD 481, and the other AD 610.’

This was the first admission in public that the oldest inscriptions yet found in Burma had been forged.3 Duroiselle’s footnote in the Report of the Superintendent, Archaeological Survey, Burma admitted the deed, but not who had done it:

‘This Sanskrit inscription has never existed; it is the figment of a vivid imagination; but as it has been mentioned repeatedly in serious works (for instance: the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, Part I, Volume II, p 193; Gerini’s Researches on Ptolemy’s Geography, pages 471 note 2, and 746) and whole theories built upon it, it is time the truth about it should be known … It is not very clear where Sir G. Scott, Upper Burma Gazetteer, Part I, Volume II, page 186, got this erroneous information.’4

Duroiselle spelt out two references in detail. To read them is to learn who the forger was. The Gerini citation refers to the Tagaung Gupta inscription, and says: ‘See Dr Führer’s archaeological report for the year 1894’.5 The Scott citation contains pages of verbatim transcripts from Führer’s 1894 Report.6 Was it through self-restraint or censorship that Duroiselle did not name Führer directly?

Duroiselle’s second publication of 1921 suggests the latter. His List of Inscriptions Found in Burma was printed not only in the Annual Reports, but also as a free-standing monograph. The sole difference between the two texts is to be found in the footnote dealing with the Gupta inscriptions. The monograph version reads:

‘This Sanskrit inscription has never existed, but was invented in toto by Dr Führer during a tour he made in Burma, his note on this tour being published in 1894; it is he also who wrongly gave out, very circumstantially, that he had found the birth-place of the Buddha. As this note of Führer has been made use of in some serious works, and whole theories built upon it, it is time the truth about it should be known … The best construction that has been put on these doings of Führer is that his mind was weakening.’7

The monograph reveals; the Annual Report conceals. Given the evident strength of Duroiselle’s feelings, it is likely that his first wish was to reveal, but that he was then subsequently persuaded to conceal. To clarify his motivation, we must examine the whole story from 1894 to 1921. In the process, two earlier contests between empire and scholarship will be seen from a fresh angle. One contest took place in 1898 in Nepal and was ‘one of the most audacious frauds … in nineteenth century Indian archaeology’.8 The other happened in 1910 in Rangoon when the Burma Research Society went through its difficult birth.

Archaeologists, professional and amateur

The first teasing allusion to the Gupta inscriptions newly found in Burma was published in 1894. The editor of Indian Antiquary promised in due course to print ‘by very far the two oldest inscriptions yet unearthed at Pagan’.9

7 [It may help the present controversy for me to state here that by far -- by very far -- the two oldest inscriptions yet unearthed at Pagan are: (1) in North Indian 7th or 8th Century characters; this is filled with Sanskrit words and expressions mixed with those in another language not yet determined; (2) in Gupta characters and dated in the second Gupta Century, -- 400-400 A.D.; this is in Sanskrit. I hope in due course to have the publishing of both inscriptions in this Journal. -- ED.] -- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 23, 1894, p. 167, FN 7.

He did so the following year:

‘The following extracts from Dr Führer’s Annual Progress Report of the Archaeological Survey Circle, North-Western Provinces & Oudh, for the year ending 30th June 1894 will interest those readers who have followed the controversy between Messrs. Taw Sein Ko and Houghton …’10

MISCELLANEA.

SOURCE OF SANSKRIT WORDS IN BURMESE.

The following extracts from Dr. Fuhrer's Annual Progress Report of the Archaeological Survey Circle, North-Western Provinces and Oudh, for the year ending 30th June 1894, will interest those readers who have followed the controversy between Messrs. Taw Sein-Ko and Houghton on Sanskrit words in Burma, Vols. XXII. and XXIII. of this Journal.

Dr. Fuhrer and Mr. Oertel were deputed to Burma in 1893-94 to make an Archaeological Tour, which has resulted in a most valuable Report, and, as the Report is a good one on its own account, it is to be regretted that the indebtedness of the authors to the writer of this note is nowhere acknowledged, and that no Mention is made in it of the great debt due by them to Mr. Taw Sein-Ko.

Extracts.

Page 15. — "The most important discoveries as yet made at Pagan are two long Sanskrit inscriptions on two red sandstone slabs, now lying in the court-yard of the ancient Kuzeit [Kuzek] Pagoda. The oldest one is dated in Guptasamvat 163, or A.D. 481, recording the erection of a temple of Sugata by Rudrasena, the ruler of Arimaddanapura. The second record is written in characters of the North-Indian alphabet and dated in Sakasamvat 532, or A.D. 610. Its object is to record the presentation of a statue of Sakyamuni by two Sakya mendicants, named Bodhivarman and Dharmadasa, natives of Hastinapura on the Eravati (the modern Tagaung in Upper Burma), to the Asokarama at Arimaddanapura, during the reign of king Adityasena. Undoubted proof is here afforded that Northern Buddhism reached Upper Burma from the Ganges, when India was mainly Buddhistic."

Gupta rulers patronised the Hindu religious tradition and orthodox Hinduism reasserted itself in this era.

-- Gupta Empire: Origins, Religion, Harsha and Decline, by factsanddetails.com/india

It is evident from the account of Hiuen-Tsang that Buddhism was slowly decaying when he visited India. Important centres of early Buddhism were deserted, though some new centres, such as Nalanda in the east, Valabhi in the west and Kanchi in the south, had sprung up. After some time Buddhism lost its hold in other provinces and flourished only in Bihar and Bengal, where royal patronage succeeded in keeping alive a dying cause. But it is clear that Buddhism was no longer popular and centred round a few monasteries. The Buddhism that was practised at these places was no longer of the simple Hinayana type, nor even had much in common with the Mahayana of the earlier days, but was strongly inbued with the ideas of Tantricism, inculcating belief in the efficacy of charms and spells and involving secret practices and rituals.

-- Nalanda Mahavihara: Victim of a Myth regarding its Decline and Destruction, by O.P. Jaiswal

Page 19b. — "The discovery amongst the ruins of Tagaung of terracotta tablets, bearing Sanskrit legends in Gupta characters and of a large stone slab with a Sanskrit record in the Gupta Alphabet of Samvat 108, or A.D. 416, affords a welcome corroboration to the statement of the native historians that, long before Anorata's conquest of Daton in the eleventh century A.D., successive waves of emigration from Gangetic India had passed through Manipur to the upper valley of the Irrawaddy, and that these emigrants brought with them letters, religion, and other elements of civilization. The inscription is one of Maharajadhiraja Jayapala of Hastinapura in Brahmadesa on the Eravati, and the object of it is to record in [Gupta] Samvat 108 the grant of an allotment of land and a sum of money to the arayasangha, or the community of the faithful, at the great vihara, or Buddhist convent, of Mahakasyapa, for the purpose of feeding bhikshus, or mendicants, and maintaining lamps at the stupa in the neighbourhood. The chief interest attaching to this inscription consists in its mentioning five lineal descendants of the Lunar Dynasty (Chandravamsa) of new Hastinapura, viz., Gopala, Chandrapala, Devapala, Bhimapala, and Jayapala, and its mentioning that Gopala left his original home, Hastinapura on the Ganges, and, after various successful wars with the Mlechchhas, founded new Hastinapura on the Irrawaddy. The vast ruins of Buddhistic Hastinapura are now buried in dense jungle, and would, no doubt, on excavation, reveal the remains of buildings raised by Indian architects and embellished by Indian sculptors. Undoubtedly valuable inscriptions would be unearthed, which might throw new light upon many dark points in the earliest history of India and Burma, and upon a civilization that appeared when New Pagan was founded, but then steadily declined. There are a few solid circular brick pagodas to the south, east, and west of ancient Tagaung, viz., the Shwezigon, Shwezati, and Paungdokya, which are held in great reverence, and which no doubt are very ancient. They were repaired during the reign of Alaungpaya, as recorded on three marble slabs."

R.C. Temple.  

-- The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, &c., &c., edited by Richard Carnac Temple, C.I.E., Major, Indian Staff Corps., Vol. 24, 1895, p. 275

It was these extracts that spread word of the Gupta inscriptions in Burma. Who was Indian Antiquary’s editor, and who were the three scholars he mentioned? After giving four paragraph-length biographies of the four men concerned, I turn to discuss the differences between professional and amateur archaeologists. Führer was paid to be Government Archaeologist of North-Western Provinces & Oudh (NWPO). Taw Sein Ko, Houghton and Temple performed their scholarly tasks for free in their spare time. I shall explain why it was preferable to be an amateur, and why there had been no professional archaeologist in Burma since 1890.

Richard Carnac Temple (1850–1931) was the son of Richard ‘Bumble’ Temple, an Indian bureaucrat whose achievements in the 1860s and 70s earned him a baronetcy and a seat in parliament. After Harrow and Trinity Hall, Temple fils joined the Indian Army, and was drawn to the study of India’s past. In 1885, he took over the editorship of Indian Antiquary, to which his gregarious disposition ideally suited him. This monthly journal acted as bulletin board for a community of linguists, historians, archaeologists and numismatists. Temple acted as the tireless blogger who posted updates and kept the Website up. He corresponded regularly with scholars in Asia, Europe and America. That he could edit Indian Antiquary from wherever the Army stationed him is a tribute to the efficiency of British India’s postal system. Temple was an amateur and had been self-taught in matters Indological. He earned his pay as Officer Commanding the Mandalay Garrison and as founder of the Upper Burmah Volunteer Rifles. In 1891, he transferred south to preside over Rangoon Municipality, where he raised the Rangoon Naval Volunteers and the risky-sounding Rangoon Voluntary Engineers (Submarine Miners). In 1894, Temple was promoted to Chief Commissioner of the Andaman Islands, which in effect meant running the Penal Colony at Port Blair. He retired from active service in 1904 at the age of 54. Living in Switzerland and England, he continued to edit Indian Antiquary until the 1920s.11

Taw Sein Ko (1864–1930) was an up-and-coming young Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer stationed in Mandalay when he first met Temple. His father was a Chinese merchant, his mother a Shan noblewoman. The family moved from Moulmein to Prome, then to Mandalay, where his father died. The widow and son retreated to Prome, then on to Rangoon. Throughout Taw Sein Ko’s education, he was taught in English. At 14, he won a government scholarship to attend Rangoon High School, where he learned Pali from Em Forchhammer and won the inaugural John Jardine Prize for Best High School Student. Chief Commissioner Charles Bernard marked him out as a promising prospect. After the University of Calcutta, Taw Sein Ko joined the Burma Commission, and spent three years as assistant to Em Forchhammer, who was then the Government Archaeologist and Professor of Pali. In December 1885, Bernard moved to Mandalay to pacify the freshly annexed Kingdom of Burma. His base was the former Royal Palace, now renamed Fort Dufferin. Taw Sein Ko was given a job scouting through the Royal Archives in search of usable information. Outside the Fort’s walls, the insurgents set fires, breached the flood defences and sniped at the occupying forces. The occupation staff members were ordered to carry a loaded revolver and short sword with them at all times. Within the Fort’s walls, Richard Temple, aged 36, struck up a friendship with Taw Sein Ko, aged 22. The editor encouraged Taw Sein Ko to contribute regularly to Indian Antiquary and to edit highlights of the Mandalay palace archives for publication. Taw Sein Ko spent the year 1892–93 in England. He taught Burmese in Cambridge and read for the bar in London. He was being offered a choice of future careers: to qualify as a barrister and serve the Burma Commission in a legal capacity, or to learn Chinese and serve in an intelligence capacity.12

Bernard Houghton (1864–1933) was, like Temple, born in India and educated in England. His father was a cochineal dealer, wealthy enough to send his son to Trinity College, Dublin. Midway through his second undergraduate year, Houghton left to cram for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) entrance exams. He came third in his year, and spent his griffin year (1884–85) in Madras as assistant to the Collector of Vizagapatam. At that time, Upper Burma urgently needed British bureaucrats. Houghton was posted to Burma, and spent the rest of his 26-year career there. During the worst of the insurgency, he acquired a reputation as a smart officer. While officiating as Deputy Commissioner of Sandoway in Arakan, he suppressed a rebel uprising and earned a written commendation from the Chief Commissioner. Stationed in remote Sandoway, Houghton had time to hone his gift for languages and studied for his proficiency exam in the Chin language. His examiner was so impressed by Houghton’s notes that he had them published. Houghton was promoted to Akyab, the capital of Arakan, as an additional Sessions Judge. At this point, Houghton’s first contribution to Indian Antiquary appeared – a review of a rival’s book on Chin linguistics. Over the next three years, Houghton contributed six more notes on linguistics and folklore. 13

Alois Anton Führer (1853–1930) was born into a German Catholic family. He studied Roman Catholic theology and Oriental studies at the University of Würzburg, taking ordination in 1878 and gaining his PhD in 1879. His Sanskrit lecturer, Julius Jolly, was associated with the Bombay School of Indology. That is probably how Führer came to be appointed Sanskrit teacher at St Xavier’s Institute in Bombay. Around 1884, Führer left the Catholic Church and started worshipping as an Anglican. This cost him his job. Back in Germany, he applied to be Curator of the NWPO Provincial Museum at Lucknow. Six months after his appointment, the Management Committee recommended him for a part-time job with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). James Burgess, the new Director-General, offered Führer a post, to run concurrently with the curatorship. Führer carried out highly successful digs at Mathura between 1889 and 1891. They transformed early Jain history and made his reputation as ‘probably the only scientific excavator in India worthy to rank with Dr. Dörpfeld and Prof. Petrie’.14 A few years later, Führer investigated Buddhist ruins in the Butwal stretch of the Terai, the strip of Nepalese territory immediately below the foothills of the Himalayas. This won him and his associates more praise from the press.15 Although Führer is mainly known for his exploits in Nepal and northern India, he maintained a lifelong interest in Burma. His first published research was into Burmese legal literature, and his last published work was on The Shaping of Ethics and Culture in Burma.16

Professional archaeology in India began tentatively in 1860. For five years, Major Alexander Cunningham ploughed the field alone. In 1871, Cunningham was given two locally hired assistants, Archibald Carlleyle and Joseph Beglar. Their work focused on Bihar and NWPO. Elsewhere, the Bombay Presidency hired James Burgess as its Archaeological Surveyor and Reporter in 1873, and British Burma allocated money to pay a Professor of Pali who would double as epigraphist. Madras started discussing a permanent appointment in 1870, but did not make one until 1882. In 1885, following Cunningham’s retirement, Viceroy Dufferin funded new ASI offices in the Punjab, Bengal and NWPO. The archaeologists concentrated on Buddhist and Jain sites, so their work did not much appeal to Hindus or Muslims. Nor was the Liberal wing of British opinion keen on paying for archaeology. Sir Edward Buck led those Liberals who would rather use funds to develop an export market in Indian arts and crafts. Buck lobbied (successfully) for the suspension of the Director-General’s job and (with partial success) for the closure of all the ASI offices in northern India. In 1892, Buck was promoted to control India’s purse strings, and announced the complete closure of the ASI. From 1 October 1895, all its staff were to lose their jobs.17

Burma was not immune from the Buck crisis. Dr Em Forchhammer carried out his first dig in Burma in 1880 and was appointed British Burma’s Government Archaeologist in 1882. He died in April 1890 on board an Irrawaddy Flotilla Company paddle boat. It would be tasteless to include him among the archaeologists whom Buck sacked that year. Nonetheless, Rangoon and Calcutta had agreed before Forchhammer’s death that he was too ill to continue working. The Burma archaeology job would go into suspension, whatever the immediate fate of its holder. During the nine-year interregnum that followed, Rangoon employed a skeleton native staff to keep the Archaeology Office open. Its monthly budget for 1897–98 was:

• 1 Pali Burmese clerk – Rs70
• 1 Burmese clerk – Rs60
• 1 clerk – Rs40
• 1 junior clerk – Rs30
• Total – Rs200 18

This was by some distance the smallest archaeology budget in British India. Madras, the next smallest, spent eight times as much as Burma. So it fell to Burma’s amateur archaeologists to keep archaeology alive in their spare time. Richard Temple was the prime mover, and Taw Sein Ko his preferred instrument. Immediately after Forchhammer’s death, Taw Sein Ko was deputed to clear the backlog of unpublished work. He saw two completed manuscripts, Arakan Antiquities and Kyaukku Temple, into print, but could only find enough among the ‘mass of papers’ left in Forchhammer’s office for one further publication, which became the Inscriptions of Pagan, Pinya and Ava.19 Forchhammer had pioneered the study of the Kalyani inscription, perhaps the most interesting of all Burmese epigraphs. Temple arranged funding for Taw Sein Ko to complete work on Kalyani and to explore the places mentioned therein. In the cold season of 1891–92, Taw Sein Ko inspected the sites between the mouths of the Salween and Sittang, and the Kalyani sima itself.20 In May 1892, the government paid for the inscribed Kalyani slabs to be restored.21 At that time, Frederick Oertel, an architectural engineer who had a keen interest in photography and archaeology, visited Burma. Temple met Oertel for a four-day tour of the Amherst Caves. Oertel carried on alone to Pegu, Prome and Pagan, and later that year published his photographic guide to Burmese antiquities.22 Oertel’s freelance mission paved the way for an official delegation the following year. Oertel was to be joined by Führer and two NWPO support staff on a Survey Tour of Burma. Führer was deputed to write a report on Burmese archaeology, which Rangoon could then use to raise funds, and to advise on expanding the Rangoon Museum. Taw Sein Ko cut short his legal studies in London and returned to Rangoon just in time to welcome the NWPO delegation. In Temple’s view, they showed insufficient gratitude for the information the Burmese amateurs had given them:

‘It is to be regretted that the indebtedness of the authors to the writer of this note is nowhere acknowledged, and that no mention is made in it of the great debt due by them to Mr. Taw Sein Ko.’23

Führer chose an odd way to express his apologies.

Forged inscriptions

Temple’s mention of a ‘controversy between Messrs Taw Sein Ko and Houghton’ referred to four short articles published in Indian Antiquary between 1892 and 1894 under the general rubric of ‘Sanskrit words in the Burmese language’.24 This linguistic argument fed into the larger question of whether civilization had reached Burma through Hindu colonists, or through Buddhist traders and travelling monks. Two types of evidence, epigraphic and morphological, bolstered the Hindu colonies thesis. Either one found an inscription that said, in effect, ‘I am a Hindu colonist of Burma’; or one found a Burmese word spelt Sanskrit-style. Provided the Sanskrit language and the Hindu religion were considered coterminous, such spelling allowed the gloss ‘I am a Sanskrit word, written by a Hindu colonist in Burma’. Forchhammer, an enthusiastic proponent of Hindu colonies, used both arguments to prove that the ruined city of Siri Kettera was ‘a chapter of the history of Ancient India’, that is, a Hindu colony. He adduced inscriptions ‘found nearby’, which showed Siri Kettera to have been ‘a dependency of the Mauryan kings and the Pandavas of Madhpyadesa’.25 As to spelling, Forchhammer explained that, although the law texts were written in Pali-Burmese, ‘the Sanskrit structure and the niceties of Sanskrit sandhi frequently peep through’.26 Indeed, it would be wrong to approach Pali-Burmese inscriptions without a thorough drenching in Sanskrit.27 Forchhammer was so convinced of this that even when he found a word spelt Palistyle, he intuited its Sanskrit origin: the word gaw.la ‘unmistakeably points to the Sanskrit Gau.da’.28

Taw Sein Ko revived these morphological arguments by listing 21 examples of Burmese words spelt in Sanskrit style.29 Houghton replied that, though such Sanskrit spellings existed, they were found only in ‘philosophical pseudo-scientific and courtly expressions’.30 Taw Sein Ko insisted that each was in common use ‘in social life’, adding that historically minded Burmese authors who used the correct Sanskrit spelling had been challenged by a ‘modern school of Burmese writers’ who, knowing ‘nothing about the obligations of Burmese to Sanskrit, desire to eliminate all Sanskritic elements’. He continued, warming up the controversy:

‘Mr Houghton accuses me of allowing my religious zeal to overstep my discretion in giving “this personage” the title of “Recording Angel of Buddhism”. A very little enquiry would have showed him that Childers makes use of this very title in his Dictionary.’31

Houghton replied that the spelling debate shed a ‘somewhat startling light’ on the proceedings of the Text-Book Committee. He urged public disclosure of ‘the arguments used by the native sayas in cases where their opinion over-ruled the more intelligent part of the committee’.32 There is rancour between Houghton and Taw Sein Ko, certainly, but no more than when any pair of 29-year-olds vies for the favour of a middleaged patron. The disputants were well matched, and their careers would, for the near future, run along similar trajectories. Taw Sein Ko spent 1892 studying at Cambridge; Houghton spent 1895 studying in Dublin. Houghton went to Hong Kong in 1896 to learn Chinese; Taw Sein Ko to Beijing the same year for the same purpose. It was Führer’s intervention in the debate, however, that stirred up real animosity between them.

