Caveat Emptor (27 page)

“Signed/dated/inscribed” meant that, in their opinion, the work was signed, dated, or inscribed by the artist.

“With signature/with date/with inscription” meant that they believed the signature, date, or inscription was by a hand other than the artist's. Only when they printed an artist's name all in uppercase, without a preceding qualification, did they believe the work to be by the actual artist, and even then they made it clear that it was
only an opinion
.

All this I found interesting, to say the least. But as I read on, I was amazed when I came to paragraphs in even smaller print entitled “Conditions of Business.” Pulling out my pocket magnifying glass, I dropped down to “Limited Warranty.” It began by stating that “Christie's warrants the authenticity of authorship on terms and conditions to the extent set forth herein.” All that sounded fine and good until I proceeded to read the “Terms and Conditions” set forth. In what can only be described as a masterpiece of duplicity, the terms and conditions made it clear (that is, if one had a law degree) that they warranted and guaranteed absolutely nothing. However, farther down, a paragraph entitled “Guarantee” made it plain for even the most thickheaded. It stated: “Subject to the obligations accepted by Christie's under this condition, neither the seller, Christie's, its employees, or agents is responsible for the correctness of any statement as to the authorship, origin, date, age, size, medium, attribution, genuineness, or provenance of any lot.”

With that settled, I read on, and came to a paragraph dealing with forgeries. It stated that if within a period of five years after the sale the buyer could establish scientifically that the painting purchased was a fake, the “Sole Remedy” would be a refund of monies paid. It further stated that “this remedy shall be in lieu of any other remedy which might otherwise be available as a matter of law.” God, I thought, if this Limited Warranty were any more limited, it wouldn't exist! So, after reading these conditions and realizing that:

A) Virtually nothing sold here was guaranteed to be what it claimed to be,

B) Neither the auction house nor the seller assumed any responsibility whatsoever,

C) Even if a buyer discovered a painting to be an outright fake, all he could do was ask for a refund,

I came to the conclusion that this was an engraved invitation to do business.

Two hours later, I was at the Sea Shell of Lisson Grove having fish and chips with José. After recounting my experiences at Christie's and briefing him on the subject of British sporting pictures, I pulled out the auction catalog, pointed out the different designations Christie's used to place paintings in various degrees of authenticity, and drew his attention to the so-called guarantee.

“Do you realize what that means?”

“What?” he asked.

“It means that I could put paintings in these salesrooms all day long and it's perfectly legal! It means that no matter what designation they use, they still offer no guarantee. And neither does the seller!”

“I thought you were reformed!” José said, and I assured him I was. “So, what now?” he asked.

“Tomorrow we are going to work,” I informed him. We spent the next two days at Foyles buying up every book on sporting art we could find, plus any back issues of auction catalogs on the subject. Then, posing as a novice collector, I paid visits to the Bond Street dealers who specialized in sporting paintings. They were happy to educate me on the finer points of equestrian portraiture and gave me copies of their catalogs. Finally, after buying a couple of worthless old paintings, some brushes and paints, and of course some rabbit-skin glue, we called up Miss Colley and headed for Bath.

The Bath and Bristol area of Britain, known as the West Country, now held a new meaning for me. As I began to study the pile of research material we had brought from London, I was surprised to learn that the West Country I'd come to love was in fact the very birthplace of British sporting art.

During the first decades of the eighteenth century, wealthy aristocrats began building grand Palladian-style mansions in the West Country of England. They were attracted by the country's beautiful rolling hills, hidden valleys, and numerous streams, and by the River Avon. There they could indulge in fox hunting and horse racing. By midcentury, during the reign of George III, the West Country was steeped in sporting culture, a way of life that carried a decadent stigma.

Rich young aristocrats could chase foxes by day, have dinner parties at night, and then go to Bath for the theater or gambling. They soon created a social controversy by having their favorite horses or dogs painted by local artists and then hanging the paintings in their drawing rooms!

