Philip Mould

The Dark Art of Fakery

I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger Who Swindled the Nazis

By

Bloomsbury 276pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

Art forgers have a tendency to present themselves as bohemian rebels, heroically cocking a snook at an immoral art market. Scratch a little deeper, however, and the reality is rather more mundane. Most of them are embittered or failed artists who behave no differently from credit-card fraudsters, except that they use rather more talent to swindle their victims. I met two in my time: Eric Hebborn and Tom Keating. They both struck me as disingenuous types, Hebborn particularly so, a drunk who was happy to wear the mantle of the artistic rebel to disguise an absence of principle.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us