Führer wrote to Temple in May 1894 with news of two Gupta inscriptions that he had discovered at Pagan. Temple saw this as conclusive of the Hindu colonies debate, and added some triumphalist footnotes disparaging Houghton’s continued opposition to the thesis.33 Führer’s new inscriptions told a consistent story of conquest followed by assimilation. The Pagan inscription of 481 CE shows the Sanskrit colonists reaching Burma around 400 CE writing a pure Sanskrit. The bilingual inscription of 610 CE shows them two centuries later, having taken local wives and mixed their pure Sanskrit with a local language. It also mentions two Sakya monks from Hastinapura-on-the-Irrawaddy, suggesting that the mother city of the colonists was Hastinapura, a city on the Ganges mentioned in the Mahabharata. Barely had Führer made this conjecture when he found epigraphic support for it. At Tagaung, he discovered a ‘large stone slab’ in Gupta script and Sanskrit language dated to the fifth century CE. It had been written ‘by the Great King of Kings Jayapala of Hastinapura in Brahmadesa’ on the Irrawaddy River, and it records his gift of land and money to support the Kassapa monastery:

‘The chief interest attaching to this inscription consists in its mentioning five lineal descendants of the lunar dynasty of New Hastinapura, viz Gopala, Chandrapala, Devapala, Bhimapala and Jayapala, and in its mentioning that Gopala left his original home, Hastinapura on the Ganges, and, after various successful wars with the mlechchhas, founded new Hastinapura on the Irrawaddy.’

QED the Sanskrit colonization of Burma. The Tagaung inscription affords ‘a welcome corroboration’ that ‘successive waves of emigration from Gangetic India’ had civilized Burma:

‘The vast ruins of Buddhist Hastinapura are now buried in dense jungle, and would no doubt, on excavation, reveal the remains of buildings raised by Indian architects and embellished by Indian sculptures.’ 34

It is worth noting that Führer, even though he had a cameraman and a draftsman with him, took neither photograph nor sketch of the Gupta inscriptions.

Führer’s first audience believed in the Gupta inscriptions because they believed in Hindu colonies. Gradually, as they realized that the facts on the ground did not fit, they came to doubt that the inscriptions existed. Neither of the ‘Gupta inscription find-spots’ was an isolated backwater. A daily boat service links Tagaung and Pagan with Mandalay and Rangoon. Burma’s amateur archaeologists would have wanted to inspect the oldest epigraphs yet found in Burma, and publish them in full. If Temple, Houghton and Taw Sein Ko did not inspect the sites personally, then they despatched reliable intermediaries on their behalf. There are indications that Temple and Houghton had discovered the truth by the end of 1896. Certainly, Taw Sein Ko had done so by 1900.

In the long term, how much did these forgeries matter? Führer published them in the NWPO Progress Report, which was a demi-official document of limited circulation. Only a few university libraries received copies, and only a dozen were sent as personal gifts to Indologists in Europe. Was Duroiselle exaggerating when he said that whole theories – meaning the Hindu civilization of Burma – rested on the evidence of the Gupta inscriptions? Although the Progress Report itself was not widely circulated, Führer’s description of the Gupta inscriptions was reprinted three times. NWPO’s Annual Report reproduced three short extracts, including Führer’s account of the two Pagan inscriptions and the Tagaung inscription.35 In 1895, Temple republished the Gupta inscription extracts in Indian Antiquary. In 1902, several pages of the Progress Report were reprinted verbatim in Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States. Quite how much responsibility George Scott, its editor, took for Führer’s facts is hard to say. In the main, Scott reproduced Führer’s claims verbatim, but he did suppress one particularly egregious claim.36 By the early 1900s, anyone with an interest in the archaeology of Burma had ample opportunity to read about the Gupta inscriptions in Führer’s own words.

Forged relics

Führer and Oertel travelled one stop north from Tagaung to Katha. There, at the Mahahti monastery, Führer met Shin U Ma, an English-speaking monk. They discussed the archaeology of the Buddhist Holy Land. Führer had visited Bodhgaya (where Gautama achieved Buddhahood), Sarnath (where the Buddha preached his first sermon) and the Jetavana monastery at Savatthi (where the Buddha spent most of his Lents). They never again met face to face, but they exchanged letters, telegrams and parcels over the next four years. Twelve of these letters survive in the Indian National Archive.37 The third in the series, written by Führer, said that he had just sent some authentic Buddha relics to U Ma. These relics had been found:

‘in the stupa erected by the Sakyas at Kapilavastu over the corporeal relics [sarirakadhatus] of the Lord. The relics were found by me in 1886 and are placed in the same relic-casket of soapstone in which they were found.’38

Writing four months later (‘Perhaps you have seen from the papers that I succeeded in discovering the Lumbini grove where Lord Buddha was born’), Führer was pleased to note:

‘that you have unpacked the sacred relics of our Blessed Lord Buddha which are undoubtedly authentic, and which will prove a blessing to those who worship them faithfully.’39

U Ma was encouraged to splash the news of the relic far and wide. Writing in September 1897, Führer told U Ma that he would ‘enclose in the silver box you are sending the precious danta of Lord Buddha Godama’.40 Three weeks later, he boasted that he had despatched:

‘your silver relic casket together with a molar tooth of Lord Buddha Gaudama Sakyamuni. It was found by me in a stupa erected at Kapilavastu where King Suddhodana lived. That it is genuine there can be no doubt, all proofs for it will be in a book which I am writing and which I shall send you as soon as it is printed off.’41

Five months later, he summarized his proofs:

‘A copy of the ancient inscription … was found by me along with the tooth. It says: “This sacred tooth relic of Lord Buddha is the gift of Upagupta.” As you know, Upagupta was the teacher of Ashokaraja, the great Buddhist conqueror of India.’42

The five letters quoted show that in 1896 Führer sent a relic (details unspecified) that was authenticated by an inscription mentioning the Sakyas at Kapilavastu. Then in 1897, he sent a further gift – a molar tooth relic, which was authenticated by an inscription written by Upagupta, King Ashoka’s Chief Monk in the third century BCE.

During October 1897, a wave of religious enthusiasm swept Deputy Commissioner Bernard Houghton’s Division. It was rumoured that an authentic tooth relic of the Buddha was on its way to Manle by ship from the Buddhist Holy Land and by special train from Rangoon. Houghton informed his superiors that ‘several large pilgrimages’ were converging from different parts of the district to see the tooth. The British regarded religious enthusiasm as a possible security threat: although Buddhism frowns on violence, Burmese Buddhists can easily be persuaded to use violence in defence of their religion. A dozen years after the Third Anglo–Burmese War, Burma was far from being pacified. There had just been another suicide attack on Fort Dufferin. The attackers, 16 men armed with swords led by the monk Shin U Wilatha, struck at 9 pm on 12 October 1897. Mrs Wilson, a soldier’s widow, and the soldier who came to her aid, were both badly injured. The Burmese attackers were gunned down. U Wilatha styled himself as the Setkya min [‘the prophesied future king of Burma’].43 Houghton had good reason to keep an eye on what was happening at Manle. In company with Norman Cholmeley, the political agent,44 Houghton visited the monastery at Manle. At centre stage orchestrating the publicity was Shin U Ma. They must have wondered whether U Ma would turn out to be another U Wilatha. In order to prove his good faith, the monk showed them authenticating letters from the NWPO Government Archaeologist. Once more, Houghton’s career entwined with Führer’s.

The 1896 relic, Houghton said, was a tooth ‘obviously carved out of ivory’. The 1897 molar tooth relic was ‘apparently that of a horse, or perhaps nilghai’.45 Some idea of what the 1897 relic looked like can be gleaned from a work that Führer had studied in late 1893 (see Figure 1).


Figure 1. Illustration from Em Forchhammer, Arakan Antiquities (1891).

Führer had misunderstood Forchhammer. The Arakanese tooth relic was not from the Buddha’s final incarnation, but from an earlier rebirth as a wild animal. When challenged on the relic’s superhuman size, Führer blustered an explanation:

‘It is quite different from any ordinary human tooth. But you will know that Bhagavat-Buddha was no ordinary being as he was 18 cubits in height as your sacred writings state. His teeth should therefore not have been shaped like ours. This is also the case with the sacred tooth which is preserved at Kandy in Ceylon.’46

U Ma was not persuaded. He knew enough of the Buddha’s life story to know that Gautama was not a giant.

Bernard Houghton typed up two of Führer’s letters and attached them to his demi-official complaint to Führer’s employers, the NWPO government. Führer was caught in a fork. If the relics and inscriptions were genuine, why had he not reported such an important find to the ASI? If bogus, why was he exporting trouble to Burma? Aware that the evidence spoke for itself, Houghton could adopt a relaxed tone in his complaint:

‘I had intended writing about this before but the subject somehow escaped my memory … Cholmeley … is very indignant … While taking a rather more cynical view of the matter, I think that its morality is somewhat dubious, and anyway I object to the planting of any more of these relics in this district.’47

The complaint left Rangoon on 2 February and reached Führer on 4 March. With it, Führer received an ominous letter from the NWPO Chief Secretary summarizing the three charges he must answer:

• Count One – That Führer was aware the relics were fraudulent: ‘To impose upon the Buddhist community … would not only partake of the nature of an imposture, but, coming from an antiquarian, would be a grave offence against archaeological truth.’

• Count Two – Disposing of government property: ‘These objects came into Dr Führer’s possession in the course of his official explorations, and are therefore the property of Government … Dr Führer has no authority to present any of the archaeological specimens discovered by him to either his private friends or to any official body …’

• Count Three – Peculation: ‘Dr Führer has received presents of apparently some value from the Burmese gentleman … He must explain his action in transgressing the rules which forbid the acceptance of presents to public servants.’48

Führer was doomed on the first two counts, although he had a fairly good defence to the third. He postponed his fate by asking Burma to send proof of the 1896 relic. On 16 September 1898, Führer’s offer of resignation was accepted by the Calcutta authorities. Führer and his family left India shortly afterwards.

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Part 2 of 2

Consequences

I have described a vendetta between Houghton and Führer – a Conradian tale of people behaving badly in the tropics. By way of conclusion, I enquire whether the episode had any wider effect beyond the combatants. I look at three routes by which the personal might have impinged on the political, all three of which traverse the frontier between state power and the autonomous pursuit of knowledge. By the first route, Houghton’s revenge initiated a slow unravelling of Führer’s crimes. The unravelling was slow because the cover-up was long. That Guptagate was successfully hushed up for a quarter of a century implies that institutions, as well as individuals, were involved; an institutional cover-up is, by definition, political. The second route led from the vendetta to the radicalization of Houghton’s politics. Because he was a thoughtful analyst who could write clearly and amusingly, his books and pamphlets were influential, especially among English-speaking Indians. The third route led from Burma’s amateur archaeologists to the foundation of the Burma Research Society.

Officials struggled to concoct a printable account of Führer’s dismissal. The investigation into Houghton’s complaint was handled by Vincent Smith, Secretary to the NWPO government and himself an amateur archaeologist. Smith found Führer guilty of sending bogus tooth relics to U Ma, and reported his verdict to British Burma.49 Six months later, he gave his first public account of ‘Toothgate’. Calcutta, he says, has ‘my reports on the alleged relics of Buddha and the inscription of Upagupta presented by Dr. Führer to the Burmese priest U Ma’. The (unspecified) facts therein do ‘not tend to support the authority of Dr. Führer when he publishes pre-Ashoka inscriptions in English only’.50 Vincent Smith’s second publication, written from Cheltenham after retirement in June 1901, promised to speak out plainly in the interests of truth: ‘I find that the reserved language used in previous official documents has been sometimes misinterpreted’.51 Despite this, he again kept silent about Führer’s other forgery – the Sakyan reliquary inscription written to validate the 1896 tooth relic.52

If Toothgate was only half exposed, Guptagate was not exposed at all. The first public hint that the Gupta inscriptions had been forged came from Taw Sein Ko in 1900, and again in 1911.53 But the full truth, as we have seen, only emerged in 1921. It was Charles Duroiselle, Taw Sein Ko’s successor as Government Archaeologist, who exposed Guptagate. The publications in which he did it were technical works printed in Rangoon. The following year, Louis Finot, doyen of the École Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO), repeated the exposure in a widely distributed journal. Finot confirmed that the ‘author of the imposture’ was ‘the all-too-famous Dr Führer’. Führer’s tour of Burma in 1893–94 had, he said, marked the beginning ‘of that scandalous career of forgery which would, some years later, come to an end in Kapilavastu’.54

Bernard Houghton walked away in disgust from the journals that had colluded in the initial cover-up. Indeed, he withdrew altogether from linguistics, his first academic love, in favour of ethnology and political sociology. The central subject of his research through the 1900s was the failure of British rule in Burma. Naturally, his findings could not be published until he had retired from the Burma Commission. On returning to England, he published his great work, Bureaucratic Government. Following the tradition of Francis Bacon and Jeremy Bentham, Houghton analysed what had gone wrong with present policy, then advocated the necessary changes. The government of British India had been ‘autocratic on the local scale’ from the 1750s until the 1870s. Then, with the arrival of telegrams and railways, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Rangoon had initiated a bureaucratic mode of governance, which ‘cannot conceive of natives except either as rebels or as timid sheep’. Lord Curzon began the third period (which Houghton labelled ‘hyper-bureaucracy’) by embodying ‘all that is most inflexible in the bureaucratic mind’. Curzon’s approach was ‘stunted and narrow’ and unfit for ‘an India that has begun to move’.55

In 1913, Houghton had shown some sympathy to ‘our Socialist or anarchist friends’. The events of the next decade – the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the Versailles Treaty and the great Burmese popular uprising of 1921 – drove him further to the left. Here is a bouquet of his thoughts, gathered from his post-war works: ‘Capital owns the Press, and capital is concerned with money-interests only’.56 The British Cabinet has been ‘pushed forward by the powerful oil industry … Towards Afghanistan, Persia and Mesopotamia it has been frankly aggressive.’57 The federation of the Shan States ‘facilitated the operations of British Capital in that area’.58 The ICS have ‘drawn themselves from a class which has always favoured capital against Labour’.59 Mahatma Gandhi, by choosing non-violence, has ‘baffled the military party in Anglo–India, burning to make use of the last inventions in the way of aeroplanes, machine guns, rifles and cannon’. Now Britain must ‘stand aside’ and ‘make over the dominion to other hands’.60 The Burmese people were part of ‘that vast army, consecrated to one ideal, lead by our transcendent leader’.61 There is much in Houghton’s analysis of Empire with which V.I. Lenin could agree. This Houghtonist–Leninist ideology spread to Indian readers through Congress-supporting publishing houses in Madras and Bombay. During the Great Depression, and the betrayals of organized Labour that followed, Houghton’s publications dried up. Increasingly infirm, he took up residence by the sea, first in north Devon, then in East Sussex.

Let us work backwards from the 1921–22 exposure to the vendetta’s third consequence. In 1921, Charles Duroiselle exposed Guptagate. When and from whom had he acquired its secret? It is unclear when Duroiselle arrived in Burma. The first 32 years of his life are a blank, save that somewhere he acquired an MA. His obituarist called him ‘a self-made scholar’ who ‘acquired his vast knowledge practically by his own unaided efforts’.62 He first makes his appearance in 1902 as teacher of Burmese at St John’s, Rangoon (a Church of England school catering for Burmese pupils).63 The following year, he played host to Édouard Huber, who had been delegated by the recently founded EFEO to investigate Burma. Duroiselle shared his knowledge of the abundant Burmese and Pali sources with Huber, and assured EFEO that his holdings were at its complete disposal.64 He contributed his first article to EFEO’s Bulletin in 1904, and was named as a Corresponding member in 1905. He made several manuscript-copying trips on behalf of EFEO through 1905 and 1906.65 He became Professor of Pali at Rangoon High School in 1904, Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey in 1912, and Professor of Oriental Studies, Rangoon University, in 1920. Despite this impressive career, he had been ‘socially marginalized due to his marriage to a Burmese woman’.66 Note the identities of his predecessors in these posts shown in Table 1. Duroiselle must have learned of the forgery from the amateur archaeologists. They must have told him as soon as they came to trust him.67

Table 1. Two scholarly offices and their incumbents.

Professor of Pali, Rangoon High School / Superintendent, Archaeological Survey of Burma

Em Forchhammer 1879–1890/ Em Forchhammer 1882–90
James Gray 1890–1904 / [post vacant]
Charles Duroiselle 1904–12 / Taw Sein Ko 1901–12
Pe Maung Tin 1912–23 / Charles Duroiselle 1912–32

Temple, Houghton and Taw Sein Ko lent their support to the campaign to found a Burma Research Society (BRS) and all three had articles published in Vol I, No I of the learned society’s Journal (JBRS).68 Four energetic young men acted as the Society’s officers. The barrister May Oung and the Government Officer John Sydenham Furnivall were prime movers. Duroiselle was appointed Editor of the JBRS, and Pe Maung Tin its Honorary Secretary. Might the secret have spilled out to all four of these youngsters? Let us look more closely at the foundation of the BRS. Its inaugural meeting was held at the Bernard Free Library on 29 March 1910. The organization was intended to have philanthropic as well as educational functions. Its President, the Hon Mr Eales, wanted it to ‘foster, encourage and increase the good feeling and mutual respect between the Briton and the Burman’. Lieutenant-Governor Herbert White responded with the hope that it ‘will form a real and living bond of interest and intercourse in the Province’. Eighteen years later, Furnivall called it ‘one of the earliest, and not the least unhopeful, of national movements’.69 Furnivall and Tun Nyein, a fellow founder, had been inspired by the Siam Society, which was founded in 1904 and which began its own journal in 1908. The founders wanted to call their organization the Burma Society. The government made known its preference for the Burma Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. When the campaigners turned down this suggestion,70 government insisted that the word ‘Research’ should be added to Burma Society. Matters of protocol were at stake: the patron of the Siam Society was the King of Siam. It followed, to the hyperbureaucratic mind, that a Burma Society must be patronized by someone of equal, or higher, rank. The Emperor of India, however, already supported his Royal Asiatic Society, and could not patronize a rival. With this in mind, read what May Oung had to say in his Inaugural Address. He noted that the latest volume of the Journal of the Siam Society contained a 100-page article on the history of Siam’s relationship with Burma:

‘It is no slight argument of the ultimate stability of our Society that the article was written by a Burman now in the service of the Siamese Government. For the most part, of course, we cannot expect such active help in our peculiar endeavours …’

May Oung’s words would have been submitted to Lieutenant-Governor White for prior vetting. The trick was to keep things oblique and ambiguous.

