A Forger's Tale by Shaun Greenhalgh

Author:Shaun Greenhalgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

VIII.

All that glitters

DURING THE MID-EIGHTIES, most of my time was spent back in my dad’s garage, painting and working on all kinds of art and craft projects. Many of my efforts of those times were fairly substandard. For some reason, I seemed to have taken a step backwards as far as art was concerned. So a lot of them ended up being destroyed or, if they were in metal, recycled. I didn’t consider them a waste of time. Everything I did helped me become better and more accomplished. I managed to finish enough things to bring in a basic amount of cash by selling the odd picture or whatever to dealers around the North West. I also did a bit of work for Monks again and through him tried my hand for a short time at picture cleaning and restoring.

As one of the many strings to their bow, Mr and Mrs Monks and their associates in the Cotswolds had a line in picture-restoring and framing, mostly for the trade in London, though they took in work from wherever they could find it. I remember quite a lot of pictures coming over from Ireland. The main studio was the Cotswolds one, but the big pictures would be brought up to Monks’s place which had more space and less dust. I always thought it odd to have a picture-restoring set-up combined with woodworking. A dusty environment is the very last thing to have around pictures.

Cleaning and restoring ‘potboilers’ – mostly nineteenth-century oils – was something I didn’t take well to. The whole affair was tiresome, boring and also smelly. Having made up my mind to have a go, I stuck to my task for as long as I could. Or at least until I learnt the basics. Then, as usual, it would be time to learn something else. During that time I picked up quite a lot from the Monkses. Both he and she weren’t as barmy as I’d thought. But the most interesting stuff to do with old paintings was picked up from a woman called Carol.

She was a professional restorer and the daughter of the old widow who owned the Cotswolds business. She was married to a cabinetmaker who worked with Monks on cutting up the Victorian ‘monstrosities’ made of the best timber. They would then re-form the wood into ‘repro’ – small and elegant eighteenth-century pieces that sold for the best prices. I’m not sure where they got rid of it all. I suspect some of the nice things they made didn’t go as ‘repro’. But who knows.

From Carol I quickly learnt that the faking of oil paintings, which is usually imagined to be the stock in trade of the art forger, is just about the most difficult type of fake to do convincingly. The painting itself, the image painted in the style of a particular artist, isn’t the problem. Where it becomes difficult is enabling that picture to pass expert or scientific examination. A host of details must pass under the trained eye of the expert.

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