In time, a number of artists began to cater to the demands of these new patrons and specialized in what we call “sporting art.” George Stubbs, one of the most talented, tried to put a respectable face on the genre, depicting the country gentlemen all decked out in their finery for a day at the hunt. Others, such as John Wootton, James Seymour, John Nost Sartorius, and Thomas Spencer, portrayed the sporting life the way it really was, capturing the dirty stables, brutish trainers, wily jockeys, and greedy gamblers.

I was fascinated by the history of sporting art. To enhance my understanding of the subject and get into the spirit of the project, we visited a number of the local estates open to the public, such as Longleat House, famous for its collection of Woottons.

With a little improvisation, I managed to prepare an “antique canvas” and then paint a red-coated gentleman atop a hunter as they jumped over a fence. It was painted in the style of Sartorius, one of the early sporting artists. After the picture was dried and aged with a light patina and fitted up in an antique frame found at a local flea market, I slipped it into a shopping bag (Harrods) and took the morning train to London. I strolled down Bond Street and went straight to Sotheby's. I found the valuation counter and got in line with half a dozen other people carrying their treasures, some in shopping bags like mine, others wrapped up in old blankets and twine.

It was all very routine. Experts were called from various departments to examine items if the screeners at the counter spotted any potential. For me, though, it was a very important moment. My turn came, and a lady carefully removed the painting from the bag, looking closely first at the front, then the back. “I'll call someone down from the picture department,” she said, and invited me to have a seat on the side. Then an astute-looking man in a pinstriped suit appeared, gave me a nod, and picked up the painting. “Hmm, looks like circle of Sartorius,” he informed me. “Maybe five hundred quid.” I gave him a nod. And with that he handed the picture to the lady at the counter, instructed her to write it up, and left.

Five minutes later, I was back out on Bond Street, my first auction-house contract in hand. It wasn't much. They had only estimated the painting at four hundred pounds. But it wasn't the money that counted. “Is it possible,” I asked José that night at dinner after our second bottle of wine, “that we could fool the British at their own game?” We were laughing too hard to take it seriously. But the answer came a month later, when a check arrived for six hundred pounds, two hundred pounds over the estimate.

This changed everything, and soon we were back in Florida.

The studio was cleaned up, a new stock of antique pictures for reconstitution was collected, a load of research books on the topic of British sporting paintings shipped from London was arranged on the shelves—and the “factory” was back in business. Just as important was what this meant to my psyche. I was incredibly happy, electrified—as if I'd been given a new life, a new direction, a new future.

As I began to study the many books and auction catalogs I'd accumulated, I was surprised to discover patterns in many of the British painters' works similar to those that I'd found in the work of the nineteenth-century American painters. Identifying these patterns, isolating and organizing them for quick comparisons, was one of the essential keys to creating a successful fake. Many of the British sporting artists, beginning in the eighteenth century with painters such as John Wootton and James Seymour, and continued by the likes of John Frederick Herring Sr. and John E. Ferneley in the nineteenth century, made exact or nearly exact copies of their own paintings in order to meet the demand of the local gentry to own portraits of famous racehorses. Just as Buttersworth placed the exact same yacht in different settings, and just as Heade copied the same flower or bird from painting to painting, so it was that many of the sporting artists copied the exact horse—or horse and jockey—from painting to painting in different settings while simply varying the colors.

The sporting genre wasn't confined to horses and jockeys but also included portraits of prized bulls, foxhounds, and even hogs. Any one of these subjects painted against the rolling hills of the West Country could be another “original.”

I began by creating a collection of twelve paintings using a mix-and-match technique of composition. The assortment consisted of fox chases in the “manner of Sartorius,” “nineteenth-century school” portraits of bulls and hogs, portraits of horses on landscapes “after Ferneley,” and finally horse and jockey portraits in the “circle of J. F. Herring,” my favorite among the nineteenth-century sporting artists.

