CHAPTER ELEVEN

The British School

Although it was rumored that the FBI’s New York offices had enough of my paintings to open a gallery of their own, nothing was traced back to me. Apparently the paintings had passed through too many hands. The closest they got was to Tony and the picker, but that was bad enough. Tony was on the hook for a “Peto” he’d sold to a Wall Street stockbroker. According to Tony, who kept in touch with me by pay phone, “She tried to sell the painting uptown and found out it was a ‘bazooka.’” He explained, “She had a fuckin’ cow and called the cops!” And as for the picker, he was sunk when he tried to float yet another “Buttersworth” at an antique show in New York City. Word spread about the painting, and he was paid a visit.

Fortunately, neither of them was easily intimidated. Both claimed the paintings had been found at flea markets. The feds filled out their reports and let them know, “There’s an investigation going on” and “We will be getting back to you.”

Months passed, and nothing happened. José and I kept the doors locked and quietly ran the restoration studio and antique operation. But every time there was a knock at the door or the phone rang, I thought it was either the feds or the “overcoats.”

Only after a year passed without incident did I begin to relax. Life for us had undergone a change. For one thing, we had no more easy money to burn, no more trips to Miami, no more nights on the town in New York. For the first time, I realized how dangerous my occupation was, and I swore off forgery for good. Thanks to the money we had invested in real estate and stocks, we were in good shape. After we were convinced the heat was off, I thought it would be therapeutic for me to shut down the business for a while and do some traveling. We left for London.

A friend had given me a tip on a discreet little hotel tucked away in a quiet street behind Kensington Place, not far from Notting Hill Gate. The Vicarage Gate Hotel was run by an English family and was very traditional. It maintained an “early morning call” in which loud bells rang throughout the old town house, rousing the guests out of bed for the hearty breakfast served in the dining room.

We spent our time shopping along Regent Street, visiting antique markets, and hanging out at cafés. After a few weeks, we decided to get away to someplace quiet where I could relax and make a plan for the future. We rented a car, took the M4 west, and headed for the city of Bath.

Bath is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was built in the eighteenth century by British aristocrats seeking a private paradise away from London. Influenced by the Grand Tour, they adopted a Palladian design for the architecture. Two hours later, we were pulling up in front of the Royal Crescent, a breathtakingly beautiful row of columned town houses arranged in a crescent overlooking their own park. Once the private residences of aristocrats, the town houses had been divided into flats and were now inhabited by ordinary people. A local woman told us that number 22 was one of the few town houses of the Crescent that was still intact as a private home, and that it was owned by an eccentric old lady who, she said, “might rent a room to you if you look presentable.”

All forty-three town houses that make up the Royal Crescent have white doors. The owner of number 22, Miss Wellesley Colley, a descendant of the duke of Wellington, had decided one day to paint her door yellow. The Bath Historic Society demanded she paint it white as before. Miss Colley told them to piss off, and a novel legal battle ensued. The residence was dubbed “the Scandal House” in the newspapers, and the case gained national attention. It caused a deep divide among the residents of the Crescent. Two years and tens of thousands of pounds in lawyers’ fees later, Miss Colley prevailed and maintained her yellow door.

We rang the bell and were greeted by the notorious Miss Colley herself. A woman of about eighty, she was very British, very old-fashioned, and very direct. Without hesitation, she offered us the grand drawing room complete with an adjoining bedroom, marble fireplace, eighteenth-century furniture, and views of the park.

Number 22 had been in the Colley family for generations and was virtually unchanged since the eighteenth century. Much of the furniture was original to the house, and even the bathrooms had hardly been modernized. Occasionally I sat down and had tea with Miss Colley as she recounted for me her life in the grand old house. But these days, it was showing its wear, and Miss Colley was the last in her family line.

The more we stayed in Britain, the more we liked it, especially Bath. For the next two years, we only went back to Florida briefly, to check on our property and take care of any pressing business. We divided our time between London, where we stayed at the Vicarage Gate Hotel, and Bath, where we stayed at the Royal Crescent. The countryside around Bath is very beautiful, and I tried, as part of my rehabilitation, to paint scenes of the rolling hills and the River Avon. But something was missing. I was unfulfilled. I felt like a professional poker player forced to play for toothpicks.

