Tom Keating

British art forger

  • Born: March 1, 1917
  • Birthplace: London, England
  • Died: February 12, 1984
  • Place of death: Colchester, Essex, England

Cause of notoriety: Keating fooled the art and antiques world with his impeccable copies of paintings done by well-known artists. He was charged with conspiracy to defraud by art forgery, but the charges were dropped because of his frail health.

Active: 1950’s-1979

Locale: United Kingdom and Tenerife, Spain

Early Life

Tom Keating (KEET-ihng) was born into poverty in southeast London. His father was a house painter and decorator, and Tom and his brothers learned the trade, though Keating’s ambition had always been to be a painter. At the outbreak of World War II, Keating was drafted into the navy as a stoker and sent to Singapore. After the Japanese invasion, he escaped to Australia, returning to Great Britain to work on Atlantic convoys. These wartime experiences caused severe emotional trauma, and he left military service in January, 1944. He married a local woman, Ellen, by whom he had two children. After the war and after working as a house painter and at other jobs, he entered Goldsmiths College on a scholarship to study art. He finished there in 1952 but failed to gain a diploma, a disappointment that always stayed with him.

Unable to earn much as a painter, he supplemented his income by cleaning and restoring frames and paintings, mainly for small-time antiques dealers. Sometimes this restoration meant patching and painting over original parts of the art piece, and Keating soon found he had a facility for re-creating such paintings. This lead him to paint copies or imitations of some of the paintings he had seen or studied in various art galleries, many of which he gave away or sold cheaply to pay for his living expenses. He called these works his “Sexton Blakes” (or just “Sextons”), a slang term rhyming with “fakes.”

Criminal Career

One of the artists Keating particularly copied was the little-known Canadian artist Cornelius Krieghoff, an early painter of North American scenes. Keating claimed to have produced approximately two hundred copies of Krieghoff’s works over the years. In the 1950’s, Keating also began to copy British watercolorists and had a particular admiration for Tom Girtin, a contemporary of William Turner. Later, in the 1960’s, he came to admire Samuel Palmer, another nineteenth century Romantic British painter. He also copied German Expressionist painting, French Impressionists, and the Dutch masters. In all, he claimed to have produced some two thousand fakes in twenty-five years.

Keating claimed that this copying was not merely a technical feat but involved getting inside the imagination of the artist and even feeling “possessed” by the dead artist’s spirit. At such intense times, he could produce ten or twenty paintings over the course of a few days. He relied heavily on friends in the antiques business, who supplied him with old canvases, frames, and drawing paper. Sometimes Keating would try to reproduce old paint techniques; at other times, he used modern acrylics or even household emulsion paint mixed with powder poster paint. He even found old frames discarded from leading auctioneers and repainted the pictures that had once been held in them.

Keating did receive some significant commissions as a restorer, including various collections in ancestral and stately homes in Scotland and East Anglia and even at Marlborough House, London, one of the royal residences.

His marriage fell apart in the 1960’s. For a while, he lived with Jane Kelly, whom he had trained as a restorer and cleaner; they moved to East Anglia but spent time in Tenerife, Spain. It was Kelly who took many of Keating’s forgeries to dealers and auctions for disposal. The couple broke up in 1974.

In 1976, Geraldine Norman, an art critic for The Times of London, was writing a piece on the paintings of Samuel Palmer and the possibility that some were forgeries. She was particularly interested in a group of thirteen Palmers that had been sold through a London antiques dealer, Legers. After careful research involving a number of Palmer experts, Norman, with her husband Frank, published the first of her articles in July, 1976. Further investigation led her to Keating, and a second article, on August 10, 1976, mentioned his name. Keating immediately replied to the charge in a letter published in The Times on August 20, admitting not only to the Palmer fakes but also to a number of other forgeries. He contacted the Normans privately and offered to tell them his story.

London-area art dealers initially were not sure how to handle the admissions, but Legers and the Redfern Gallery decided to refer the matter to the metropolitan police force, which investigated their specific complaints. Keating’s defense was that he had always introduced deliberate mistakes into his fakes, used modern paint, or in some other way given clues to the paintings’ inauthenticity.

The police decided to prosecute. Keating was charged in 1977 with conspiracy to defraud, and the case was scheduled for trial in 1979. However, Keating’s health had been badly undermined by years of smoking and drinking, and his lungs were further damaged by the various chemicals used in his paintings, which were often done in cramped, unventilated conditions. The stress of the court case broke Keating’s health, and the case was dropped. Despite some improvement to his health, he died in 1984.

Impact

The case against Tom Keating turned Keating himself into a celebrity. His interviews with the Normans were chronicled in 1977 as an autobiography titled Fake’s Progress. He was asked to do a series of television interviews regarding the techniques of the old masters, which were later sold as videotapes. More extraordinary, his forgeries, of which he was never able to give a full list, began to take on a value of their own, fetching up to ten thousand pounds each. In a strange twist, other artists began to forge Keating’s works.

The case also exposed the dearth of art expertise in the antiques business and the lack of any self-policing. It also raised questions of the difference between “imitations,” which have always occurred in the history of art, and deliberate “forgeries,” as well as inflated prices associated with certain artists as opposed to others.

Bibliography

Keating, Tom, with Geraldine and Frank Norman. Fake’s Progress. London: Hutchinson, 1977. Keating’s own account of his forgery career, as told to the Normans. It reveals a very self-aware artist who was as much a rebel as a criminal.

Keating, Tom, with Geraldine Norman, ed. The Tom Keating Catalogue Illustrations. London: Hutchinson, 1977. The Times art correspondent who broke the Keating story introduces some of the paintings Keating produced.

Phillips, David. Exhibiting Authenticity. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997. Raises the same philosophical questions that Keating raised in his defense.

Radnstis, Sandor. The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Puts the Keating story in a wider context and raises some of the artistic, moral, and philosophical questions about integrity and authenticity in art.