Herring was one of the most sought-after equestrian painters of his time. He was famous for his bright, crystal-clear portraits of well-known jockeys astride champion racehorses. Herring often set his subjects in an open field with a landmark racetrack such as Doncaster in the distance.

The paintings varied in size, but couldn't exceed twenty-four by thirty inches so that they could fit into a large suitcase. I picked out six of the paintings, packed them into a suitcase, and booked a flight to London. My only worry was being stopped at customs, but I passed right through and went straight to the Vicarage Gate Hotel. The next day, I visited the local antique frame dealers. Each piece was fitted up with an antique frame complete with chips, scrapes, and missing pieces so they'd be right at home in the salesrooms. The next step was to distribute the paintings. I took one to Christie's, one to Sotheby's, and another to Bonhams. In each case, it was as simple as the first time I'd taken the “Sartorius” to Sotheby's.

I waited a few days and went back to the same houses with other paintings. “I can't believe how easy it was,” I reported to José over the phone. “I could do this all day long. They just look at the painting, give me a price, and then write it up. No questions asked.”

I flew back to Florida, packed up the other six paintings, and it was tallyho. A few days later, I was back in London. We didn't have to wait long before checks issued in pounds sterling and written from banks like Lloyds, Barclays, and National Westminster started arriving in the mail.

José and I were busy day and night hunting for old canvases, planning out the next collection for export, and thinking of ways to perfect the routine. For instance, to avoid becoming too familiar a sight at the auction houses, I studied the different types who routinely appear at the valuation counter and altered my appearance accordingly—sometimes showing up in a flat cap and wax coat, just in with a find from a country market. Other times, especially after arriving in the UK with a deep Florida suntan, I'd play the glamour role, complete with cashmere overcoat and Hermès scarf, just another society playboy discreetly parting with a family heirloom produced from a Dunhill shopping bag. I even worked on perfecting a British accent. These measures, along with the fact that I often got different experts to evaluate my pictures, kept me way below the radar.

London, I was convinced, held a special magic for me. I felt at home there, as though it was where I had always belonged. I loved the history, the streets, the shops, cafés, and pubs. José felt the same. Professionally, London offered me all I could ask for.

To this day, London is still the center of the antique print trade. For me, these shops served as an important source of research material that was soon translated into new paintings. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was common for engravings to be copied from paintings. It can also work the other way around. A painting can be copied from a print of the period.

Tucked away in a mews near Covent Garden was Grosvenor Prints, one of the oldest shops in town, boasting one of the largest accumulations of period prints in the world. Housed in a fine Georgian building with high ceilings and tall windows, it had walls lined with long, shallow drawers. Within the drawers were portfolios, worn with age and tied with ribbons, encompassing prints of every imaginable subject. The proprietor, a large, portly man dressed in a dark suit, looked like an Oxford professor and rarely moved from a complex of antique desks piled with books. Instead, he directed an assistant, a pretty French girl, to the drawer that might contain the portfolio on the subject I required. The aproned assistant would then roll up an old wheeled library ladder to the desired drawer, climb up, locate the portfolio, and, with a sweet smile, deposit it on a table for my undisturbed inspection. The place looked as if it hadn't been touched since the nineteenth century and, if the ghost of Hogarth is anywhere to be found, I'm certain it's haunting the Grosvenor Print Shop.

Another major attraction for me was London's antique-frame dealers. I spent days hanging out in their musty old shops, making friends with the proprietors and often rolling up my sleeves and helping out. The weekly antique markets like Portobello, Camden Passage, and Bermondsey assured me an easy and steady supply of artifacts destined for reconstitution.

Culturally, London offered us everything we could want and more. We went to the opera, symphony, theater, and museums. And with plenty of money, we were frequently to be found along Jermyn Street, where one can find the finest men's specialty shops in the world. We bought our shirts at Hilditch & Key, cashmere sports coats at Dunhill, and country outfits at Cordings. Indeed, Samuel Johnson's famous saying “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” rang totally true.