Back in London, I began to spend time at the auction houses, just to look at the paintings and sit in at the sales. Then, one fine day, I strolled into Christie’s just as an exhibition of British sporting pictures had gone on view. Although I’d seen examples of the genre before, I’d never taken much interest in paintings of horses, dogs, and fox chases. However, in my new Anglophiled state, I began to develop an appreciation of these pictures. How easy they would be to paint, I thought, after studying a few of them closely. I also noted the old antique frames that surrounded them.

I caught the attention of a department expert and asked him the estimate of a picture of a foxhound that caught my eye. Probably in the hope of cultivating a new American client, he gave me my first lesson in the school of British sporting paintings. He pointed out the highlights of the exhibition, taking me from painting to painting. He showed me a Stubbs, a Wootton, and a Herring. He explained what to look for in a superior painting and then, as a parting gesture, gave me a complimentary copy of the sale catalog to study at my leisure.

I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting José for dinner, so I strolled over to Ponti’s at Covent Garden, ordered a cappuccino, and studied the catalog. I began by flipping through the pages and glancing at the illustrations of paintings with the artists’ names directly beneath them. This exercise would familiarize me with the artists and what each was noted for. As I scanned the pictures, though, another issue presented itself. I noticed that the name of almost every artist was preceded by an interesting collection of phrases, such as “Attributed to,” “Signed,” “In the circle of,” “Studio of,” and others. My curiosity piqued, I searched the catalog and found an explanation of the cryptic phrases in the back pages under the heading “Explanation of Cataloging Practice.” In small print under the heading was an explanation of what each phrase meant.

“Attributed to” meant that, in Christie’s opinion, the work was created in the period of the artist and might be in whole or part the work of the artist.

“Signed” meant that, in their qualified opinion, the signature on the painting was the signature of the artist.

“Bears signature” meant the signature might be that the artist.

“Manner of” meant the work was in the style of the artist, but of a later date (emphasis mine).

“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.

As I continued to study the work of artists like Seymour, Wootton, Herring, and Ferneley, I began to understand their way of thinking, their way of visualizing, the way they set up a painting, the way they designed cloud patterns, the rolling hills of the landscape with hedgerows, and the colors of their palettes. Designing new paintings in their styles came effortlessly to me. I also enjoyed inventing original sporting pictures—not based on the style of any particular artist of the period—just to see if the British would buy them. They did. But the more I spent time in the West Country and the more my love and enthusiasm for sporting art grew, the more I believed I’d finally found myself artistically.

What a pity I hadn’t been born in the eighteenth century! I lamented. I was certain I could have done well. Here I was in Bath, in the land of Jane Austen, right on Milsom Street, a street no doubt familiar to artists and the aristocrats who commissioned their work. The grand houses were still here and many of the paintings too. But, alas, I had arrived a couple of hundred years too late. I loved Bath and the country life so much that I felt misunderstood, victimized by fate, and stuck in a century where I didn’t belong.

As paintings “In the style of Sartorius,” “In the manner of Herring,” and “In the circle of Ferneley” began hitting the block at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, and Bonhams, I was averaging around three thousand dollars for each one. My pictures almost always doubled or tripled the house’s estimates. It was an intoxicating thrill to see my pictures hanging in the exhibitions and watch the experts examine them. I remembered the first time I’d visited Sotheby’s and stood in the exhibition rooms, never dreaming that one day my own pictures would hang there too. It was an even bigger thrill to attend the sales and watch them sell. We always celebrated with a night at the theater and dinner at Simpson’s-in-the-strand. Afterward, we often walked around Leicester Square. I was drawn to the artists who sat there and did portraits for a few pounds. I liked to watch them work, but sometimes it frightened me, and I wondered if one day I’d wind up there too.

This routine went on for about a year but it was not without its problems. First, there was the matter of customs. If I had been stopped in a random customs check, like they often made in Britain’s airports, I would have had to explain away a couple of suitcases loaded with British paintings. And using suitcases limited the size of the pictures to a maximum of twenty-four by thirty inches.

I reduced the risk of the first problem by finding out how people were selected for a search by the customs agents. A travel book published for college students went into the subject at some length. The book described several profiles the sharp-eyed agents look for in flagging down a traveler. For instance, single young men with long hair and an unkempt appearance, wearing jeans, could be targets for a marijuana search. Nervous-looking people in a rush could be smugglers of some kind.