May Oung’s speech then turned to archaeology. The founders had called in their prospectus for more attention to be given to Burma’s archaeology. Governor White deleted this clause ‘on the grounds that it might be seen to be too critical of the British government’.71 After summarizing research on Burma up to the 1870s (naming four missionaries, five military officers and five administrators who worked in these early years), May Oung turned to the 1880s and 90s:

‘Then there are the papers … by Sir John Jardine, by Dr Forchhammer, and by the present learned head of the Archaeological Department [Taw Sein Ko], and by not a few others, of whom it would be invidious to mention particular individuals …’

Führer is one of these ‘others’. In what sense would it have been ‘invidious’ to mention his name – in its commoner sense (tending to excite odium against the speaker, May Oung) or in its original meaning (tending to excite odium against the spoken-of, Führer)?72 Two pages later, May Oung remarked that:

‘Honour attaches to the man who first discovers anything even if it be a matter of such little interest as the North Pole. Surely a rational consideration should attach little less honour to the man who makes the discovery a second time.’73

Can we read this passage as a reference to Guptagate? If so, he implies that Taw Sein Ko should be honoured as the person who refused to corroborate (that is, discover for the second time) Führer’s discoveries at Pagan and Tagaung.

Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code prevented May Oung from addressing his audience in plainer words. It states that those who attempt in any way ‘to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in British India’ may be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Criticism, however justified, of an employee of the Indian government might provoke a show trial. For 70 years, until it succumbed to a different form of tyranny, the BRS provided a safe space within which Burmese and Europeans could discuss their views. John Furnivall referred to its foundation as ‘the first attempt, except by Government, to promote cultural interests in Burma’.74 Penny Edwards suggests that the government’s hostility was due to the fear of losing ‘its standing as the leading authority on Burma’.75 To translate into combative language: the Burma Research Society broke the colonial state’s monopoly over the production of knowledge. How this came about is a pungent tale, even as told by the published sources. How much greater the smell when we factor in Guptagate and its cover-up. In 1910, the official history of early Burma was still founded on a lie. Houghton, Taw Sein Ko and Duroiselle knew this, but could not reveal it.

_______________

Notes:

1 D. G. E. Hall (1981), A History of South-east Asia, 4 ed, Macmillan Education,  Basingstoke, pp 776–777.
 
2 George Orwell (1936), Shooting an Elephant, Website: http:/www.onlineliterature.  com/Orwell/887.
 
3 I define ‘forgery’ as including two activities: first, the creation of a purportedly ancient  artefact that independent scholars can examine; second, the description for  publication of an artefact that independent scholars are unable to examine.
 
4 Charles Duroiselle (1921), Report of the Archaeological Survey, Burma, for the Year  Ending 31st March 1921, Government Press, Rangoon, p 21.
 
5 G. E. Gerini (1909), Researches on Ptolemy’s Geography of Eastern Asia, Royal  Asiatic Society and Royal Geographic Society, London, p 471; A. A. Führer (1894),  NWPO ASI Progress Report for 1893 to 1894, Government Press, Rorkee.
 
6 Gazetteer, pp 178–187 = Report, pp 11–16; Gazetteer, pp 191–193 = Report, pp 18–  19. Although J. G. Scott, the Gazetteer’s editor, borrowed Führer’s text without  acknowledging its author, this is not a case of plagiarism. Scott’s title page informs  the reader that its contents are ‘compiled from official papers’. Furthermore, on p  178 Scott credited ‘Dr. Führer quoting Forchhammer’. Scott alludes to: Em  Forchhammer (1891), Kyaukku Temple, Government Press, Rangoon.
 
7 Charles Duroiselle (1921), A List of Inscriptions Found in Burma Part I, Government  Press, Rangoon, p ii.
 
8 Upinder Singh (2004), The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and  the Beginnings of Archaeology, Permanent Black, Delhi, p 321.
 
9 R. C. Temple (1894), ‘Editorial footnote’, Indian Antiquary, Vol 23, p 167, fn 7.
 
10 R. C. Temple (1895), ‘Source of Sanskrit words in Burmese’, Indian Antiquary, Vol  24, p 275.
 
11 W. F. B. Laurie (1888), Sketches of Some Distinguished Anglo–Indians (Second Series),  W.H. Allen, London, p 228; the Temple–Roberts correspondence in MSS Eur F98/  67, Temple Papers. All archival references are to the India Office Library collection  in the British Library, London.
 
12 Anon (1927), Who’s Who in Burma: A Biographical Record of Prominent Residents  of Burma with Photographs & Illustrations, Indo–Burma Publishing Agency, Calcutta  and Rangoon, p 123; Penny Edwards (2004), ‘Relocating the interlocutor: Taw  Sein Ko (1864–1930) and the itinerancy of knowledge in British Burma’, South East  Asia Research, Vol 12, No 3, pp 277–335; V/12/387, History of Service of Gazetted  and Other Officers in Burma.
 
13 I have reconstructed Houghton’s career from many short references in the Burma  Home Papers and Gazettes of Service. See also http://www.houghtontree.blogspot; Bernard  Houghton (1892), Essay on the Language of the Southern Chins and its Affinities,  Government Printing, Rangoon.
 
14 J. S. Cotton (1894), ‘The Archaeological Survey of India’, Academy, 23 June, p 521.
 
15 Führer’s find at Nigliva ‘seems to carry the origin of Buddhism much further back’  than the 5th century BCE; New York Post, 3 May 1896. The discovery, made during  Führer’s brief absence from the site, that Paderia was ‘the actual birthplace of the  Buddha’ ought to bring ‘devout joy to about 672,000,000 people’, Liverpool Mercury,  29 December 1896. The Piprahwa Stupa, excavated 15 miles away from Führer’s  camp, ‘contains no less a relic than the bones of the Buddha himself’, Pall Mall  Gazette, 18 April 1898.
 
16 I am obliged to Klaus Karttunen (Helsinki), Terry Phelps (London) and Urs von Arx  (Bern) for details of Führer’s life. See also Arch. & Epig Pros 4–18, file number 6 of  1898, October 1898; A. A. Fuhrer (1907), Eines Volkes Seele: Sitten und Kulturbilder  aus Birma, Sursee, Luzern.
 
17 Three demi-official histories deal with the ‘Buck crisis’: Jas Burgess (1889), ‘Archaeological  research in India’, Actes du Huitième Congres International des  Orientalistes, Vol III, Brill, Leiden, pp 41–48; W. G. Wood (1900), A Short History  of the Archaeological Department in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Government  Press, Allahabad, pp 4–10; J. H. Marshall (1904), ‘Introduction’,  Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report Number One for 1902–03, Government  Press, Calcutta, pp 1–13.
 
18 Rangoon to Calcutta, 19 April 1898, P/5445, p 115, Burma home papers.
 
19 E. Forchhammer (1891), Arakan Antiquities, Government Press, Rangoon; E.  Forchhammer (1891), Pagan I. The Kyaukku Temple, Government Press, Rangoon;  E. Forchhammer (1892), Inscriptions of Pagan, Pinya and Ava, edited by Taw Sein  Ko, Government Press, Rangoon.
 
20 Taw Sein Ko’s account of the tour was published in December 1892, his text and  translation of the inscription between January and March 1893, and his notes on the  inscription between April 1894 and October 1895. All appeared in Indian Antiquary.
 
21 R. C. Temple (1893), ‘Postcript’, Indian Antiquary, Vol 22, pp 274–275.
 
22 F. O. Oertel (1892), Note on a Tour in Burma in March and April 1892, Government  Press, Rangoon. Later in his career, Frederick Oertel would perform a great service  to Indian archaeology. While digging at Sarnath in 1904–05, he discovered the best  known of all Ashokan artefacts – the four-lion capital of the Sarnath pillar.
 
23 Temple, supra note 10, at p 275.
 
24 Taw Sein Ko (1892), ‘Sanskrit words in the Burmese language’ , Indian Antiquary,  Vol 21, pp 94–97; Bernard Houghton (1893), ‘Sanskrit words in the Burmese language’,  Indian Antiquary, Vol 22, pp 24–27; Taw Sein Ko (1893), ‘A reply’, Indian  Antiquary, Vol 22, pp 162–165; Bernard Houghton (1894), ‘A rejoinder’, Indian  Antiquary, Vol 23, pp 165–167.
 
25 Em Forchhammer (1884), Archaeological Report for 1883–84, p 95, Burma administrative  reports.
 
26 Em Forchhammer (1880), Report on the Investigation, Collection, and Preservation  of Pali, Burmese, Sanscrit, and Talaing Literature in Burma During the Year 1879–  80, bound in W 987 (a).
 
27 ‘A critical study of Pali’ starts ‘with Sanskrit, the Magadhese inscriptions’ of Ashoka  and ‘elementary training in the palaeography of Indian languages’ before ‘gradually  preceding’ to the actual epigraphs found in Burma. Forchhammer to Bernard, 3 May  1885, Special Training of Native Epigraphists, P/2431 A May 18, Burma home papers.
 
28 Em Forchhammer (1884), Notes on Early History and Geography II, Suvannabhumi,  Government Press, Rangoon, p 9.
 
29 Taw Sein Ko, supra note 24, at p 94.
 
30 Houghton, supra note 24, at p 24.
 
31 Taw Sein Ko, supra note 24, at p 163, referring to Sakya.
 
32 Houghton, supra note 24, at p 167.
 
33 For example: ‘Mr. Houghton will find it difficult to persuade scholars of the truth of  the last assertion’, Temple, supra note 9, at p 165.
 
34 Führer, supra note 5, at p 20.
 
35 Progress Report for 1893–94, pp 20, 15, 11 = Administration Report for 1894–95, pp  219–220.
 
36 Progress Report for 1893–94, p 18 = Gazetteer, p 192, except that Scott omits the  following judgment on Sagaing’s Kyaungmudaw pagoda: ‘The whole exhibits a striking  contrast to the elegant and still larger pagodas at Shwemudaw or Shwedagon; in  fact it is the most inelegant and heavy building to be seen in the whole country.’  There is no accounting for Führer’s taste. The shape of the Kyaungmudaw Stupa  was based on King Thalun’s favourite Queen’s breasts. Few who have seen the Stupa  have been able to judge the degree of similarity, but most have enjoyed the architectural  result.
 
37 Department of Revenue & Agriculture, Archaeology & Epigraphy, File No 24 of  1898, Proc. 7–10, Part B, August. I cite this henceforth as the U Ma file.
 
38 Führer to U Ma, 19 November 1896, U Ma file.
 
39 Führer to U Ma, 6 March 1897, U Ma file.
 
40 Führer to U Ma, 3 September 1897, U Ma file.
 
41 Führer to U Ma, 21 September 1897, U Ma file.
 
42 Führer to U Ma, 16 February 1898, U Ma file.
 
43 P/5110 October viii, Burma political proceedings.
 
44 Norman Goodford Cholmeley (Charterhouse and Balliol) joined ICS in 1881, was  posted to the Burma Commission in 1884, and promoted to Deputy Commissioner in  1890. In 1898, he was a political agent with the Political Department, holding the  rank of Deputy Commissioner.
 
45 Houghton to Chief Secretary, Government of Burma, 15 January 1898, U Ma file.  Nilghai [‘blue bull’] is an antelope (Boselaphus tragocamelus), one of the commonest  wild animals in northern India.
 
46 Führer to U Ma, 16 February 1898, U Ma file.
 
47 Bernard Houghton to Government of Burma, 15 January 1898, U Ma file.
 
48 H.C. Evans to R.C. Hardy, 18 February 1898, U Ma file.
 
49 Department of Revenue & Agriculture, Archaeology and Epigraphy, File No 18 of  1898, Proc. 1–9, Part B, October.
 
50 V. A. Smith (1899), Progress Report for 1898–99, p 2.
 
51 V. A. Smith (1901), ‘Introduction’, in P. C. Mukherji, A Report on a Tour of Exploration  of the Antiquities in the Terai, Nepal, the Region of Kapilavastu, ASI Imperial  Series, Calcutta, No XXVI, p 4.
 
52 On 8 July 2006, a Conference on the Piprahwa Relics convened at Harewood House,  Yorkshire. It was suggested that the reason Smith was reluctant to mention Führer’s  Sakyan reliquary inscription was lest it cast doubt on the similar Piprahwa urn inscription.  The Proceedings of the Conference have not yet been published.
 
53 Taw Sein Ko (1900), Index Inscriptionum Birmanicarum, Volume I, Government  Press, Rangoon. He lists all the known Pagan inscriptions except for the earliest two  – Führer’s Gupta inscriptions from the Kuzeit pagoda. ‘Probably, there are no epigraphs  [at Pagan] antedating the reign of Kyanzittha.’ Taw Sein Ko (1911), Report  of the Superintendent, Archaeological Survey, Burma for the Year Ending 31 March  1911, Government Press, Rangoon, p 13.
 
54 Louis Finot (1922), ‘Chronique’, Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient,  Vol 22, pp 208–209, translating ‘C’est la trop fameux Dr. Führer …’ and ‘… dans  cette scandaleuse carrière de fausseur qui devait, quelques années plus tard, trouver  son term à Kapilavastu’.
 
55 Bernard Houghton (1913), Bureaucratic Government: A Study in Indian Polity, P.S.  King, London, pp 40, 44, 121, 125, 156–157, 163, 173, 200. It was reprinted in  Madras in 1921 by G.A. Mateson’s Press. Taw Sein Ko expressed similar views:  ‘The air was surcharged with ideas of Imperialism and Centralization, and the Viceroy  did not favour any view that savoured of innovation or decentralization’: Taw  Sein Ko (1912), ‘A plea for a university for Burma’ (speech at Old Rangoon Collegians  Annual Dinner, 20 January 1912), Burmese Sketches Volume 1, Government  Press, Rangoon, pp 14–16.
 
56 Bernard Houghton (1922), The Revolt of the East, S. Ganesan, Madras, p 66.
 
57 Bernard Houghton (1922), The Foreign Policy of India, S. Ganesan, Madras, p 16.
 
58 Bernard Houghton (1924), The Struggle for Power in India, Sunshine Publishing  House, Bombay, p 33.
 
59 Bernard Houghton (1923), The Menace from the West, Tagore Press, Madras, p 17.
 
60 Bernard Houghton (1922), The Mind of the Indian Government, Ganesh & Co, Madras,  pp 5, 8, 33.
 
61 Bernard Houghton (1921), Advance, India! Tagore & Co, Madras, p 27.
 
62 Pe Maung Tin (1951), ‘The late Professor Charles Duroiselle’, Journal of the Burma  Research Society, Vol 34, p 44. My thanks to Christian Bauer (Berlin) and Bob Hudson  (Sydney) for help with Duroiselle’s life.
 
63 Charles Duroiselle (1902), Notes on the Vessantra jataka vatthu according to the  Text Book Committee, British Burma Press, Rangoon.
 
64 Édouard Huber (1904), ‘Birmanie’, Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient,  Vol 4, p 496.
 
65 Jacqueline Filliozat (2000), ‘Pour mémoire d’un patrimoine sacré’, Bulletin de l’École  Française d’Extrême-Orient, Vol 87, pp 445–446.
 
66 Edwards, supra note 12, at pp 277–335, p 330.
 
67 That Richard Temple had discovered the truth in 1897 may be inferred from Indian  Antiquary’s silence about Führer’s discoveries in the Butwal Terai. Houghton offered  his last article to Indian Antiquary in 1896 and to the Journal of the Royal  Asiatic Society in 1897. (Bernard Houghton [1896], ‘Superstitions of Burmese criminals’,  Indian Antiquary, Vol 25, pp 142–143. Houghton had written five articles on  linguistics for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society between 1893 and 1897.)
 
68 Taw Sein Ko (1911), ‘The early uses of the Buddhist Era in Burma’, JBRS, Vol 1, No  1, pp 31–34; B. Houghton (1911), ‘Some anthropometric data of the Talaings’, JBRS,  pp 70–74; R. C. Temple (1911), ‘The 37 Nats’, JBRS, published as a supplementary  paper (see p 6). Charles Duroiselle’s first contribution came in Vol II, No 1.
 
69 J. S. Furnivall (1935), ‘Twenty-five years: a retrospect and a prospect’, Journal of  the Burma Research Society, Vol 25, p 42.
 
70 Furnivall says this was because incorporation as part of the Royal Asiatic Society  would have put off those Burmans and Europeans whom they wanted to attract. He  does not explain why. Ibid, p 42.
 
71 Edwards supra note 12, at p 327.
 
72 Concise Oxford English Dictionary, I, p 1478, sub ‘invidious’.
 
73 JBRS (1911), ‘Inaugural Meeting of the Burma Research Society’, Journal of the  Burma Research Society, Vol 1, pp 1, 4, 5, 6, 9.
 
74 Furnivall, supra note 69, at p 42.
 
75 Edwards, supra note 12, at p 327.

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Part 1 of 2

Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist
by Andrew Huxley
School of Oriental and African Studies
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 20, No. 4 (October, 2010), pp. 489-502
October, 2010

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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-- Dr Führer's Wanderjahre: The Early Career of a Victorian Archaeologist, by Andrew Huxley
-- Mr. [Bernard] Houghton and Dr. [Alois Anton] Führer: a scholarly vendetta and its consequences, by Andrew Huxley
-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story. Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps
-- The Piprahwa Deceptions: Set-ups and Showdown, by T.A. Phelps
-- Investigation of the Correctness of the Historical Dating, by Wieslaw Z. Krawcewicz, Gleb V. Nosovskij and Petr P. Zabreiko
-- Alois Anton Führer, by Wikipedia
-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen
-- William Claxton Peppe: Persons of Indian Studies, by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen
-- Monograph On Buddha Shakyamuni's Birth-Place: The Nepalese Tarai, by Alois Anton Fuhrer
-- Georg Bühler, by Wikipedia
-- Archaeological Survey of India, by Wikipedia
-- Vincent Arthur Smith, by Wikipedia
-- ART. XXIX.—The Conquests of Samudra Gupta, by VINCENT A. SMITH, M.B..A.S., Indian Civil Service

Abstract

The Rev. Dr A.A. Fuhrer lived to the age of seventy-seven. Herein is examined his first forty years. Trained as an Oriental Linguist, Fuhrer eventually found employment as a field archaeologist. Three years after his appointment, the Archaeological Survey of India entered the worst crisis of its existence. Fuhrer reacted in ways incompatible with scholarly integrity. It remains to be seen whether he committed further transgressions and or forgeries during his final thirty-seven years.

From 11 October 1894 to 6 January 1899 the Earl of Elgin served as Viceroy of India. Between these dates Rev. Dr A.A. Fuhrer, the Government Archaeologist of North-Western Provinces & Oudh (NWPO), achieved fame and notoriety through his research in the Butwal Terai (the stretch of Nepali lowland lying north of Patna and Varanasi). Upinder Singh describes Fuhrer's campaign in the Terai as "one of the most audacious frauds perpetrated in the history of nineteenth-century Indian archaeology".1 Janice Leoshko labels the official reports of his discoveries as 'false' and 'fraudulent'.2 To Charles Allen, Fuhrer's excavations in Nepal were 'badly botched' and his claims 'bogus'.3 Between 1894 and 1899 Fuhrer displayed the hubris, and suffered the nemesis, of a Sophoclean protagonist. Fuhrer was forty-one years old when his investigations into the Butwal Terai began. I examine Fuhrer's Bildung during his first forty years -- the Wanderjahre that took him across continents, vocations, and confessions.

