Eric Hebborn
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Eric Hebborn (1934-1996) was a British painter and art forger and later an author.
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[edit] Early life
Eric Hebborn was born to a Cockney family in 1934. According to him, his mother beat him constantly. At the age of eight, he set fire to his school and was sent to Borstal reformatory. There teachers encouraged his painting talent and he became connected to Maldon Art Club where he held his first exhibitions at the age of fifteen. He also later claimed that it was there he acquired homosexual habits.[1]
At the Malden Art Club, Hebborn befriended art restorer George Aczel and began his forgery career —he started altering older landscape paintings or painting new landscapes on old blank canvases so that they could be sold for more money.
Hebborn joined the Royal Academy and flourished there. He won the Silver Award and received a scholarship to a British art school in Rome in 1959.[2] He had became part of the international art scene and formed acquaintances with many artists and art historians, including the British spy, Sir Anthony Blunt in 1960, with whom he is rumored to have been romantically involved. Eventually Hebborn decided to settle in Italy and founded a private gallery there.
[edit] Life as a forger
When contemporary critics did not seem to appreciate his own paintings, Hebborn began to copy the style of old masters such as; Corot, Castiglione, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, Rubens, Jan Breughel and Piranesi. Art historians such as Sir John Pope Hennessy declared his paintings to be both authentic and stylistically brilliant and his paintings were sold for tens of thousands of pounds through art auction houses, including Christie's. According to Hebborn himself, he had sold thousands of fake paintings, drawings and sculptures. Most of the paintings Hebborn created were his own work, made to resemble the style of historical artists—and not slightly altered or combined copies of older work.
In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Conrad Oberhuber, was examining a pair of paintings he had purchased for the museum from Colnaghi a seemingly reputable old-master dealer in London, one by Savelli Sperandio and the other by Francesco del Cossa. Oberhuber noticed that two paintings had been painted on the same kind of canvas, and in same style.
Oberhuber was taken aback by the similarities of the two pieces and decided to alert his colleagues in the art world. Upon finding another fake "Cossa" at the Morgan Library, this one having passed through the hands of at least three experts, Oberhuber contacted Colnaghi, the source of all three fakes. Colnaghi, in turn, informed the worried curators that all three had been acquired from Hebborn.[1]
Colnaghi waited a full eighteen months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit. Thus Hebborn continued to create his forgeries, changing his style slightly to avoid any further unmasking, and manufactured at least 500 more paintings between 1978 and 1988.[2]
[edit] Confession and Criticism
In 1984 Hebborn confessed to the forgeries —and feeling as though he had done nothing wrong, he used the press generated by his confession to denigrate the art world.
In his autobiography Drawn to Trouble (1991), Hebborn continued his assault on the art world, critics and art dealers. He boasted of how easily he had fooled supposed art experts and how eager the art dealers were to declare his works authentic to maximize their profits. Hebborn also claimed that some of the works that had been proven genuine were actually his fakes and that Sir Anthony Blunt had not been his lover, as stated in some articles. On one page he offers a side-by-side comparison of his forgeries of Henri Leroy by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and the authentic drawing, challenging "art experts" to tell them apart. [1]
On January 8, 1996, shortly after the publication of Italian edition of his book The Art Forger's Handbook, Eric Hebborn was found lying is a street in Rome, his skull crushed with a blunt instrument. He died in hospital on January 11, 1996.[1]
The provenance of many paintings connected to Hebborn, some of which hang in renowned collections, continues to be debated.
[edit] Hebborn's books
- Drawn to Trouble (1991)
- Art Forger's Handbook (1997, posthumous)