The book pointed out that to avoid being stopped, one should dress conservatively and neatly. Be clean-cut. Don’t be in a rush. Don’t look around as you are waiting for your bags. And, above all, never look at the agents. In other words, just blend in with the crowd and go with the flow, ignoring the agents completely. So my standard outfit was khaki pants, a blue Oxford shirt, a Baracuta jacket, and penny loafers. As an added touch, I always carried along one of those thick British travel guides that I conspicuously displayed in my hand as I pushed my cart along.

After a year or so, the suitcase maneuver gave way to Phase II. In the mid-eighties, the English country look became very popular. Fashion designers such as Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley, who copied English design in their clothing, now moved into English home furnishings. Top decorators were in the salesrooms, buying up all the English furniture and paintings they could find. The auction houses snapped up my pictures as fast as I walked in the door with them. But the more paintings I placed in the London market, the more I had to diversify them in size and subject matter in order not to raise suspicions. As I became ever more familiar with the market, I learned that British marine paintings, which included those of James and Thomas Buttersworth, went hand in glove with the sporting pictures. In fact, the two genres were often featured together in the sales catalogs.

Once again, I was running around London buying up every book I could find on the subject. The genre of British marine painting stems from Britain’s glorious maritime history. From the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a progression of artists specialized in painting everything from the majestic battleships that protected the island fortress to beautiful clipper ships that imported goods from faraway places like India and China.

During the eighteenth century, British marine painting was dominated by such artists as Thomas Whitcombe and Charles Brooking. Later in the nineteenth century came artists like Thomas Buttersworth and Nicholas Condy. Since no respectable English drawing room is complete without a painting of a ship on the sea with the white cliffs of Dover on the horizon, it was essential that I include these paintings in my repertoire as well.

The problem of transporting larger paintings into Britain was solved one afternoon after I had dropped off a few paintings at the auction houses. With some time to kill, I decided to view a collection of nineteenth-century European paintings on display in Sotheby’s exhibition rooms. Always ready to learn more, I recognized the expert in charge and struck up a conversation with him about the condition of a painting on display. He remarked that the canvas was extremely dry and brittle and would soon require a relining.

Relining is a process whereby an antique painting is rebacked with a new canvas. The antique painting is carefully removed from its stretcher. Then it is placed facedown on a table with a perfectly flat surface. Next, a special glue or wax is spread all over the back of the antique canvas. Then a sheet of new canvas is pressed down over the antique canvas and flattened down under pressure by various methods until the two pieces of canvas fuse together as one. The painting is then remounted onto a new stretcher. The procedure reinforces the original canvas, which has become fragile with age, and restores a flat, even surface to the painting. It is a common procedure, and nearly every painting found in a museum has been relined. While I pretended to be ignorant of a process that I routinely performed on customers’ paintings back in Florida, the kind expert was eager to show me an example of what he was talking about. He removed a painting from the wall. Relining, he explained, is nothing new. In fact, relining antique paintings became common over a hundred years ago, but the particular relining he wanted to show me was of special interest.

Leaning the painting against the wall, we each got down on one knee and took a close look. It was an example of an old type of relining that I’d seen many times before—but about the history of which I had known nothing. This particular technique was called a “screw-press lining,” the expert said as he proceeded to point out its unique characteristics. He estimated that the example we were studying was from the first decade of the twentieth century.

The canvas used for the relining had a common broadcloth weave. The stretcher used to replace the original was about three inches wide and had sturdy square joints at the corners. It was a standard stretcher used at the time, sometimes referred to as an “English stretcher.” The keys used to expand the joints had rounded heads, and there was a cross brace for added strength. Another important characteristic was the beveled edge of the stretcher over which the flap or border of the relining canvas was wrapped and secured, first with a row of tacks placed along the very edge of the stretcher and then with glue to hold down the last inch of fabric to the beveled edge.

The expert went on to explain that the Industrial Revolution had produced a great demand for British paintings and old masters. The paintings were needed to fill up the mansions of a new class of wealthy industrialists in search of an instant pedigree. There existed at that time a huge reservoir of antique paintings that had never been restored. In order to make these paintings salable, large restoration mills sprang up around London and processed literally thousands of paintings. Art dealers like Duveen made millions selling these pictures to their nouveau riche clients.