1853-1885: Youth and Early Manhood

Alois Anton Fuhrer (1853-1930) studied Roman Catholic theology and Oriental studies at the University of Wurzburg. He received his Doctorate in 1876 and was ordained in 1877. His first posting, as Sanskrit teacher in the Jesuit College in Bombay, was probably secured through Julius Jolly, (a junior member of the Bombay School, who had taught Fuhrer at Wurzburg). Bombay in the 1870s was a leading spot for Indological studies,4 boasting Georg Buhler, Peter Peterson and James Burgess as residents. It was Buhler who was to play the leading role in Fuhrer's career.5 They first bonded when Buhler (who researched Hindu Law on the Government's behalf) recruited Fuhrer to edit a Dharmasastra for the Bombay Sanskrit Series.6 Buhler then helped Fuhrer to travel to London in order to copy out a Burmese-Pali law text held by the India Office, which Buhler knew of through an article by Reinhold Rost, the India Office Librarian.7 In London Rost guided Fuhrer through the palin-leaf itself and through the secondary literature, on Southeast Asian law. Fuhrer agreed to give two lectures to the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society on his research. These two lectures were printed in successive issues of the Society's Journal (JBBRAS).8 They are plagiarised to a startling degree.

Fuhrer's own words make up only a tenth of what he allowed to be printed under his name.9 Most of the first lecture transcribed a Preface to a Burmese Law work published four years earlier in British Burma by Colonel Horace Browne. Fuhrer's first three pages are also Browne's first three pages, save for differences in spelling. Then, where Browne describes his researches in Burma, Fuhrer replaces it with his own visit to London. The next two pages are lifted from Browne's second Preface, from Rost's article, and from Sangermano's 1833 monograph.10 For instance Rost's 'Von dem Dhammasat wurde nachmals von Indra dem King Byumandhi (Vyomandhi fur Vyomadhi?)' [Google translate: 'From the Dhammasat was afterward told by Indra the king Byumandhi (Vyomandhi for Vyomadhi?] became 'The work is said to have been revised in the time of King Byumandhi -- perhaps Vyomandhi instead of Vyomadhi (?)'. Fuhrer ends with two pages of original work that give a precis of the Burmese law text, chapter by chapter. His second lecture offered a generalised description of the rules and institutions of Burmese Law, as reflected in the Burmese law text. In fact he had taken these eight pages from an article on Siam.11 During the 1820s Major James Low of Penang had been the East India Company's expert on Siam. His studies of Siamese law were published twenty years later. Fuhrer had to alter Low's text to hide its provenance. Wherever Low wrote 'Siamese', Fuhrer substituted 'Burmese Buddhist', and wherever he used Thai words and phrases, Fuhrer cut them. However Fuhrer gave the game away by retaining a passage about Siamese sakdi-na: Burma never subscribed to this system of ranking princes and officials.12 He ended the second lecture with two pages of his own material, illustrating Burma's debt to the Sanskrit Manusmrti literature. I have analysed what Fuhrer added to this debate elsewhere.13 Fuhrer's first academic article was worse than plagiarised -- it was actively misleading. Siam is not Burma. Siamese law is not Burmese law.

Fuhrer's contemporaries in the field -- John Jardine, Em Forchhammer, Julius Jolly, and Rhys Davids -- spoke as if his work were a serious contribution to scholarship.14 Rost became aware of Fuhrer's borrowings by way of the India Office Library's subscription to JBBRAS. Fuhrer must have anticipated this outcome. Did he act heedless of the consequences, or did he calculate the risks in advance? If the latter, he must have been very confident of his relationship with Buhler. Usually in academia two patrons are better than one. Perhaps Fuhrer found himself under pressure to choose between Rost and Buhler (the two leading Anglophone Indologists of the day) as his sole patron. Shortly after Fuhrer's London trip, ill health forced Buhler to retire from his front-line duties in India to a Chair in Vienna. Fuhrer compounded his offence by claiming credit for a piece of research that Rost had himself carried out. Browne had raised the possibility of finding dhammathats in Sri Lankan book chests. However, "inquiries which have been made through the Ceylon branch of the Royal Asiatic Society ... have failed to elicit any information on the subject". Fuhrer altered this passage, to read "inquiries which I have made through the Buddhist high-priest, Mr Subhuti, in Colombo ... have failed to elicit any information on the subject".15 As it happens, the correspondence that Ven. Waskaduwe Pavara Neruttikacariya Mahavibhavi Subhuti Nayaka (1825-1905) conducted with foreign scholars has been preserved and published. There is no letter in Ven. Subhuti's files from either Fuhrer or Browne. There are, however, four letters from Rost enquiring about Sinhalese and Siamese equivalents of the Burmese dhammathats.16

Post-doctoral researchers gave lectures to bodies such as the Royal Asiatic Society in order to advertise their presence in the job-market. But Fuhrer, as a Catholic priest, could not enter the job market. At sometime in the early 1880s he lost his vocation, renounced his bishop's authority, and thereby lost his job at St Xavier's College, Bombay. He probably spent the year of 1884-85 in Germany and may have spent the two preceding years as well.17 Early in 1885 Sir Alfred Lyall, NWPO's Lieutenant-Governor, appointed Fuhrer as Curator of Lucknow Provincial Museum on a salary of Rs.250 per month. Fuhrer started work in March, and by September had transformed the hitherto 'gloomy' Museum into an 'attractive and most instructive' space. He opened out the ground floor to create a light well down to the lower gallery, and filled it with Buddhist sculptures. Lyall, the Chair of the Museum's Management Committee, greatly approved, and wrote to Calcutta asking whether a part-time job for Fuhrer could be found with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Fuhrer was "a person of considerable zeal and energy" as well as a "good Sanskrit scholar and epigraphist".18 Thus, late in 1885, Fuhrer's career as a Government Archaeologist began.

1885-1891: Beginner's Luck

The ASI, when Fuhrer joined it, was in a period of expansion. Having started in 1861 as the fiefdom of a single person, it now employed eleven staff. The expansion posed awkward questions about professional training and specialisation. In its early years the ASI's sole function had been to list northern India's antiquities. Major Alexander Cunningham spent his cold seasons conducting survey tours. Later his assistants carried them out for him. Between 1861 and 1885 Cunningham and his assistants filled twenty-three volumes with their reports. The 'survey tour' was a systematic campaign of description, transcription, and listing, supplemented by occasional excavations. Because the survey tourists rarely spent more than three nights in one place, they had little opportunity for significant discovery. Excavation, if it took place at all, was a hit-and-run affair. By the early 1880s specialist functions were being assigned to people with relevant training. Major H.H. Cole was appointed Curator of Ancient Monuments: mapping, drawing, photographing, and preserving India's monuments needed staff qualified as architects, engineers, or art teachers. J. F. Fleet (an ICS man who had learnt Sanskrit under Theodor Goldstucker) was appointed to head the Epigraphical Survey in 1882 [Epigraphical: An inscription, as on a statue or building]: a degree in oriental languages was preferred for those editing and publishing inscriptions.

-- The Tradition About the Corporeal Relics of Buddha, by J.F. Fleet, I.C.S. (Retd.), Ph.D., C.I.E.
-- Bhadrabahu, Chandragupta, and Sravana-Belgola, by J.F. Fleet, Bo.C.S., M.R.A.S., C.I.E.
-- Note on the Sarnath Inscription of Asvaghosha, by Arthur Venis, and Remarks on Professor Venis' Note, by J. F. Fleet

Despite its increased specialisation, in 1885 the ASI still bore Cunningham's stamp. He had developed a prose style -- aspiring to the sublime -- which influenced most of his staff; jungles were always 'dense', ruins 'vast', and sites 'deserted' and in his monograph on the Bhilsa Topes he had even sunk to quoting his own verses. At the head of his archaeological agenda Cunningham put three aims. Most important was to identify the sites within the Buddhist Holy Land mentioned in the Buddhist Canon and by the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang. Next in importance was to find more Ashokan epigraphy. James Prinsep's unravelling of the Brahmi alphabet used by Ashoka remains the greatest achievement of British archaeology in India, and Cunningham was keen to build on Prinsep's foundations. Finally, he aimed to discover examples of Hellenistic influence on early India, so as to argue that what was best in Indian art had come from Greece. The post-Cunningham ASI followed his agenda until at least the start of the twentieth century.

On joining the ASI Fuhrer was instructed to continue surveying NWPO. His first tour, undertaken early in 1886, took him northwest from Jaunpur, along the Gogra River and up to the Rapti River. On the way he collected forty-six inscriptions in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. One of the latter could, he said, help settle "the question of the time of the first appropriation of the ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples by the Musalmans". Inscription XLIV records "a Hindu king erecting a Vaisnava temple" in 1184 CE. Fuhrer discovered it not on the Hindu temple itself but as part of the rubble "re-used by Aurangzib in building his masjid".19 Since the demolition of Ayodya's Babri Mosque in 1992, Inscription XLIV has become newsworthy, not so much for its text as for its find-spot.20 Fuhrer visited the Buddha's birthplace (as identified by Cunningham) and the Buddha's favourite monastery at Savatthi (as identified by William Hoey in 1885). He rejected Cunningham's identification, but accepted Hoey's. Late in 1886 Fuhrer joined the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and submitted two short epigraphic papers to it.21 His second Survey Tour (1886-87) started in the Allahabad region, then moved northwest along the right bank of the Jumna River to Hamirpur. On the way he copied ten inscriptions in Arabic, twenty-four in Persian and two hundred and fifty in Sanskrit. The season's most successful event had been:

the entering of the almost inaccessible cave of Gopala, high up in the face of the hill of Prabhasa, by means of a wooden crib let down from the overhanging rocks of the hill.22

Within it he found an Indo-Scythian inscription from 47 BCE. With the third tour (1887-88) Fuhrer concentrated once more on the Buddhist Holy Land. He was, he said, "in search of ancient sites visited by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims".23 Starting at Partabgarh, fifty miles north of Allahabad, he followed the Sal River northwest past Shahjahanpur to the promising sites of Mati and Ramnagar. In all he claimed seven positive identifications of places mentioned by Faxian and Xuanzang. Fuhrer's three Survey Tour Reports were not published, though Burgess from time to time printed highlights in the Academy.24 Fuhrer's first book on archaeology was a gazetteer of NWPO monumental antiquities. Following Cunningham's retirement, there was a belief that his printed legacy needed better organisation. Fuhrer was deputed to mould the contents of the twenty-three volumes, along with his own discoveries, into a single volume. At the same time Vincent Smith, the amateur NWPO antiquarian, compiled a full index to the volumes.25

-- The Early History of India, From 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, Including the Invasion of Alexander the Great, by Vincent A. Smith, 1914
-- ART. XXIX.—The Conquests of Samudra Gupta, by Vincent A. Smith, M.B..A.S., Indian Civil Service
-- Coins of Ancient India: Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, Volume 1, by Vincent A. Smith, M.A. F.R.N.S., M.R.A.S., I.C.S. Retd.

Under Burgess' leadership, the ASI became much concerned with relations between its professional staff and the amateurs employed by the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and Indian Army. The amateurs, men like Hoey and Smith, far outranked the ASI staff in monthly salary and reputation. No professional had yet achieved anything as important as Hoey's discovery of Savatthi. Burgess sought to enhance the ASI's status by restricting the competition. Without the ASI's prior consent, Calcutta ruled, no 'person or agency' (that is, no amateur archaeologist, and no provincial government) could excavate anywhere in India. This was an ill-judged move. Some amateurs retaliated by refusing all cooperation with the ASI. J. Cockburn of the Opium Department [The East India Company ferried opium to China, and in due course fought the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics.], having discovered the location of the Dragon Cave described by Xuanzang, "distinctly refused to let the cave's whereabouts be known to any officer of the ASI". When Fuhrer claimed the discovery as his own, Cockburn challenged him in an Indian newspaper, and the row spread to the London press. Cockburn had the Editor of Academy print a retraction of Fuhrer's claims.26 Burgess defended his assistant: Dr. Fuhrer had made the discovery quite independently "by descending the rock during the night to avoid the wild bees that infest it".27

The Chinese treatise known as the Hsi-yu-chi (or Si-yu- ki) is one of the classical Buddhist books of China, Korea, and Japan....

On the title-page of the Hsi-yu-chi it is represented as having been "translated" by Yuan-chuang and "redacted" or "compiled" by Pien-chi ([x]). But we are not to take the word for translate here in its literal sense, and all that it can be understood to convey is that the information given in the book was obtained by Yuan-chuang from foreign sources....

After sixteen year's absence Yuan-chuang returned to China and arrived at Ch'ang-an in the beginning of 645, the nineteenth year of the reign of T'ang T'ai Tsung....

Now he had arrived whole and well, and had become a many days' wonder. He had been where no other had ever been, he had seen and heard what no other had ever seen and heard. Alone he had crossed trackless wastes tenanted only by fierce ghost-demons. Bravely he had climbed fabled mountains high beyond conjecture, rugged and barren, ever chilled by icy wind and cold with eternal snow. He had been to the edge of the world and had seen where all things end. Now he was safely back to his native land, and with so great a quantity of precious treasures. There were 657 sacred books of Buddhism, some of which were full of mystical charms able to put to flight the invisible powers of mischief. All these books were in strange Indian language and writing, and were made of trimmed leaves of palm or of birch-bark strung together in layers. Then there were lovely images of the Buddha and his saints in gold, and silver, and crystal, and sandalwood. There were also many curious pictures and, above all, 150 relics, true relics of the Buddha. All these relics were borne on twenty horses and escorted into the city with great pomp and ceremony....

His faith was simple and almost unquestioning, and he had an aptitude for belief which has been called credulity. But his was not that credulity which lightly believes the impossible and accepts any statement merely because it is on record and suits the convictions or prejudices of the individual. Yuan-chuang always wanted to have his own personal testimony, the witness of his own senses or at least his personal experience. It is true his faith helped his unbelief, and it was too easy to convince him where a Buddhist miracle was concerned. A hole in the ground without any natural history, a stain on a rock without any explanation apparent, any object held sacred by the old religion of the fathers, and any marvel professing to be substantiated by the narrator, was generally sufficient to drive away his doubts and bring comforting belief. But partly because our pilgrim was thus too ready to believe, though partly also for other reasons, he did not make the best use of his opportunities. He was not a good observer, a careful investigator, or a satisfactory recorder, and consequently he left very much untold which he would have done well to tell....

After Yuan-chuang's death great and marvellous things were said of him. His body, it was believed, did not see corruption and he appeared to some of his disciples in visions of the night. In his lifetime he had been called a "Present Sakyamuni", and when he was gone his followers raised him to the rank of a founder of Schools or Sects in Buddhism. In one treatise we find the establishment of three of these schools ascribed to him, and in another work he is given as the founder in China of a fourth school. This last is said to have been originated in India at Nalanda by Silabhadra one of the great Buddhist monks there with whom Yuan-chuang studied....

-- On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629-645 A.D., by Thomas Watters M.R.A.S., Edited After his Death by T.W. Rhys Davids, F.B.A. and S.W. Bushell, M.D., C.M.G., With Two Maps and an Itinerary by Vincent A. Smith

After 1891 the amateurs won back their ability to put on successful digs. Lawrence Waddell, an Indian Army Surgeon, excavated Ashoka's capital Pataliputta in 1892, and in 1896 Vincent Smith excavated Kasia, which he thought to be the site of the Buddha's final nirvana. But by then the professionals were able to boast their own successes.

In 1887 Fuhrer's superior in the NWPO office retired. Thenceforth Fuhrer worked without a professional supervisor. He felt that he had proved his competence as an archaeologist, and had earned the chance to spend a whole season at a single site. In print his lobbying was limited to describing the candidates for such a dig.28 He spoke of a return to Savatthi, "especially as the Maharanai of Balrampur is willing to grant a large subvention for this purpose". And he spoke, with particular enthusiasm, of Mati, where the surface of the ruins was "covered with large bricks" and walls "still rising up to 10 feet above the ground".29 From his Chair in Vienna Georg Buhler approved of Mati in particular and of three month excavations in general:

Should the excavations of the ancient sites be ever undertaken in real earnest, they would no doubt yield full information regarding the ancient history and political geography of the country, besides a mass of curiosities which might fill all the Museums of India and Europe and leave a great deal to spare.30

In his private discussions with Burgess, Buhler put the case for re-digging Mathura to look for early Jain material. Burgess agreed, and dug there himself in the 1887-88 season.31 Fuhrer apparently visited for a few days to handle the epigraphical finds -- the only hands-on lesson in archaeological methodology that Fuhrer was ever given. Burgess retired from India before the start of the 1888-89 season. Funding to continue at Mathura was still available, so Fuhrer stepped into the breach. Such was Fuhrer's success that he was allotted RS. 1,250 and four months to dig again at Mathura in 1889-90. These two campaigns made his reputation as the most successful of the professional excavators.

Within the Kankali mound at Mathura Fuhrer found hundreds of Jain sculptures and epigraphs. None praised these discoveries more than Buhler, who had "for many years guided Fuhrer in his explorations, interpreted his results, and published the more important results".32 Kankali, Buhler announced, "has by no means yielded up all its treasures". "Next season Fuhrer should be sent back to examine 'the oldest Jaina temples"'. Buhler's lobbying can read disconcertingly like prediction. Next year's finds would "without a doubt completely free their creed from the suspicion of being a modern offshoot of Buddhism".33 In 1890, advocating a third season devoted to Chaubara mound he said it "undoubtedly hides the ruins of an ancient Vaishnava temple". 34 There is, however, little hyperbole in Buhler's praise of Fuhrer. The digs at Mathura really did yield enough sculpture to stock a new Museum at Mathura, and to overfill the existing Lucknow Museum. They really did produce enough inscriptions for Buhler to write twenty articles in Vienna Oriental Journal, Academy, and Epigraphia Indica. Fuhrer's finds really were "important additions to our knowledge of Indian history and art". Money really had been "spent to good purpose and in the interest of Indian history". 35

Buhler attributed Fuhrer's success to his "energy and perseverance".36 Luck may also have been a factor. Fuhrer lacked the perseverance to write up his Mathura campaigns as a scholarly monograph, and lacked the energy to make a proper catalogue of the artefacts he dug up. His entries in the published acquisition lists tantalise as much as they reveal. It is little help to be told, without further detail, of "74 statues of Jinas, inscribed between BC 200 to AD 150" or of "10 pieces of old pottery filled with the ashes of some Jaina monks".37 Nor, apparently, was Fuhrer energetic enough to write his own Progress Reports, which borrow extensively from Buhler's previous publications. Four-fifths of the 1890-91 Report consists of words previously published by Buhler. Two pages of Buhler's discussion of Jain nuns in the Vienna Oriental Journal became one page of Fuhrer's Report. Two pages of Buhler's account in Academy was edited down into a page of his own. He ended with a borrowed paragraph from Buhler's most recent article in Vienna Oriental Journal.38 This is not, however, a true case of plagiarism. Fuhrer's letters to Buhler from Mathura (which unfortunately no longer exist) must have contained phrases and sentences that Buhler incorporated into his own text. They must have understood themselves as co-authors, free to publish the shared material under either's name. Fuhrer and Buhler made an unwritten, and probably tacit, contract of partnership, the terms of which are implicit in their interaction. Scholars today should be able to reconstruct these terms from the public record. However they disagree widely. One body of opinion regards Fuhrer and Buhler as compliant with best scholarly practice. The middling view construes them as business partners, with Fuhrer handling acquisitions in India, and Buhler in charge of European marketing. At the other extreme, they are seen as partners in crime.

