Exposing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Art Forger

Ask 100 people what they think an art forger does and 99 will tell you, “They copy paintings.” In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. And if you think about it, the reason why is obvious. No serious art forger could copy a painting simply because the original already exists. All you’d have to do to prove the copy is fake is point to the original in the museum and say, “There’s the real one.” To really make a forgery, you have to make something new that never existed and give it a reason for being born.

Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch forger of the 1930s and ’40s, was a mediocre painter, but he was a master ager, having invented the use of phenol and formaldehyde—Bakelite plastic—to make his paint dry and crack from the inside out to simulate age. Van Meegeren’s technique fooled the experts. He could bring his painting to a museum and say, “I got this from a wealthy Italian family who wishes not to be named,” without any further explanation. That was not possible in my time, and this points out an important secret of modern forgery. For me, the documented history of the painting—the provenance—was more important than the work itself.

For a forger, drawing and painting and aging is just the beginning and most obvious part of the process. To really be a forger, you must have a voracious appetite for information and a sharp eye for detail. As you learn and read and watch, you are always on the lookout for a weak point, an opening, a mistake, any bit of uncertainty that allows your work a chance to exist. You are looking for plausibility. If you think about it, the key to being a great forger is not being a great painter but rather a convincing storyteller.

When I was working with [art dealer] Carl Marcus, I traded a piece of art glass for a couple of Rembrandt etchings, Angel Departing from the Family of Tobias and Portrait of Jan Cornelius Sylvius. At the time, I didn’t know much about the subject, but it seemed incredible that I could so easily own an actual Rembrandt. I was thrilled by the idea and brought the etchings to LACMA, to an expert named Ebria Feinblatt, so that I could learn more about them. She looked at the etchings very carefully through her magnifying glass and told me that Angel Departing was a valuable print made during the lifetime of Rembrandt, then gently broke it to me that Jan Cornelius Sylvius was actually a forgery, though a masterful one. I was, of course, disappointed about the forgery, though the etchings had started the wheels turning.

Experts say that Rembrandt did three hundred etchings, but maybe only ten preparatory drawings remain. To me this suggested that the drawings may not have been considered important works of art in their own right and may have been discarded. I myself was less interested in the etchings; I wanted to make a preparatory drawing, which seemed rarer, more physical, and more intriguing.

In the early 1900s, an expert from the British Museum named Arthur Hind created a detailed catalog of every etching by Rembrandt, full of minutiae and little footnotes about how the etching was made, who had owned it, and what the experts thought about it. As I pored over the listings, I searched for any piece of information that I could use as provenance—any excuse to make my drawing real. Finally, I noticed a little footnote on an etching named Naked Woman Seated on a Mound, and one of its details stood out.

In his book, Hind says that there was no preparatory drawing for Naked Woman. However, he quotes an expert, who quotes another expert who thought that a preparatory drawing for Naked Woman had been made and that an Englishman, John Malcolm, had owned the drawing in the 1800s. Hind did not agree, but he wasn’t 100 percent sure. Instead of saying that the drawing definitely didn’t exist, he just said, “I see no evidence to convict myself of error.” It seems like an insignificant quibble between experts, but that little touch of uncertainty was all that I needed. Now, I had a beautiful provenance that was just waiting for me to make a drawing.

First, I found a book of Rembrandt etchings that showed each work in its exact details and dimensions. Then I made a photocopy of the image. I covered the photocopy with graphite using the side of a pencil and put this graphite-covered photocopy face up on a light table. Then I placed a sheet of paper on top. Pressing on the back with a stylus, I traced over the photocopy, getting the graphite lines to transfer onto the underside of my paper like a carbon copy. When I turned it over, I had the mirror image of the photocopied etching with the exact same orientation that a preparatory drawing would have had. I went over those lines with black chalk, as Rembrandt would have done, practicing the whole process many times on ordinary paper, until I felt confident.

When I was ready, I did my final version on the antique paper I had gotten from a three-hundred-year-old book with perfect paper. It was yellow with age and even had a watermark, a bunch of grapes that could be traced to northern Europe in the 1600s.

For centuries, people who collected art have stamped it with their names or identifying marks the way that you might write your name in a paperback book you’ve bought. With art, marks and stamps could be used as a physical provenance tracking where a work had been and who had owned it through its lifetime. Hind’s experts claimed that the drawing had belonged to John Malcolm. I needed to create some trace or mark of his ownership, and to do it I turned to Frits Lugt. Lugt was an obsessive cataloger of collector’s marks whose work Les Marques de Collections de Dessins et d’Estampes was the absolute reference for establishing the provenance of old master drawings and prints.

In this book… I was able to find Malcolm’s stamp, which depicted an I for “Ioannes” (Latin for “John”) and an M for “Malcolm,” with a tower in between the letters.

From my other reading, I had learned about Nicolaes Flinck, an art dealer who had collected many Rembrandt prints and etchings and who was the son of Rembrandt’s favorite student. I thought my drawing should bear his stamp, too, which as I had seen in Lugt was a cursive letter F that Nicolaes placed on the lower-right front side of the art.

I asked a printer I had been using to make certificates to help make my stamps. He had a small letterpress that he typically used to print betting slips that bookies handed out to gamblers, and he loved doing anything that was out of the ordinary. I now had a preparatory drawing that experts had said might have existed. It was executed faithfully, and with its history marked by physical stamps, it now had a provenance. My drawing had become a plausible precursor to Naked Woman Seated on a Mound. I had contemplated selling my Rembrandt drawing, but instead I kept it in my safe, as a souvenir of this fascinating case.

I stamped my Jan Cornelius Sylvius forgery with Flinck and Malcolm marks and sold it along with Angel Departing from the Family of Tobias to the Center Art Gallery in Hawaii, for $16,500. It was far too little, less than many Chagall or Dalí or Miró prints would have cost. When I pointed this out to the gallery, a light went off for them. Pretty soon, everyone wanted a Rembrandt etching. Even the artist’s drawings that had always been avidly collected were now being called the “new oils” because they had become so incredibly valuable.

Today, many of the forgeries like the ones I did would probably be impossible to pull off. Science would blow most of them out of the water. With radio carbon dating and spectroscopic analysis, they can tell which exact mine your pigments or your ink came from. With DNA and dendrochronology, you can tell whether the wood in your paint panel came from Italy or Poland or Japan. It’s what they use for finding a fake Stradivarius, and it doesn’t leave much room for romance.

Then, forgery was fun, like a challenging puzzle or a riddle to solve. I loved figuring out intriguing ways to make an artwork plausible. I loved doing everything perfect—leaving little hints that only the most knowledgeable experts would appreciate. It’s strange to say, but half the fun was imagining the oohs and aahs I would get and the little nods of appreciation I might receive. Without that, art forgery would have been just another job.

Excerpted from Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the World’s Greatest Art Forger by Tony Tetro and Giampiero Ambrosi. Copyright © 2022. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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