James Burgess, Director-General of the ASI, expressed his satisfaction with Fuhrer's "trained and varied scholarship" which "sufficiently guarantee the accuracy" of his work on Jaunpur.39 In any well-run institution, such praise would have brought Fuhrer commendation and promotion. Instead he was threatened with the sack. Viceroy Dufferin's expansion of the ASI had attracted powerful opposition, which clamoured incessantly for cuts to the ASI budget.40 None in Calcutta was more clamorous than Edward Buck.41 Buck was committed to implementing Viceroy Lord Ripon's Liberal policies. To bolster the Arts and Manufactures of India he planned to build Museums in each of "the great Indian centres". These would be "sample rooms where the best examples of Indian craftsmanship might be seen". To this end he sought Revenue and Agriculture Department funding for a new Journal of Indian Art and Industry. In 1884 these expensive plans were cancelled by the incoming Conservative Secretariat under Lord Dufferin, and the funds diverted from Arts and Crafts to Archaeology. Buck bounced back in 1888 under Viceroy Lord Lansdowne. Buck drove Burgess to resign, then froze any appointment of a successor, then transferred the ASI wage bill from the central to the provincial budget. A correspondent in the Pioneer summarised Buck's arguments. In the good old days amateur archaeologists investigated India "as a labour of love in their leisure hours". But during the 1880s Government came to:

entertain at very high salaries learned antiquarians and a large and most expensive staff of officers to pervade the past and patrol the night of time in a vague and general way -- and with vague and general results.42

The 'Buck crisis' lasted for more than a decade, and moved through three phases.43

The first phase (from 1888 to 1891) hit all the ASI staff, but Fuhrer, two years married and recently become a father, was hit particularly hard. The threat of dismissal felt like poor recompense for his successes at Mathura. If honest toil went unrewarded, why not pursue international acclaim by other means? If the Government maltreated him, why not play it for a fool? A motive for misbehaviour was emerging, and so too were opportunities. Starting in 1891 Fuhrer's Progress Reports were distributed to select learned institutions in Europe and India without any external vetting.44 The shift to Provincial funding in 1891 meant that, though theoretically Fuhrer answered to the Lieutenant-Governor of NWPO and to the Revenue & Agriculture Secretary in Calcutta, in practice he worked without any supervision.

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Part 2 of 2

1891-1894: The Plot Thickens

Fuhrer chose to spend the 1891-92 season (and RS. 1,373) excavating at Ramnagar. Cunningham's enthusiastic report of 1861 had identified present-day Ramnagar with the city known to the Chinese pilgrims as Adhikshetra. Fuhrer opened a couple of stupas, but all he found in them was one reliquary, two Buddha images, some terracotta scenes of the Buddha's life, and a thousand bricks.45 Though he described them as "beautifully carved bricks of various shapes and designs", he was aware that to the newspaper-reading public a thousand bricks appealed less than a single Jain statue. Rather than admit that Ramnagar had been a failure compared to the rich pickings from Mathura, Fuhrer told a series of lies in his Progress Report. First, he invented a geographical pointer confirming that Ramnagar was Adhikshetra. The identification was proved by "inscriptions of the second and first centuries BC" discovered on the spot. No such objects exist in the Lucknow Provincial Museum.46 Second, he proved that the ruins were second century BCE or earlier by finding, buried beneath the foundations, a cache of sixteen coins bearing names from the Mitra dynasty. Perhaps he did find them. But two years previously he had written that "ancient copper coins of the Mitra dynasty" are frequently ploughed up hereabouts and "may be obtained in some quantity from the people of the neighbourhood".47 Thirdly, and so as to provide his two opened mounds with distinctive identities, Fuhrer invented two inscriptions. In the first mound, written on the base of a sitting Jain image, was the text 'the divine Nemninatha'. This, Fuhrer said, must be the Jain deity to whom the temple was dedicated. In the second mound, on the base of a terracotta Buddha-image, was inscribed a reference to the Mihara monastery of the Sarvastivadin monks at Mathura. Heinrich Luders deconstructed these Neminatha and Mihara inscriptions. He showed by source analysis that Fuhrer had compiled them from real inscriptions found in Mathura 'or rather of Buhler's translations' thereof.48 Fourthly, Fuhrer invented a large trove of donative inscriptions taken from 'carved bricks and terracottas'. He did not count or list them. Rather he gave a long analysis of the setz-im-leben of the Ramnagar donors, which he took wholesale from Buhler's work on the Sanchi corpus of dedications.49 In a limited sense we can regard Buhler and Fuhrer as co-owners of their text. Fuhrer's unpublished letters of 1889 were doubtless incorporated into Buhler's publication on Sanchi. But what had been true of the Sanchi trove discovered in 1889 was not true of the Ramnagar trove supposedly found in 1892. Luders gave an overall verdict on the 1891-92 season: "As all statements about epigraphical finds that admit of verification have proved to be false, it is very probable that no inscriptions at all have turned up".50 Just as Fuhrer began to write his report on the Ramnagar dig, he received unwelcome news. Edward Buck, having just been put in charge of the Government of India's budget, issued letters of dismissal for the entire ASI. It was to cease its operations on 31 September 1895. That Fuhrer had just received his notice supplies a motive for him lying so recklessly. He would have been exposed had anyone asked to examine the Ramnagar inscriptions. Likewise, had anyone noticed that the Mathura and Ramnagar donative inscriptions had been described in exactly the same words. But exposure of his dishonesty could not lead to a fate any worse than that of his four honest colleagues. The situation was not yet hopeless. Perhaps archaeology's supporters would be able to out-lobby Buck. Perhaps the ASI staff would discover something so important that public opinion would demand a reprieve. Alexander Rae had come near to doing so at Bhattiprolu in 1892, but he was not a natural self-publicist. Fuhrer had three seasons left in which to strike gold. Or so he thought. Then the Government of India ordered him to return to the grind of Survey Tours. During the 1892-93 cold weather he was to visit the Monumental Antiquities of Rajputana and Central India. He was to be sent to Burma in 1893-94, and to the Punjab the following year. From now until the end of his contract, Fuhrer would only have time for hit-and-run digs. How, then, was he to make a splash? In 1893-94 he answered this question spectacularly. The 1892-93 season saw a break in his career of forgery: for 1892-93 the watchword was 'spin', rather than lies.

The Survey Tour of 1891-92 was an unwelcome distraction for Fuhrer. However Buhler managed to send one pleasant task in his direction. Could he please, while passing Sanchi on the way to Rajputana, take impressions of all the votive inscriptions on the two great stupas and estimate whether "excavation on the ground around the stupas would yield any more novelties"?51 During the few days Fuhrer spent at Sanchi, he discovered thirty or forty genuine unpublished donative inscriptions. But these were about as newsworthy as a thousand bricks. Buddhist donative inscriptions are boring. All they communicate is the fact that some layman has donated some artefact for the greater glory of Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha. What the public wanted was more news about King Ashoka. Buhler had asked Fuhrer to take a new impression of Ashoka's Sanchi Schism edict. Nothing newsworthy there, either: the edict had been published first in 1838, then again in 1854.52 But Fuhrer had presentational skills, and knew how to spin dross into silk. He convinced the Lieutenant-Governor of NWPO that he had rediscovered a missing fragment of the pillar. In reality no piece of the epigraph had ever gone missing. Fuhrer had, however, reported it missing on his previous visit.53 Since the pillar fragment was too heavy to move by hand, it was no surprise that it reappeared exactly where it had last been seen in 1854. Buhler's general comment on Fuhrer's new impression sounded uncharacteristically downbeat. It did "not quite fulfil the expectations which I thought might be reasonably entertained".54 Fuhrer spun harder. He claimed to have deciphered a new sentence at the start of the inscription:

It appears that the piece is the lower end of a longer inscription, and that the first words are not devanam pire, as they have been read formerly. The end of the first line extant and the second line contain the valuable statement that 'a road or path was made for the Sangha, both for monks and nuns'.55

This reading was first printed by Buhler, but first suggested, I surmise [To make a judgment about (something) without sufficient evidence; To make a guess or conjecture.], in a letter from Fuhrer. Whoever of them had devised this new reading, it was wrong. They had not foreseen that Ashoka's Vinaya proclamation would contain specialist Vinaya vocabulary.56 The Lieutenant-Governor endorsed and amplified Buhler's misreading:

the large Buddhist stupa on top of the hill, known as No. 1, existed before the time of Ashoka, who only made new approach roads to it . . . It may not improbably be the oldest extant Buddhist monument in the world.57

Fuhrer served for this rally in 1889 when he announced the inscription missing. He put spin on the return shot in 1892 when he announced its rediscovery. He won the point when he elicited the superlative 'oldest' from his employer. With the deadline of October 1895 fast approaching, Fuhrer had to find the 'oldest' this, the 'biggest' that, and the 'most sacred' other.

The 1893-94 season found Fuhrer on Survey Tour in Burma. British Burma's first Government Archaeologist had died in 1890, and had not been replaced. Richard Temple, the editor of Indian Antiquary and President of Rangoon Municipality, helped other amateur archaeologists to carry out small epigraphical and survey operations. Frederick Oertel, an architectural engineer keenly interested in photography and archaeology, visited Burma from NWPO in 1892, and Temple joined him for a four day tour of the Amherst Caves. This paved the way for an official delegation. Oertel was to return the following year, accompanied by Fuhrer and by two support staff from the Lucknow office of the ASI. The party took steam paddleboats up the Irrawaddy, and inspected Prome, Pagan, Sagaing, Ava, Mandalay, Tagaung, Katha, and Bhamo. Returning to Rangoon, they took a side trip to Pegu and Toungoo. Their mission was to prepare a survey of the Burmese sites to help the Rangoon Government prioritise its archaeological programme. The expectation was that Rangoon's Government Press would publish a lengthy survey report, illustrated with photographs. But all Fuhrer ever produced was twenty-one pages, unillustrated and printed in NWPO as that year's Progress Report. His text is "really a compilation from Yule's Mission to Ava and the notes left by the late Professor Forchhammer".58 To be more specific, it contains several short extracts from Forchhammer's List (1884), a short passage from his Jardine Prize Essay (1885), and seven whole pages (making up a third of the Progress Report) from his Kyaukku Temple (1891).59 In Kyaukku Forchhammer had used architectural style to prove that Hindu colonists retained political control of Burma up until the 1100s CE. He identified the lowest platform of the pagoda as characteristic of the Colonial Style:

The oldest and most interesting temple of all the many ancient historical buildings at Pagan is the Kyaukku Ohnmin; it is the original type of the edifices in Pagan called kala kyaung, the monasteries or schools of Western Foreigners, Buddhist Indians apparently.

This style can be recognised by "huge square top-heavy buildings", "condensed details of ornamentation" and absence of interior staircases on the lowest platform, which latter is "almost conclusive of the upper stories being later additions". Forchhammer compared it to an Arakanese example of the same style:

Many facts that can be adduced point to the conclusion that Pagan was built almost exclusively by Indian architects. The Kyaukku temple, like the famous Mahamuni shrine ... in Arakan, is undoubtedly a remnant of North-Indian Buddhism.60

Fuhrer reproduces this stylistic argument word-for-word, adding his own gloss:

Many facts that can be adduced point to the conclusion that Pagan like her elder sister city Hastinapura on the Erawati, or the modern Tagaung in the upper valley of the Irrawaddy, was built almost exclusively by Indian architects. The Kyaukku temple, like the famous Mahamuni shrine ... in Arakan, is undoubtedly a remnant of North-Indian Buddhism.61

Fuhrer's gloss on Tagaung points the way to his boldest forgeries yet.

Though the party only spent two or three days at each site, Fuhrer succeeded in making three extraordinary discoveries. In May 1894 he wrote to Temple, announcing that he had found near the Kuzeit pagoda in Pagan "by far -- by very far -- the two oldest inscriptions yet unearthed". In August he described a third inscription, even older, from Tagaung. Collectively they added six centuries to Burma's existing epigraphic records -- an achievement comparable to James Prinsep's in the 1830s. The later of the two Pagan inscription was Gupta script of the seventh or eighth century "filled with Sanskrit words and expressions mixed with those in another language not yet determined". The earlier was dated 481 CE, and written in pure Sanskrit.62 The Tagaung inscription was written sixty years before that in Gupta script and Sanskrit language. Together they illustrated three stages in the history of the Indian colonists who had brought civilisation to Burma. In 416 CE King Jayapala of Hastinapura-on-the-Irrawaddy lists the four Indian kings who ruled in Tagaung since the dynasty's founder, King Gopala, left Hastinapura-on-the-Ganges, and "after various successful wars with the mlechchhas, founded new Hastinapura".63 King Rudrasena's inscription of 481 CE shows that the dynasty had now conquered Pagan, still speaking its immaculate Sanskrit. By 610 CE, when King Adiyasena ruled Pagan, the colonists had settled down, inter-married, and were now composing mixed vernacular-Sanskrit inscriptions. Fuhrer welcomed this corroboration that "successive waves of emigration from Gangetic India" had civilised Burma. Had the delegates been able to excavate the "vast ruins" of Tagaung, they would no doubt have revealed "the remains of buildings raised by Indian architects and embellished by Indian sculptors".

In 1921 Charles Duroiselle and Louis Finot, two of the French scholars attached to the Ecole Francais d'Extreme Orient, revealed that all three Gupta inscriptions from Burma were bogus. They had "never existed". Because "whole theories" had been built upon them "it is time the truth about it should be known".64 They had been "invented in toto by Dr. Fuhrer during a tour he made in Burma". The best construction that has been put on "these doings of Fuhrer is that his mind was weakening".65 Finot confirmed that the "author of the imposture" was "the all-too-famous Dr. Fuhrer". Fuhrer's tour of Burma in 1893-94 had, he said, marked the beginning "of that scandalous career of forgery which would, some years later, come to an end in Kapilavastu".66 Source analysis shows that Fuhrer constructed the Tagaung inscription from two obscure publications: an article published in 1836, and a list of kings from the Hatthipala Jataka.67 With hindsight, it did seem odd that Fuhrer, though accompanied by a cameraman and draftsman, had taken neither photograph nor eye-copy of the Gupta inscriptions.

Just as Indian Antiquary was reprinting Fuhrer's Gupta claims, Phase Two of the Buck crisis came to its resolution. In June 1895, lobbying by Lord Elgin in Calcutta and by Lord Reay in London won a reprieve for the five remaining ASI staff. They were to continue to work on an annual basis pending consultations between Calcutta and the local governments. Lord Reay, Under-Secretary of State for India and President of the Royal Asiatic Society, asked Buhler to formulate detailed proposals for "the continuation of the archaeological and epigraphic work in India". Buhler put forward a three-point plan: to save the jobs of the ASI staff currently employed, to make use of European experts as consultants, and to do one important dig a year in each province -- he mentions Taxila, Mathura and Patna as suitable sites. What the scholars of Europe need, he says, is "new authentic documents" from the pre-Ashoka period. They will "only be found underground" at a considerable depth. The "expectation" that they will turn up is "by no means unfounded".68 Buhler had written a private letter to Calcutta in November 1894 making a similar point:

The way to obtain what is wanted -- inscriptions older than the 3rd century -- is to dig deep [at] Patna, Kosambi ... Ojjayani, Ramnagar ... To excavate deep and thoroughly is the point.69

For the moment, the ASI had been reprieved. Now the search for pre-Ashokan epigraphs could get underway.

Conclusions

Only the first half of Fuhrer's life-story has been told. Conclusions at this point would be premature. Only when scholars from different disciplines have re-examined the Butwal Terai discoveries will it be appropriate to discuss issues of culpability, motivation, and accessory liability.

-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story. Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps

ANDREW HUXLEY
School of Oriental and African Studies

_______________

Notes:

1 Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Delhi, 2004), p. 321.
 
2 Janice Leoshko, Sacred Traces: British explorations of Buddhism in South Asia (Aldershot, 2003), p. 57.
 
3 Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs (London, 2002), p. 277.
 
4 E.J. Rapson, 'Obituary of Peter Peterson', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1899), pp. 917-919.
 
5 Georg Buhler (1837-1898) studied at Gottingen University, then carried out freelance research in London with the hope of landing a job in British India. In 1863 he obtained a position teaching at Elphinstone College Bombay. He had great success collecting Sanskrit manuscripts for the Government. After seven years he switched from teaching to a full-time post as Inspector of Education. He died suddenly in an alpine lake.
 
6 A. A. Fuhrer, Vasishta dharmasastra (Bombay, 1883).
 
7 Reinhold Rost (1822-1896) studied at Jena. He moved to London to carry out research, supporting himself as Oriental Teacher at St Augustine's College, Canterbury. In 1863 he combined his Canterbury job with being Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, switching in 1869 to become India Office Librarian. He specialised in Southeast Asia, though he was too fastidious to publish much of what he knew. He detested anyone who popularised Indological research.
  
8 A. A. Fuhrer, 'Manusara dhammathat, the only one existing Buddhist Law Book, compared with the Brahminical Manu dharmasastra', Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 15 (1882), pp. 329-338 and pp. 371-382. 
 
9 These five sources were Vincento Sangermano, The Burmese Empire, (Vatican City, 1833); James Low, 'On the Laws of the Mu'ung Thai' Journal of the Indian Archipelago I (1847), pp. 321-429; Reinhold Rost, 'Uber den Manusara' Indische Studien 1(1850), pp. 315-320; Horace Browne, Preface to Manuwunnana dhammathat (Rangoon, 1878); Horace Browne, Preface to Manusara Shwe Myin dhammathat (Rangoon, 1879).
 
10 Fuhrer 1882, pp. 333-335; = Browne 1879, pp. 2-3; Rost 1850, p. 316 and Sangermano 1833, pp. 223-224. 
 
11 On land, Fuhrer 1882, p. 372; = Low 1847, pp. 336-337. On inheritance, Fuhrer 1882, pp. 372-373 = Low 1847, pp. 344-345. On marriage, Fuhrer 1882, pp. 373-374 = Low 1847, pp. 346-349. On inheritance by monks and ministers, Fuhrer 1882, pp. 375-376 = Low 1847, pp. 351-352, 354-355. On contract, Fuhrer 1882, pp. 377-378 = Low 1847, p. 393. On elopement, Fuhrer 1882, p. 378 = Low 184, p. 424. On rape, Fuhrer 1882, p. 378 = Low 1847, p. 425. On slavery, Fuhrer 1882, p. 377 = Low 1847, p. 386. On pledge, Fuhrer 1882, p. 378= Low 1847, p. 391. 
 
12 Fuhrer 1882, p. 376 = Low 1847, p. 351. 
 
13 Andrew Huxley, 'Legal transplants as historical data - Exemplum Birmanicum', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 37, No.2 (2009), pp. 167-182. 
 
14 John Jardine, Notes on Buddhist Law Part VIII, Preface (Rangoon, 1883), pp. 2-3; Em Forchhammer, The Jardine Prize: An Essay (Rangoon, 1885), pp. 2-3; Julius Jolly, Tagore Law Lectures of 1883 (Calcutta, 1885), pp. 44, 46, 292; Rhys Davids, 'Two books on Buddhist Law', The Academy No. 671 (1885), p. 190. Though Jardine and Forchhammer knew Browne's Prefaces very well, they made no public reference to the plagiarisms. 
 
15 Browne 1878, p. 2 = Fuhrer 1882, p. 330. 
 
16 Letters from Rost to Subhuti, 16 August 1877; 26 April 1878, 29 April 1881 and 14 March 1884 in Ananda W.P. Guruge, From the living Fountains of Buddhism: Sri Lankan Support to Pioneering Western Orientalists (Colombo, 1984), pp. 47, 49, 58, 72. 
 
17 In Thacker's Indian Directory (Calcutta, 1895) he appears as "A. A. Fuhrer, M.D, Ph.D., Curator of Lucknow Museum ..... If he did graduate in medicine as well as in theology and orientalism, it can only have been between 1882 and 1885. However, he did not mention any medical studies when applying in 1885 to be Curator of Lucknow Museum. (Minutes of Managing Committee of NWPO Museum, I: Minute of 18 May 1885.). Unless a typesetter or intermediary informant made a mistake, the likelihood is that Fuhrer's medical qualification was self-awarded.
 
18 Letter from Chief Secretary, North-West Provinces & Oudh, to Secretary for Archaeology and Epigraphy,  Calcutta, 20 July 1885. In Arch. & Epig Pros 4-18, file number 6 of 1898, October 1898. All archival references  are to the India Office Library collection in the British Library, London.
 
19 A. Fuhrer, The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur (Calcutta, 1889), p. 68.
  
20 'Mystery of the "missing" inscription', accessed 16 April 2010, http;//timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/18499.cms. The Times of India, 12 June 2003.
 
21 A. Fuhrer, 'On three grants of Govinda Chandra Deva of Kanauj in the 12th century', Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1887, p. 159; A. Fuhrer, 'The Kudarkhot inscriptions of Takhsadatta', ibid p. 251. He joined the Philological Committee, and the History and Archaeological Committee, ibid, pp. 93-94.
 
22 Anon [probably James Burgess], Academy 3 March 1888, reprinted in American Journal of Archaeology, 4 (1888), p. 78. 
 
23 The President, 'Annual Report', Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1889), p. 74.
  
24 For details of the First Tour see A. Fuhrer, The Sharqui Architecture of Jaunpur (Calcutta, 1889). For the Second and Third Tours see the references infra to Academy and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 
 
25 A. Fuhrer, Monumental Antiquities of the North-western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad, 1891); V.A. Smith, General Index to the Reports of the Archaeological Survey of India (Calcutta, 1887). 
 
26 James Burgess, Academy, 9 April 1887, p. 97. 
 
27 James Burgess, 'Letter to the Editor', Academy, 4 June 1887, p. 131.
 
28 Fuhrer, The Sharqui Architecture of Jaunpur, p. 71. Such a dig, Fuhrer added, 'ought to be gone about in a scientific method.' Given that he was a trained linguist who had evolved his own archaeological methodology, 'scientific' probably connoted an excavation lasting longer than a week.
 
29 Anon [probably James Burgess], 'Archaeological Survey Reports', Athenaeum, 23 June 1888, reprinted in American Journal of Archaeology, 4 (1888), p. 475. 
 
30. G. Buhler, 'Dr. A. Fuhrer's Abstract Report from 1st October 1887 to Jan. 31 1888', Vienna Oriental Journal, 2 (1888), p. 270. 
 
31 Kendall W. Folkert, 'Jain Religious Life at Ancient Mathura: The Heritage of Late Victorian Interpretation', in Mathura: The Cultural Heritage, ed. Doris Meth Srinivasan (New Delhi, 1989), p. 106.
  
32 A. Barth, 'Decouvertes Recentes de M. le Dr. Fuhrer au Nepal', Journal des Savants (1897), p. 68, translating "depuis plusieurs annees le guidait dans ses explorations et en avait regulierement interprete et publie les principaux resultats". 
 
33 G. Buhler, Academy, 1 June 1889, reprinted, American Journal of Archaeology 5 (1889), p. 482.
  
34 G. Buhler, Academy, 19 April 1890, reprinted, American Journal of Archaeology 6 (1890), p. 176.
  
35 G. Buhler, Academy, 7 February 1891, reprinted, American Journal of Archaeology, 7 (1891), p. 114.
  
36 G. Buhler, Academy, 18 April 1891, reprinted, American Journal of Archaeology 7 (1891), p. 117.
  
37 Accessions to the Lucknow Museum for March 1890 and March 1891. In Minutes of NWPO Provincial Museum Management Committee.
  
38 G. Buhler 1890, pp. 321-322 = Fuhrer 1890-91, pp. 1-2; Progress Report; Buhler 1891, Academy, pp. 117-119, = Fuhrer 1890-91, Academy, P.17; Progress Report, Buhler 1891, pp. 176-177, Kleine Mittheilungen = Fuhrer 1890-91, Progress Report 17. See also: Buhler 1890, pp. 327-328 = (edited down) Fuhrer 1890-91, Progress Report 15; Buhler 1890, pp. 328-329 = Fuhrer 1890-91. Progress Report, 16; Progress Report, Buhler 1890, pp. 330-331 = Fuhrer 1890-91, Progress Report 16-17.

39 James Burgess, 'Introduction', in A. Fuhrer and Ed. Smith, The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur, (Calcutta, 1889), p. iv. Cf James Burgess, 'Sketch of Archaeological Research in India during Half a Century', Journal Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1905) Centenary Memorial Volume, p. 146. By 1905 Burgess knew a great deal that was damaging to Fuhrer's reputation. With considerable restraint he merely wrote that Fuhrer was an "educated officer". He may have meant this as a statement of the process Fuhrer had undergone, rather than as an evaluation of its result.

40 Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India, 2004, p. xvii.

41 Edward Charles Buck (1838-1916) was educated at Oakham school and Clare College Cambridge. He joined the ICS in 1862. As Secretary for Revenue and Agriculture in 1882 he experimented with crop improvements, built embankments, and cut out a layer of bureaucracy from the Land Revenue system. His opponents ("bullet-headed metallic-souled bureaucrats of the type so well-known in India") thought his schemes impractical. A romantic of the old school, Buck's favourite occupation was "to plunge with a native hunter into a Himalayan forest, which he would penetrate before the dawn of day". H.E.M.J., 'The late Sir Edward Charles Buck', Journal of Indian Art, 17 (1916), p. 74.

42 Anonymous, 'Review of Jeypore Architecture', Pioneer, 12 March 1891, p. 342.

43 On the Buck crisis see: W.G. Wood, A Short History of the Archaeological Department in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, (Calcutta, 1900); J.H. Marshall, 'Introduction' in ASI Annual Report Number One, for 1902-3,ed. Marshall (Calcutta, 1904). pp. 1-13.

44 These annual Progress Reports of the Epigraphical Section of the Archaeological Survey, N.-WP. and Oudh Circle are the primary source for Fuhrer's career between 1891 and 1898. Cited as 'Fuhrer's 1892-93:20 Progress Report'.

45 Lucknow Museum Accessions list, March 1892, p. 1.

46 Fuhrer 1892-93:28, Progress Report. On the unprovenanced inscription see: Heinrich Luders, 'On some Brahmi Inscriptions in the Lucknow Provincial Museum', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1912), p. 167.

47 Fuhrer 1892-93:2, Progress Report, cf with Fuhrer, Monumental Antiquities, 1891, p. 27.

48 Fuhrer 1891-92:3, Progress Report; Luders, 'on some Brahmi Inscriptions', 1912, pp. 162-163.

49 Buhler 1892:1I, pt x, p 91, Epigraphia Indica = Fuhrer 1892, pp. 3-5, Progress Report. Luders 1912, p. 167 explains how this plagiarism was committed.

50 Luders, 'on some Brahmi Inscriptions', 1912, p. 167.

51 Fuhrer 1892-93:28, Progress Report.

52 T.S. Burt and J. Prinsep, 'More danams from the Sanchi tope near Bhilsa, taken in impression by Capt. T.S. Burt, Engineers. Translated by Jas. Prinsep', Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1838), pp. 562-566; Alexander Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes, (London, 1854), Plate XIX.

53 'The most serious loss is that of Sir A. Cunningham's No. 177 which ... contains a second version of Ashoka's so-called Kosambi edict,': G. Buhler, 'Votive inscriptions from the Sanchi Stupas', Epigraphia Indica, Vol. II (1894), p. 87. James Burgess, the Editor, added a footnote suggesting that it might "possibly have been overlooked by Dr Fuhrer in his hurried visit".

54 G. Buhler, 'Further Inscriptions from Sanchi', Epigraphia Indica, Vol. II (1894), p. 366.

55 Fuhrer 1892-93:29, Progress Report.

56 The contentious word is not mage / magga ('road'), but samage / samagga ('being united'). Samagga is a Vinaya technicality meaning a non-schismatic community that lives together within agreed monastic boundaries. See V i 104.

57 Lieutenant-Governor's Resolution on the NWPO Progress Reports for 1892-93, 11 August 1893.

58 George Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (Rangoon, 1900), Part I, Vol. II, p. 176.

59 Anon [Forchhammer], List of Objects of Antiquarian and Archaeological Interest in British Burma (Rangoon, 1884); E. Forchhammer, The Jardine Prize Essay (Rangoon, 1885); E. Forchhammer, Pagan I. The Kyaukku Temple, (Rangoon, 1891).

60 Forchhammer 1891:11-15.

61 Fuhrer, Pagan I, The Kyaukku Temple, pp. 11.

62 Richard Temple, Editorial footnote to: B. Houghton, 'A Rejoinder', Indian Antiquary, Vol. 23 (1894), p. 167.

63 Fuhrer 1893-94:20, Progress Report.

64 Charles Duroiselle, Report of the Archaeological Survey, Burma, for the year ending 31st March 1921 (Rangoon, 1921), p. 21.

65 Charles Duroiselle, A list of inscriptions found in Burma. Part I (Rangoon, 1921), p. ii.

66 Louis Finot, 'Chronique', Bulletin d'Ecole Francais J'Extreme Orient, Vol. 22 (1922), pp. 208-209, translating "C'est la trop fameux Dr. Fuhrer ... " and .. . .. dans cette scandaleuse carriere de fausseur qui devait, quelques annees plus tard, trouver son term a Kapilavastu". ["It's the too famous Dr. Fuhrer..." and .. . .. in this scandalous career as a faker which, a few years later, was to find its end at Kapilavastu".]

67 H. Burney. 'Discovery of Buddhist Images with Deva-nagari Inscriptions at Tagaung, the ancient capital of the Burmese Empire', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1836), pp. 157-164; Hatthipala Jataka (#509 of the Pali Collection). The samodhana to this birth-story states that the father of the four children Hatthipala, Gopala, Assapala and Ajapala, was reborn in the Buddha's lifetime as Mahakassapa, his chief disciple. Perhaps it was this that prompted Fuhrer to equip Tagaung with a monastery named after Mahakassapa.

68 G. Buhler, 'Some Notes on Past and Future Archaeological Explorations in India', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1895), pp. 660, 656.

69 G. Buhler to G.A. Griersson of the Philological Section, 9 November 1894. Griersson forwarded it to Calcutta; Revenue and Agriculture Pros. No. 1-5, File 6 of July 1895.

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Part 1 of 2

Tom Keating
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/28/22



Thomas[1] Patrick Keating[2] (1 March 1917 – 12 February 1984) was an English art restorer and famous art forger who claimed to have faked more than 2,000 paintings by over 100 different artists.[3] The total estimated of the profits of his forgeries amount to more than 10 million dollars in today's value.[4]

Early life

Keating was born in Lewisham, London, into a poor family. His father worked as a house painter, and barely made enough to feed the household. At the age of fourteen, Keating was turned away from St. Dunstan’s College in London.[5] Because his father barely made ends meet, Keating started working at a young age. He worked as a delivery boy, a lather boy, a lift boy and a bell boy before he started working for the family business as a house painter.[5] He was then enlisted as a boiler-stoker in World War II. After World War II, he was admitted into the art programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London. However, he did not receive a diploma, as he dropped out after only two years. In his college classes, his painting technique was praised, while his originality was regarded as insufficient.[5] During Keating's two years at Goldsmiths College, he worked side jobs for art restorers. He even worked for the revered Hahn Brothers in Mayfair. Utilizing the skills he learned through these jobs, he began to restore paintings for a living (although he also had to keep working as a house-painter to make ends meet). He exhibited his own paintings, but failed to break into the art market. In order to prove himself as good as his heroes, Keating began painting in the style of them, especially Samuel Palmer.

Homage to Samuel Palmer, by Tom Keating


Samuel Palmer, by Tom Keating


Moonlit Dedham, Suffolk, by Tom Keating


Sussex Landscape, by Tom Keating

In 1963, he met Jane Kelly who would become his lover and partner in spreading and selling his forgeries. However, they separated many years before they were put on trial for the forgeries.

He later married his wife, Hellen, from whom he also separated in his later years. They had a son named Douglas.

Keating studied at London’s National Gallery and the Tate.

Mid-life

After dropping out of college, Keating was picked up by an art restorer named Fred Roberts. Roberts cared less about the ethics of art restoration than other restorers Keating had previously worked for. One of Keating's first jobs was to paint children around a maypole on a 19th-century painting by Thomas Sidney Cooper that had a large hole in it. Most art restorers would have simply filled in the cracks to preserve the authenticity of the painting.[5] His career of forgery stemmed from Roberts' workshop when Keating criticized a painting done by Frank Moss Bennett. Roberts challenged him to recreate one of Bennett's paintings. At first Keating produced replicas of Bennett paintings, but he felt he could do even more. Keating recalls feeling as if he knew so much about Bennett that he could start creating his own works and pass them off as Bennett's.[5] Keating created his own Bennett-like piece, and was so proud of it, that he signed it with his own name. When Roberts saw it, without consulting Keating, he changed the signature to F. M. [Frank Moss] Bennett and consigned it to the West End gallery. Keating did not find out until later, but said nothing.

x

According to Keating's account, Jane Kelly was instrumental in circulating his forgeries in the art market. With Palmer being one of his biggest inspirations, he created nearly twenty fake Palmers. Keating and Kelly then decided on the best three forgeries and Kelly took them to gallery specialists for auction.

In 1962, Keating counterfeited Edgar Degas' self-portrait.[5]

Self-Portrait, by "Degas", by Tom Keating


Degas Dancing Class, by Tom Keating

In 1963, he started his own informal school, teaching teenagers painting techniques in exchange for tobacco or second-hand art books.[6] This is where Keating, at the age of 46, met Jane Kelly, at the age of 16, a student of his. Kelly really enjoyed Keating's "class" and convinced her parents to pay Keating a pound/day for full-time instruction.[6] She became especially attached to him and they ultimately became lovers and business partners. Four years later, the two began a life together in Cornwall, where they started an art restoration business.[6]

Forger with a cause

Keating perceived the gallery system to be rotten – dominated, he said, by American "avant-garde fashion, with critics and dealers often conniving to line their own pockets at the expense both of naïve collectors and [of] impoverished artists". Keating retaliated by creating forgeries to fool the experts, hoping to destabilize the system. Keating considered himself a socialist and used that mentality to rationalize his actions.[5]

Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies or other forms of free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, usually placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing (libertarian socialism) of the socialist movement.

-- Anarchism, by Wikipedia

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.[5] 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."[6]

Samuel Palmer paintings



In the early 1970s, 13 paintings by 19th-century English artist Samuel Palmer – the man behind works such as In A Shoreham Garden (pictured) – were put up for auction by art restorer Tom Keating. Palmer, who died in 1881, was particularly hailed for works during what became known as his "Shoreham Period" during which the artist produced landscapes of the Kent village in which he lived between 1826 and 1835.

In 1976, The Times journalist Geraldine Norman exposed the Palmer paintings to be fake and Keating (pictured) confessed to having "flooded the market" with versions of works by the Victorian artist and others such as Constable. Keating said he did so as a protest "against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists". He was put on trial in 1977 but charges against him were dropped after he was injured in a near-fatal motorcycle crash. He died in 1984.



-- Fake treasure finds that fooled the world, by lovemoney.com

Technique

Mastering an artist's style and technique, as well as getting to know the artist very well, was a priority for Keating.

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 texture 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.[7]

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.[6] 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.

Kees Van Dongen, by Tom Keating

Keating's "Sexton Blakes"

Sexton blake is a term coined in the UK from the name of a fictional detective, comparable to Sherlock Holmes. In rhyming slang, the term means "fake". As usual, for a short time after its creation, a slang term has limited currency as it is known only to a few people, typically those in the criminal underworld. So Keating initially referred to all of his forgeries as Sextons.[1]

Revealing the forger


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

In 1970, auctioneers noticed that there were thirteen Samuel Palmer watercolour paintings for sale – all of them depicting the same theme, the village of Shoreham, Kent.

Geraldine Norman, the The Times of London's salesroom correspondent, looked into the 13 Palmer watercolors, sending them to be scientifically tested by a renowned specialist, Geoffrey Grigson. After careful inspection, she published an article in summer 1976 declaring these "Palmers" to be fake.[8] Norman was sent tips as to who forged these paintings, but it was not until Jane Kelly's brother met up with Norman and told her all about Keating, that she found out the truth. Soon after, she drove out to the house that Kelly's brother had told her about, and met Keating. Keating 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.[6] 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.[8] In response, Keating wrote: "I do not deny these allegations. In fact, I openly confess to having done them." He also declared that money was not his incentive.[6] 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.[6]

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.

The trial

After Keating and Jane Kelly were finally arrested in 1979, and both accused of conspiracy to defraud and obtaining payments through deception amounting to £21,416,[6] 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.

Dionysius, or Pseudo-Dionysius, as he has come to be known in the contemporary world, was a Christian Neoplatonist who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century CE and who transposed in a thoroughly original way the whole of Pagan Neoplatonism from Plotinus to Proclus, but especially that of Proclus and the Platonic Academy in Athens, into a distinctively new Christian context.

Though Pseudo-Dionysius lived in the late fifth and early sixth century C.E., his works were written as if they were composed by St. Dionysius the Areopagite, who was a member of the Athenian judicial council (known as ‘the Areopagus’) in the 1st century C.E. and who was converted by St. Paul. Thus, these works might be regarded as a successful ‘forgery’, providing Pseudo-Dionysius with impeccable Christian credentials that conveniently antedated Plotinus by close to two hundred years. So successful was this stratagem that Dionysius acquired almost apostolic authority, giving his writings enormous influence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, though his views on the Trinity and Christ (e.g., his emphasis upon the single theandric activity of Christ (see Letter 4) as opposed to the later orthodox view of two activities) were not always accepted as orthodox since they required repeated defenses, for example, by John of Scythopolis and by Maximus Confessor. Dionysius’ fictitious identity, doubted already in the sixth century by Hypatius of Ephesus and later by Nicholas of Cusa, was first seriously called into question by Lorenzo Valla in 1457 and John Grocyn in 1501, a critical viewpoint later accepted and publicized by Erasmus from 1504 onward. But it has only become generally accepted in modern times that instead of being the disciple of St. Paul, Dionysius must have lived in the time of Proclus, most probably being a pupil of Proclus, perhaps of Syrian origin, who knew enough of Platonism and the Christian tradition to transform them both. Since Proclus died in 485 CE, and since the first clear citation of Dionysius’ works is by Severus of Antioch between 518 and 528, then we can place Dionysius’ authorship between 485 and 518–28 CE. These dates are confirmed by what we find in the Dionysian corpus: a knowledge of Athenian Neoplatonism of the time, an appeal to doctrinal formulas and parts of the Christian liturgy (e.g., the Creed) current in the late fifth century, and an adaptation of late fifth-century Neoplatonic religious rites, particularly theurgy, as we shall see below.

It must also be recognized that “forgery” is a modern notion. Like Plotinus and the Cappadocians before him, Dionysius does not claim to be an innovator, but rather a communicator of a tradition. Adopting the persona of an ancient figure was a long established rhetorical device (known as declamatio), and others in Dionysius’ circle also adopted pseudonymous names from the New Testament. Dionysius’ works, therefore, are much less a forgery in the modern sense than an acknowledgement of reception and transmission, namely, a kind of coded recognition that the resonances of any sacred undertaking are intertextual, bringing the diachronic structures of time and space together in a synchronic way, and that this theological teaching, at least, is dialectically received from another. Dionysius represents his own teaching as coming from a certain Hierotheus and as being addressed to a certain Timotheus. He seems to conceive of himself, therefore, as an in-between figure, very like a Dionysius the Areopagite, in fact. Finally, if Iamblichus and Proclus can point to a primordial, pre-Platonic wisdom, namely, that of Pythagoras, and if Plotinus himself can claim not to be an originator of a tradition (after all, the term Neoplatonism is just a convenient modern tag), then why cannot Dionysius point to a distinctly Christian theological and philosophical resonance in an earlier pre-Plotinian wisdom that instantaneously bridged the gap between Judaeo-Christianity (St. Paul) and Athenian paganism (the Areopagite)? [For a different view of Dionysius as crypto-pagan, see Lankila, 2011, 14–40.]

-- Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, by Kevin Corrigan L. Michael Harrington, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published Mon Sep 6, 2004; substantive revision Tue Apr 30, 2019, Copyright © 2019 by Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington

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.[6] Since Kelly had already pleaded guilty, she still had to serve her time in prison. 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.

Aftermath

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."[3] 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 Keating rallied, however, and although in fragile health, he presented television programmes on the techniques of old masters for Channel 4 in the UK.[3][9]

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. His proponents would disagree. 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.[7][10][11]


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.

And perhaps even more interesting, there are fake Keatings. 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."[3]

Tom Keating on Painters (television show)

After Keating's legal suit was dropped, he was asked to star in a television show called Tom Keating on Painters. The show started airing in 1982 at 6:30 p.m. on weekdays to attract a family audience. On this show, Keating demonstrated how to paint like the masters, illustrating the techniques and processes of painting like artists, such as Titian, Rembrandt, Claude Monet, and John Constable.[5][12]

In popular culture

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.[13]

Further reading

• 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.

References

1. "Tom Keating: Art Fraud". JAQUO Lifestyle Magazine. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
2. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
3. MacGillivray, Donald (2 July 2005). "When is a fake not a fake? When it's a genuine forgery". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 31 December 2010.
4. "Authentication in Art Unmasked Forgers".
5. Keats, Jonathon. "Masterpieces For Everyone? The Case Of The Socialist Art Forger Tom Keating [Book Excerpt]". Forbes. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
6. Keats, Jonathon. "The Ultimate In Reality TV? Try Televised Art Forgery. [Book Excerpt #2]". Forbes. Retrieved 5 May 2016.
7. "Tom Keating, 66, a Painter; Gained Fame as Art Forger". The New York Times. 14 February 1984.
8. Magnusson, Magnus (2007) [2006]. Fakers, Forgers & Phoneys. Edinburgh: Mainstream. pp. 32–6. ISBN 978-1-84596-210-4.
9. Landesman, Peter (18 July 1999). "A 20th-Century Master Scam". The New York Times.
10. "Soaring beauty of village church". Gazette. Retrieved 27 August 2022.
11. Cook, William. "Dedham Vale | The Spectator". http://www.spectator.co.uk. Retrieved 27 August 2022.
12. Keats, Jonathon. "Masterpieces For Everyone? The Case Of The Socialist Art Forger Tom Keating [Book Excerpt]". Forbes.
13. Longdon, David (5 August 2012). "Judas Unrepentant". David Longdon Blog. Retrieved 16 October 2013.

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When a fake is not a Keating: It may be by Samuel Palmer, by a master faker, or by an unknown. Who is the creator of a suspect watercolour at the Royal Academy?
by Geraldine Norman
UK Independent
Sunday 14 March 1993 00:02

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QUESTION: when is a Samuel Palmer not a Samuel Palmer? Answer: when it's done by Tom Keating. Or that is what art historians would nowadays have one believe. 'Did you know there was a Tom Keating at the Royal Academy?' a respected art historian asked me on the phone the other day, after we had discussed something quite different. I didn't. I didn't even know that one of the Palmers in the 'Great Age of British Watercolours' exhibition at the Royal Academy was under suspicion of being a fake.

Samuel Palmer brought an extraordinary mystical vision to landscape painting for about six years around 1830. The inspiration faded and, though he imitated it later in life, he never recaptured his youthful inspiration. The drawings remained in his family and virtually unknown until an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1926 of 'Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake'. It had a huge impact on British artists and connoisseurs; the artists imitated his work and the connoisseurs bought the watercolours from his son, A H Palmer.

In the early days his drawings were not expensive and no one is known to have started faking his work until Tom Keating took it up in the 1960s and 1970s - when prices had risen. But that is not to say that others did not try making Palmers, either for fun or to earn a few irregular pounds. Indeed, in my opinion the suspect painting at the Royal Academy - a very orange watercolour called Harvesters by Firelight - makes it clear that someone did.

I have a special interest in Tom Keating, since I was the journalist who unmasked him as a picture-faker back in 1976 - on account of his fake Samuel Palmer watercolours. So I rang round the Palmer buffs. 'When was it that your friend started out?' laughed Martin Butlin, former keeper of the British collection at the Tate. 'We know this one was in existence by 1951. Was Keating at work by then?' Keating had just left art school by 1951 and was already copying Old Masters but not, to my knowledge, making Palmers. I found a couple of Keating Palmers tucked away at the back of a drawer. One is reproduced here along with Harvesters: a clear demonstration, in my view, that the watercolour in the R A show is not by Keating. The way the foliage is treated is, perhaps, the most obvious giveaway. Keating indicates leaves by making quantities of individual brush strokes. Whoever did the R A drawing has used a black outline for the shape of the trees and filled it in with wash.


Harvesters by Firelight, 1830, Pen and black ink with watercolor and gouache on wove paper, 11 5/16 × 14 7/16 in, 28.7 × 36.7 cm, by Samuel Palmer

That puts paid to the Keating idea. But having a suspect Palmer in the Royal Academy show - acknowledged as such by the exhibition's organiser - is a very unusual bit of miscalculation. As far as I can make out from the embarrassed participants, no one realised it wasn't by Palmer until the catalogue was written and the show was on the walls.

The drawing belongs to the National Gallery in Washington, which received it as a gift from Paul Mellon in 1986. Mellon, who inherited one of the largest fortunes in America, has given the National Gallery - which was founded by his father - more than 800 pictures. It was not difficult for one fake to sneak in among them.

Mellon himself is a passionate anglophile and has formed the most important private collection of British art anywhere in the world, even rivalling the Tate. It is now mostly housed at the Yale Center for British Art. He bought the 'Palmer' watercolour at Christie's in 1981 for pounds 77,000 through his friend and agent John Baskett, then a Bond Street dealer. 'I've always thought it was a Palmer,' John Baskett told me last week. 'There was no doubt at the time.' Mellon's reaction to my enquiry was 'No comment'.

It was not until 1988 that a catalogue raisonne of Samuel Palmer's work - a catalogue, that is, which lists all known Palmers and discusses them - appeared. Raymond Lister, its author, told me: 'I included Harvesters because I felt it couldn't exactly be rejected as a Palmer - but I'm not as convinced as I was. It could be an original that someone's played about with. I don't think the red figure in front is by Palmer.'

There is an inscription on the back, Lister points out, which is particularly suspicious. It is supposed to be in the hand of Palmer's son, who did inscribe several drawings; if it was not written by him, it must have been written by someone who was consciously trying to turn the picture into a Palmer.

The inscription explains that the wild orange glow over the scene is: 'The reflection of one of the incendiary fires, fires in Kent, I think about 1830 done I think the next day. The building is, I think Ightham Mote. A H P. Subject the harvesters hurrying away the last of the harvest.' Lister wrote in his catalogue: 'The building is not Ightham Mote. Such an indecisive statement is uncharacteristic of A H Palmer. Moreover, it does not make sense: it would have been unnecessary to 'hurry away' the last of the harvest for the 1830 incendiary attacks were aimed against stacks and barns and not against growing crops'.

It is not entirely clear when doubts about the painting began to surface. 'I remember considerable enthusiasm for it when we had it for sale in 1981,' Anthony Browne of Christie's told me. However, both Martin Butlin and his successor at the Tate, Andrew Wilton, tell me they did not think it was by Samuel Palmer at the time.

Andrew Wilton is the curator of the Royal Academy show and says that the watercolour slipped in because the exhibition had to be mounted in such a hurry - he only had six months to put it together, from start to finish.

'The Palmers we wanted were not available,' Wilton said. 'I rather hoped that as the National Gallery in Washington offered it as one of the things they were happy to lend, they had sorted out the attribution.' No such thing: 'I first heard of the doubts when the Royal Academy rang me in Italy two weeks ago,' Andrew Robison, the National Gallery's curator of drawings, told me. 'If it's not by Palmer, we won't have any problem about changing the attribution but I don't yet understand what's wrong.' Piers Rodgers, secretary of the Royal Academy, maintains that the argument over the attribution is not yet resolved. 'Scholars have been discussing it for ages,' he said. 'We knew that when we put it in the show.'

The inclusion of the drawing in the exhibition has been hard luck on the pundits. Simon Jenkins, former editor of the Times, described Palmer's 'idylls of the gloaming' in a column about the Academy show, pointing especially to 'his brilliant Harvesters by Firelight'. Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard illustrated the painting in colour to demonstrate what he thought of English watercolours - but saved his reputation as a connoisseur by describing it as 'a sickening confection of glutinous marmalades coarse cut'.

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[admin]

Part 2 of 2

Masterpieces For Everyone? The Case Of The Socialist Art Forger Tom Keating [Book Excerpt]
by Jonathon Keats
[Excerpted from Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, by Jonathon Keats, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Part II of the Keating saga can be read here.]
Forbes.com
December 13, 2012 10:55am EST

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, by Jonathon Keats


The Ingenue, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Photo credit: Wikipedia via Zamanta)

One sunny morning in 1983, a model named Amanda slipped on an antique French blouse, swept back her long auburn hair, and turned toward the painter Tom Keating, pouting her lips as young girls did for Renoir. Though Amanda knew that the potbellied Cockney artist had counterfeited more than two thousand paintings by masters ranging from Rembrandt to Edvard Munch in his sixty-six years – and that many had fraudulently sold at auction – her face radiated childlike innocence as he loaded his palette with viridian and vermillion and alizarin crimson, colors Renoir had favored a century before.

Keating had inferred Renoir's techniques by studying the Frenchman's paintings at London's National Gallery and the Tate. He'd also read the standard textbooks from Renoir's era, and had handled Impressionist paintings as a restorer. Most important, he'd assimilated Renoir's creative process, reducing knowledge to habit. In his old-fashioned smock and full white beard, taking up a stub of sanguine chalk, Keating was as much in character as his model.

He began by drawing her figure on the canvas with a few fluid gestures. Taking up his palette, he then brushed in the pale sunlight pouring across her face. He described her contours in shadow with broad strokes of dark green background, and filled in her coif as a swathe of burnt sienna. His underwork looked nothing like the Renoirs in museums. Periodically the figure lost even the basic appearance of a woman, only to gain greater semblance to his model several brushstrokes later. For him the fickle procedure was "like love," he said, "and this is the beauty of it."

Gradually the model's visage took shape on the canvas. Keating conveyed a sense of depth by outlining Amanda's figure in cobalt blue. He used the same hue to define the bone of her cheeks, gently blended into the warmth of her skin. Then he disfigured her again with stabs of pure color. He built up the pigment into a thick mask of impasto, fusing the colors by blotting the paint with sheets of newspaper. He repeated these steps over and over. By degrees Amanda's features blurred into the anonymously sweet hues of a typical Renoir girl.

Yet even had her face remained as identifiable as in a mug shot, Amanda need hardly have worried about a visit from Scotland Yard. This subterfuge was no secret. The studio in which she posed belonged to Channel Four, where Keating's acts of artistic imposture were filmed for British national television. Starting in 1982, weekday episodes of Tom Keating on Painters – aired at 6:30 p.m. to attract a family audience – revealed the working methods of Titian and Rembrandt and Monet and Constable. In thirty-minute sessions, the potbellied Cockney demonstrated how to paint Turner's ships and van Gogh's sunflowers. Viewers adored him. As the British TV personality Magnus Magnusson later noted in an elegiac essay, Keating's popularity was "almost on a par with art historian Kenneth Clark and his pioneering 1969 BBC television series Civilisation."

The comparable status of Civilisation and Tom Keating on Painters was as revealing as it was surprising. Two men could not have come to prominence by paths more different. Heir to a Scottish textile fortune, Lord Clark was former Surveyor of the King's Pictures, director of the National Gallery, and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Keating was a former housepainter from the bleak Forest Hill district of south London, whose "Sexton Blakes" -– Cockney rhyming slang for fakes -– made a mockery of institutionalized erudition. Their perspectives on art were as disparate as their backgrounds. "Although Renoir's first impulse to paint came from an almost naïve sensuous delight," Clark wrote in the Burlington Magazine, "he never imagined that the mere representation of agreeable objects was the end of painting." Keating begged to differ. "He loved young girls," Keating told TV viewers. "Don't we all?"

Of course ratings on television counted for nothing in the ranks of scholarship. Keating didn't express his opinions in learned language. His ideas scarcely registered with the guardians of culture. Certainly his byline never appeared in august journals such as The Burlington Magazine, or in monographs on the likes of Renoir and Constable. His handiwork did, though –- albeit bearing signatures other than his own.

**

The greatest disappointment in Tom Keating's life came at the age of fourteen, when he was turned away from St. Dunstan's College in London. Overcoming the poor education available in Forest Hill, he'd passed an entrance exam to the respectable public school, only to be told by the headmaster that his family would have to cover the fourteen pound expense of books and clothes. "He might just as well have asked for fourteen thousand," Keating recalled in his picaresque 1977 autobiography, The Fake's Progress. His father's shilling-and-sixpence hourly wage as a housepainter could scarcely feed the overcrowded Keating household. So young Tom got a job. He worked as a delivery boy, a lather boy, a lift boy and a bell boy before entering the housepainting trade, mastering the crafts of graining and marbling just in time to be enlisted as a boiler-stoker in the Second World War.

The sole benefit of military service was eligibility for a two-year rehabilitation course, on the basis of which Keating was admitted to Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Entering the art program, he tried (as he later phrased it) "to get a bit of taste". Instead he discovered the cultural chasm separating him from his higher-class peers. The rift could be humiliating, as when they'd mocked him for praising the anti-Modernist painter Pietro Annigoni, whose academic realism could appeal only to a plebeian. Lack of refinement may even have undercut Keating's efforts to earn a diploma: While he got high marks for painterly technique, his composition was deemed insufficiently original. He left Goldsmiths' as he'd entered, an artisan.

Only indirectly did Goldsmiths' offer an escape from the shilling-and-sixpence life. In his two years, Keating had picked up a complementary set of skills working evenings and weekends for art restorers. At the esteemed Hahn Brothers in Mayfair, he learned the painstaking craft of filling in cracks -– mixing paints just light enough that they'd match the original color under a darkening coat of varnish –- but he was soon lured away by a more vigorous restorer, less burdened by ethics, a man he dubbed Fred Roberts in The Fake's Progress.

At Roberts' small shop, Keating was given jobs that thoroughly exercised his technical skills and appeased his painterly ambitions. His first big task was to fill in a hole torn through a large landscape by the 19th century Royal Academician Thomas Sidney Cooper. The canvas had been ripped by shrapnel during the Blitz. Roberts relined it ­–- laid it down on new cloth -– physically stabilizing the painting but leaving a conspicuous gap in Cooper's grazing herd of cattle. In place of the livestock, he proposed that Keating enliven the pasture with children encircling a maypole. "It was a naughty thing to do," Keating later admitted, "but the alternative was filling in cracks. More than anything else in the world I wanted to paint and I didn't care what it was that I painted."

And so it was that the fake progressed. Amongst the many canvases passing through Roberts' shop was a quaint winter scene by Frank Moss Bennett, an early 20th century British genre painter whose works were widely reproduced on cigarette cards and calendars. Sounding the tone of his fellow Goldsmiths' students, Keating made some snide remarks about the picture, and was challenged by Roberts to show he could match it. His first attempts were essentially replicas, carefully duplicating a horse-drawn coach departing a country inn. His third effort was more ambitious. "I felt that I knew so much about the artist that I could do one out of my own head," he recollected. He visited the National Maritime Museum, where he could sketch mannequins attired in period costumes. From these drawings he painted a pastiche that played on Bennett's obsession with seafaring in the age of Sir Francis Drake. "It took me exactly two weeks to complete, and when it was finished I was so proud of it I signed it with my own name."

The signature was the only detail that Roberts saw fit to correct. Without consulting Keating, he had it autographed F.M. [Frank Moss] Bennett 1937 and consigned it to a West End gallery that also fronted some of the more outlandish restorations. Keating learned about the scam only when he saw one of his ersatz Bennetts in the gallery windows. "I was astonished to discover, as I looked around, that hanging on the walls were quite a number of the paintings that I'd prettied up with boating scenes, little girls with ribbons in their hair and other additions to make them more saleable," claimed Keating in retrospect. "I wondered, as I stood there, how many other dealers in the West End went in for this kind of deception."

As hard as it is to believe that Keating was wholly oblivious to this fraud -– what other purpose could even his first maypole have served? -– witnessing it in a gallery does seem to have made his relationship with forgery more complicated. No longer was the art market an abstraction to him, distant and anonymous. Instead it became his focus, giving him a rationale for adopting the style of other painters and earning some money in their name. "It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty," he asserted in The Fake's Progress. "All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death." The time had come for the commercial art establishment to learn a lesson, by his reckoning, and the poverty he shared with past generations qualified him for the job. "I was determined to do what I could to avenge my brothers and it was to this end that I decided to turn my hand to Sexton Blaking."

Some of Hendrix's friends have concluded that "Jeffrey stood to make a greater sum of money from a dead Jimi Hendrix than a living one. There was also mention of a one million dollar insurance policy covering Hendrix's life made out with Jeffrey as the beneficiary." The manager of the Experience constructed "a financial empire based on the posthumous releases of Hendrix's previously unreleased recordings." Crushing musical voices of dissent was proving to be an immensely profitable enterprise because a dead rocker leaves behind a fortune in publishing rights and royalties.

-- The Covert War Against Rock, by Alex Constantine

**

By the early 1950s, Keating had a wife and two children. They lived together in a decrepit Forest Hill flat, devoid of furniture, that doubled as his studio. What the neighborhood lacked in luxuries it made up for in junk shops, where broken old paintings of no artistic merit could be bought for mere shillings. Unable to afford fresh art supplies as a student at Goldsmiths', Keating was already accustomed to refurbishing used canvases. He began to see their dilapidation as an advantage: Anything he painted on them inherited the patina of past centuries.

He was not particular about matching the canvas to his picture. At first he favored genre painting -– "ice-skating scenes, ladies reading letters at spinnets, tavern interiors" -– pastiche subjects that lent themselves to pastiche treatment. He cribbed imagery from books and postcards. Older supports got variations on Peter de Hoogh, Adriaen Brouwer and Gabriel Metsu. Newer canvases were usually made to resemble the work of Cornelius Krieghoff, whose pictures Keating first encountered in Fred Roberts' shop.

Given the sheer number of mid-nineteenth century canvases moldering in south London junk shops, Krieghoff got by far the biggest posthumous boost. He scarcely needed Keating's assistance. A Dutch artist working in Quebec City in the 1850s, Krieghoff produced thousands of diminutive farm and tavern scenes, many of which were bought as souvenirs by British soldiers. Historians came to value them for their detailed documentation of Canadian customs. Collectors coveted them for their decorative charm. Dealers delighted in their escalating prices, reaching into the thousands of pounds by the 1950s. Keating appreciated them for Krieghoff's skillful depiction of "jolly little Brueghelesque figures", and for the fact that Krieghoff "did so many versions of the same picture" -– to which hundreds more could and would be added over the following decade.

Keating took seriously the work of mastering an artist's style, teaching himself all he could learn on his own, but this care with technique was intentionally offset by his recklessness with materials. Rather than scraping down the old potboilers he bought in junk shops, he simply cleaned them with alcohol and reprimed them with a layer of rabbit-skin glue. He painted directly onto this surface, often in acrylics, sometimes brushing on a layer of darkening varnish before the paint cured. The results were predictably catastrophic. Even if his synthetic pigments were never detected by scientific testing, the paint would start to peel in a few decades, betraying his ruse. Ultimately all that would remain was the original potboiler, more often than not the portrait of a grim British grandmother.

Even more anarchic than his method of creation was his mode of distribution. Keating sold his first Sextons in the Forest Hill junk shops where he bought his canvases, seldom calling attention to the signatures, charging as little as five pounds apiece, rarely more than fifty. By 1956 he'd left his family for itinerant work in Scotland- – restoring the trifling art collections of minor Highlands castles -– a job that unaccountably inspired him to take up French Impressionism. He tossed his Sisley landscapes and Renoir girls into country auctions together with the Dutch genre pictures. It was a buyer's market. "Sometimes a farmer might write to me and enclose a fiver for a Krieghoff that hadn't attracted any bidders at a cattle auction," he recalled. "His wife liked it and was a fiver all right?" Another time a Krieghoff hammered at a pig auction for eighteen pence.

However the vast majority of fakes were just given away, along with sketches drawn in imitation of Rembrandt -– penned with home-made seagull quills -– and watercolors painted in the styles of J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Girtin. In the Highlands and then back in London, Keating gave pictures to friends and neighbors, acquaintances at the corner pub, the man who read his gas meter. In some cases he regarded fakery as a means of helping people in need, while also bringing chaos to the art market when the forgeries were cashed in at auction. At least several Sexton Krieghoffs sold at major houses such as Sotheby's and Phillips, though generally at junk shop prices since the catalogue entries were shrewdly vague. Rumors about forgery had the desired effect, depressing all Krieghoff prices, curbing dealers' profits.

"I've been a socialist all my life," Keating declared in his autobiography. Yet he was onto something more subversive than merely unhinging the market. With his Sexton de Hooghs and Sexton Renoirs, Keating made the masters widely available and broadly affordable -– even if only in ersatz form -– allowing practically anyone to live with a magisterial collection. In a country as stratified as mid-Century England, where culture was interchangeable with status, his Sexton Blakes afforded a sort of cut-rate cultivation.

**

Tom Keating deemed himself a successor to Edgar Degas because Degas mentored the British artist Walter Sickert, who'd mentored one of Keating's early mentors. It was a tenuous connection, reinforced in Keating's mind by a Degas self-portrait he counterfeited in 1962. As he told the story, he'd no recollection of making the pastel. "It sounds ridiculous, I know, but Degas really did draw that picture through me and many others besides," he claimed. "I woke up one morning and found it on the easel, in place of the scratchy, silly daub that I'd been working on the day before."

The drawing impressed a couple of Keating's friends, siblings who were junk dealers in Kew. In The Fake's Progress he dubbed the pair Roger and Anne, and said they began pestering him for paintings to sell after Anne showed the pastel to a Paris gallery and was offered two thousand pounds. Keating's response was characteristically impulsive. First he ripped up his drawing. Then he went into business with them.

Roger and Anne supplied the canvases and the clients. Keating prepared the inventory. The artists he chose to Sexton -– the German Expressionists -– he deemed the opposite of Degas. "It may be unfair, but I have never liked them all that much," he later explained. "You only have to look at the self-portraits of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff with his barbaric fizzogg and monocle, to see how arrogant they were." But the Expressionists were in vogue with collectors, and Keating found them easy to mimic. Cribbing from "a little paperback that cost a few bob" he turned out twenty-one paintings in a weekend under bankable names including Kirchner, Nolde, and Pechstein. To save money, he simulated passages of thick impasto by mixing poster colors with house-painter's emulsion. He rendered everything else in acrylic. As usual the canvases were old potboilers, sealed with rabbit-skin glue, and sometimes underpainted with assorted rude words. For those he used lead white, a traditional oil pigment he reckoned would show up in an x-ray due to the heavy metal content.

It was a peculiar business strategy to say the least, as if Keating sought to sabotage himself (and his partners) for straying too far into capitalism. Roger hawked a couple dozen of the paintings to the tony Redfern Gallery in Mayfair, where he was received by the gallery's senior director, Harry Tatlock Miller. As Miller later recalled, the junk dealer claimed to know nothing about art, and to have acquired the works blindly from the estate of an old German émigré. In terms of provenance, the story was worthless. The amount Miller offered was negligible. Then Redfern singled out twelve of the paintings they believed to be authentic, and sold five of them in a summer exhibition.

If Keating heard about this, it didn't make him more entrepreneurial. Instead he found himself possessed by Francisco de Goya [30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828]. As Degas had done, Goya enlisted him to create a self-portrait. "Never before or since have I felt so strongly the presence of a master," he recollected. "The old boy was standing there right next to me and he was guiding my hand so firmly that I felt I had no control over what was taking shape on the canvas." In the end, Keating found himself staring at an image of Goya as he looked in old age -– similar to Goya's famous self-portrait of 1815 -– albeit rendered atop a Scottish potboiler in a careless mix of oils and acrylics. Keating embellished the picture with an inscription: Death comes to us all. (Because he knew no Spanish, he had the proprietor of a local coffee shop translate his English. "La muerte viene para todos," the bemused Spaniard scribbled on his bill for egg and chips.) Keating hung the portrait on his studio wall. He made no effort to sell it. For him it vindicated a slight quite different from the grudge he held on behalf of his brother Impressionists. Goya had not been wronged by the art market in his opinion, but by the museum establishment which destroyed Old Masters' work by over-restoration. This painting was a replacement, and the museums were not fit to own it.

That Goya had chosen him did not surprise Keating any more than he was amazed to have been enlisted by Degas [19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917]. Evidently he believed past masters recognized themselves in him as he saw himself in them. His creation of their self-portraits showed their shared sympathies across time and nationality: Painters belonged to the same culture, and could understand each other in ways that museum professionals and peddlers could never comprehend. Yet Keating was not condoning an alternate elite. He considered the culture open to anyone willing to wield a brush.

[Excerpted from Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, by Jonathon Keats, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Part II of the Keating saga can be read here.]

***************************

Tom Keating on Painters
September 19, 2022
Written by Darby Milbrath for Issue 20



In August, I was living alone and painting on an old dairy farm. When painting wasn’t going well or coming easily, my boyfriend sent me a link to a video that he thought would be helpful: Tom Keating on Painters – “Vincent Van Gogh.” It was a show on how to rip off a master painter in 30 minutes. The program first aired in 1982 at 6:30 pm on weekdays, to attract a family audience, with Tom Keating, a famous British art forger, illustrating the techniques and processes of artists such as Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne. Each episode begins with an animated sketch of the artist painting with his smock and palette to a romantic theme song made by the same composer who arranged the themes for Gone with the Wind and Great Expectations. The artist’s signature, Tom Keating appears in a gold gilded frame, his cursive handwriting indicates a jolly optimism with the decorative letter “K”, its leg like a coat-tail, and a hurried, carelessness with its crossed “T” dashing off ahead, and an all-around old world romanticism to its right-leaning slant. The camera pans to him in his studio, set up with a somewhat drab but cheerful still life of what appears to be handmade artificial sunflowers and magazine cut-outs of Japanese prints.

“This week we would like to talk a little of the artist Vincent Van Gogh and show you a little of his techniques.” Keating looks a bit like a teddy bear. “I have here a made up still life,” he says sort of apologetically. “And of course this is not naughty,” he emphasizes, “because the old masters always used artificial flowers if they were taking a long time.”

After about fifteen seconds of this, he begins quickly blocking in his canvas with yellow ochre, while he goes on unscripted to tell the audience about Van Gogh’s life. Watching this episode midday, lying on the mattress on my floor, was the first and only art training I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen anyone paint like that before: haste verging on debauchery. He blobs the paint on his canvases confidently, with big brushes to save time. “Don’t want to muck about,” he says.


Tom Keating after Degas


Tom Keating after Renoir

Without utilizing special effects, Keating endeavoured to begin and finish an entire painting within the episode. Whenever he speaks about the masters taking years to complete the paintings that he bangs out in the thirty minute program, he’ll always humbly remind the audience: “Of course it’s easy to copy a thing, I mean no disrespect to the artists, thank you very much.” In other episodes, his paintings of portraits—while starting out fairly distinguishable—often lose even the basic appearance of a figure. In the episode on Renoir, he describes how the painting, “will come to you and leave you,” with a single brushstroke, “like love,” he says. “And that’s the beauty of it.” Often Keating’s voice will grow softer as he describes brushstrokes as “kisses,” demonstrating how to “caress the flesh” while painting the inner thigh of a nude in a near-lusty whisper. Keating teaches viewers how to paint Degas’ “sweetie-pies” as he calls them, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and Turner’s ships. While he paints Turner’s fluffy clouds in thick impasto he explains: “It comes from years of buttering bread…or margarine in my case.” Keating’s plainspoken techniques demystify painting. Each episode, while hurriedly painting, he speaks about the artist’s life as if they’re an old friend, using their first names familiarly and regularly muttering apologies to the audience about how poorly a job he’s doing, or how the old master would’ve done it much better. “Of course I don’t find painting easy,” he admits. Despite his confidence before the easel and his irreverent attitude toward the art world, Keating often made self-degrading comments throughout his TV program. Apparently his ratings were almost as high as Civilisation, the late-60s BBC series of art historian Lord Kenneth Clark. Clark was a lord, a director of the National Art Gallery and a professor at Oxford. Keating was a house painter, a true Cockney, a fake who destabilized institutionalized art, only dodging criminal charges due to poor health.

Keating painted more than 2,000 forgeries by over 100 different artists in his sixty-six years. Many had fraudulently sold at auctions with the total profits estimated at over 10 million dollars. “I flooded the market with the work of Palmer and many others,” the artist said. “Not for gain (I hope I am no materialist) 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. It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty,” he defended in The Fake’s Progress, his autobiography. “All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death.” As with other art forgers like Han van Meegeren and Elmyr de Hory, resentment was one of Keating’s motives to retaliate against the art world. “I was determined to do what I could to avenge my brothers and it was to this end that I decided to turn my hand to ‘Sexton Blaking’.” He called all his phoney pictures “Sexton Blakes,” Cockney slang for fakes.

Keating was born into a low-income family in a poor neighborhood in South London. His father was a house painter. His family couldn’t afford to give Tom a proper education so instead he began working at a young age as a delivery boy, a lather boy, a lift boy, and a bell boy before working for the family business painting houses. “I’ll do a bit of house painting,” he jokes in the episode on Degas, as he paints the walls of the dance studio in pale greens. Grumbling, he says, “Now step back, see what you’ve done, shudder, and carry on.” He was later enlisted as a boiler-stoker in World War II. After military service he was admitted into the art programme at Goldsmiths, University of London as a rehabilitation course and “to get a bit of taste,” as he later phrased it.

He didn’t last two years in school, dropping out because of the “humiliating” cultural rift separating him from the upper class. Although he got high marks on technique, he was criticized for lacking originality. He ended up getting a job as an art restorer and learned the painstaking techniques of matching colours and varnishes and repairing cracks and crevices. He began working with a less ethical art restorer, Fred Roberts, who wasn’t concerned with preserving the integrity of the artist. On one occasion, after Roberts filled a large hole in a landscape painting by the 19th century Royal Academician Thomas Sidney Cooper that had been blown out from shrapnel during the war, he suggested that Keating paint the gap and brighten up the pasture with children encircling a maypole. “It was a naughty thing to do,” Keating later admitted, “but the alternative was filling in cracks. More than anything else in the world I wanted to paint and I didn’t care what it was that I painted.” Roberts once challenged Keating to make a replica of a Frank Moss Bennett, a quaint British painter whose wintry scenes decorated stationary and calendars. Keating made a couple of replicas and then thought he knew so much of the artist he could create a new scene from his head. The finished painting so impressed Roberts that he rubbed out Keating’s signature and signed it F.M. [Frank Moss] Bennett, 1937. Without telling Keating or sharing the profits, he sold the fake to a gallery where Keating saw it hung in the window. “I was astonished to discover, as I looked around, that hanging on the walls were quite a number of the paintings that I’d prettied up with boating scenes, little girls with ribbons in their hair and other additions to make them more saleable,” claimed Keating in retrospect. “I wondered, as I stood there, how many other dealers went in for this kind of deception.”

Keating saw the gallery system to be rotten, dominated by “avant-garde fashion, with critics and dealers often conniving to line their own pockets at the expense both of naive collectors and impoverished artists.” Tom moved into a decrepit flat with no furniture, which doubled as a studio, and began scouring the London junk shops for old canvases and cheap materials to continue making his “Sexton Blakes.” Keating never actually copied the masters’ work, he simply painted in imitation of their style. This method of inventing new pictures, which demands creativity and a greater understanding of the artist, pleased Keating’s painterly ambitions very much. Keating had a great respect and understanding of all the artists he imitated but was always reckless in his handling of the materials. He often used house paint and poster paint to mix in with his acrylics as a cheaper way to achieve the impasto works. At times he wouldn’t bother preparing his antique canvases he found at the junk shops out of laziness, so that in just a few years the paint would peel right off to reveal what was originally underneath. Keating often planted what he called “time bombs” like this in his paintings. Because of his understanding of the chemicals used in art restoration, Keating would purposely paint with layers of glycerin, which would destroy the painting once it was cleaned by a restorer, proving it was a fake. He often wrote obscenities under his paintings, like “Bollocks!”, in lead white so that it could be seen by the experts who x-rayed the painting to check its authenticity. These little acts of trickery and self-sabotage were a way for him to offset the whole operation from leaning too far towards capitalism.


Tom Keating after Monet


Tom Keating after Renoir

He claimed to have never signed any of his sextons and always pointed to the corruption of the art world when questioning how they all happened to be signed eventually as fakes. Apparently he sold his works for under $50 a piece. “Many I just gave away to friends or acquaintances. I’ve never had much lolly [money], never owned a car in me life, never owned anything much at all. That’s the only way to keep sane, you know.” Keating was a bit of a superstitious spiritualist. There are accounts where Keating claims he was channeling the old masters. For instance, there was a Degas pastel he had done that he felt Degas himself had painted. Keating described this in a 77’ Maclean’s interview called “The Magnificent Fraud.” “It was in 1956 I think, and I was experiencing ghosts—a terrifying experience—the first psychic experience I ever had. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but Degas really did draw that picture through me and many others besides,” he claimed. “I woke up one morning and found it on the easel, in place of the scratchy, silly daub that I’d been working on the day before.” He apparently took the drawing once it was passed off as “real” by many experts and promptly ripped it up. “And I burned a Van Gogh self-portrait for the same reason, but that was also because I can’t stand having Van Goghs around, you see; they’re more of those objects I can’t seem to live with. Have you ever stayed in a room with a Van Gogh on the wall for a long time? It’ll drive you loony after a while.” Keating was also at one time possessed by Goya. “Never before or since have I felt so strongly the presence of a master,” he recalled. “The old boy was standing there right next to me and he was guiding my hand so firmly that I felt I had no control over what was taking shape on the canvas.” The painting was a self-portrait of Goya which Keating kept and hung in his bedroom with no intention to sell. In the book Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age, author Jonathon Keats wrote: “Evidently he believed past masters recognized themselves in him as he saw himself in them. His creation of their self-portraits showed their shared sympathies across time and nationality: Painters belonged to the same culture, and could understand each other in ways that museum professionals and peddlers could never comprehend. Yet Keating was not condoning an alternate elite. He considered the culture open to anyone willing to wield a brush.”

Keating loved to teach painting but didn’t have the education to be a professor. Instead he taught classes in a London railway station to young painters in exchange for old books and tobacco. One of his keenest students was a sixteen-year-old girl named Jane Kelly. He taught her everything he knew about painting and restoration and eventually despite their ages became lovers. “I think any artist who has learnt on a one-to-one basis from a master must love the master,” Kelly explained to the Toronto Star in 1979. “It’s absolute falling in love with the person and all they stand for, in the same way that one falls in love with Rembrandt.” Keating, a rogue who’s favourite painter to defraud was Rembrandt, proved to be a bit vulgar, even to his family audience during his dinner-hour TV show. “Putting little bits of lipstick on the ladies is a delightful occupation,” he says while painting the lips of the young girls in his Degas episode, “but taking it off’s better.” Kelly played a large part in selling and distributing Keating’s sextons.

Inevitably, they were found out by a journalist of The Times of London named Geraldine Norman, who was tipped off after writing an article investigating thirteen fake Samuel Palmer watercolours. The person who tipped her off was Jane Kelly’s brother. Keating openly confessed shortly after an article by Norman ran in The Times with allegations of forgery. Apparently Keating wasn’t upset with Norman for exposing him, and felt a deep connection to her husband Frank, who was a thief-turned-playwright best known for his Cockney comedy Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be. The two became quick friends and within hours Frank agreed to write Tom’s autobiography. Hundreds of journalists and photographers were there at the launch of The Fake’s Progress. Keating and Kelly were both finally arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud in 1977. Kelly pleaded guilty, promising to testify against Keating. They had separated many years before the trial, and she said he had a Svengali-like control over her. Keating pleaded not guilty on the basis that he was working under the guiding spirit of the masters. Shockingly, the case against Keating was dropped completely due to his injuries after a near-fatal motorcycle accident, but Kelly had to serve time in prison because she pleaded guilty. Keating recovered shortly after the charges were dropped and enjoyed his new found success and fame. He was offered his TV program and his sexton blakes, now being shown as “Tom Keatings” were becoming valuable in their own right. His paintings were being sold at a gallery across the street from the courthouse. There are people forging Tom Keating’s forgeries now.

Watching Tom Keating On Painters that day, seeing how easily and confidently he painted his imitations, how quickly he turned out each picture, made me feel even more confused about my own painting. The landscape I had been struggling with, of the wheat fields and apple orchards on the farm I was staying in, could be quickly resolved and finished if I just imitated Van Gogh. I already imitate all of the masters. That’s why I started painting—because I thought it would be a bit of a joke to paint naive versions of masters works as a young girl with no art training. One of my first attempts was a finger painting of figures playing ring-around-the-rosy, after Matisse. I relate to Keating’s simple sentimentality and romanticism for the past. It’s so easy to feel like an imposter. I think that the only way to overcome that feeling is with faith, a sort of channelling of the old masters spirits. I also feel that I’ve channelled those that inspired me. Am I channeling Tom Keating? At the end of every episode Keating stops painting just as quickly as he started, turns to the audience abruptly and announces quietly, sometimes a bit disappointingly, “I think that’s about all I can do on that. Thank you very much.”