Before the screw press, the adhesive used in the relining process had been beeswax. A layer of hot liquefied wax was applied between the old and new canvases, and the two were then pressed together with a hot iron. It was a long and tedious process, one that left a messy coat of wax on the back of the canvas. To speed up the relining process, the screw press was invented. It resembled a large book press. The antique painting was placed facedown on a steel bed. The back of the painting was then painted with a coat of water-based glue. Then the new canvas was placed over it. Finally, a large, flat sheet of steel was lowered down by turning a series of screws until the antique and new canvases were pressed together under great pressure. The result was a very flat relining. When viewed from the back, all that could be seen was a clean, dry sheet of canvas.

The relined painting was then mounted onto the standard three-inch-wide, square-jointed English stretcher. Although years of oxidation had turned this stretcher and canvas dark brown, thousands of these relinings are still holding up fine today, creating a characteristic appearance familiar to collectors and experts.

When my expert was finished, I helped him lift the painting back onto the hook and thanked him for a most enlightening afternoon. I walked over to Ponti’s and over a cappuccino reviewed the contracts I had collected from the day’s deliveries. But my mind kept wandering back to the expert’s dissertation on relining. If I could simulate a screw-press relining, I thought, I could solve a number of problems at once. First of all, if I relined my paintings, I might no longer have to hunt up antique specimens to reconstitute. Instead, I could find cloth of the same weave used by the artists of the period, apply gesso, and use it as my canvas for the painting. The challenge would be to make it crack properly, and the relining would have to be “aged” in a way that would make it appear that it had been done a long time ago.

If I could paint a picture on modern cloth, which is pliable, and then reline it, I should have no problem rolling it up. And, I reasoned, if I could roll them up, I could easily bring larger paintings into Britain. The only problem would be that I would have to mount them onto the stretchers after I got to London. The idea fascinated me. Would it be possible to make fakes out of entirely new materials and fool the auction-house experts with them? I would have to revamp my whole operation.

Before I left London, I stopped and bought a legal pad. I spent the flight home in a state of excitement, drawing up a step-by-step plan to manufacture fakes out of modern materials.

Back in Florida, I searched through my inventory of old paintings and found a perfect example of a screw-press relining that had been applied to a second-rate eighteenth-century British portrait. In the privacy of my studio, I took the painting completely apart. The stretcher went straight to an accomplished woodworker. I had him make me a dozen stretchers and keys in varying sizes, constructed exactly like the old one. The tacks were no different from carpet tacks still used in upholstery work. A handful of them bought at the local hardware store went into a jar of saltwater for some quick rust.

Next, I had to find canvas that would resemble the type used by artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also needed heavy broadcloth of the type used in early relining. My search led me to upholstery-supply houses that carried a variety of cotton and linen weaves used as underlining in the upholstering of chairs and sofas. Some of these weaves came from places like India and China. One cloth, known as osnaburg, had all the irregularities of the cloth commonly used by artists in the eighteenth century. In fact, I learned that its manufacture hadn’t changed in hundreds of years! The question remained, could I make the cracks on a modern canvas resemble antique ones? Once again, I turned to rabbit-skin glue. After working with this unique substance for years, I had become an expert in its use and its properties.

I began by tacking a piece of canvas onto a stretcher. Next I made up a thinned-out solution of glue and water, which I spread evenly over the canvas. Then I mixed up the gesso using my usual formula and, with a four-inch-wide brush, painted the gesso directly onto the impregnated canvas, using even, horizontal swipes of the brush. After a thorough drying, I observed that when held at an angle to the eye, the canvas displayed a perfect surface “signature” consistent with hand-applied gesso on canvas commonly seen on eighteenth- and some nineteenth-century paintings. Also when placed out in the sun and allowed to heat up, the tensile strength increased and stiffened the canvas. Finally, it only took the slightest pressure with the palm of my hand to send a shattering pattern of perfect cracks throughout the canvas.

For the relining, I employed a new heat-activated glue developed for restorers. The glue, which has the consistency of rubber cement, is simply painted onto the back side of the antique canvas after it has been removed from the stretcher. Then the new canvas is laid down over it and pressed on with a hot iron. The beauty of this system is that it produces a “dry” relining, without the use of wax, and the appearance is identical to a screw-press relining.

The “oxidation” of the stretcher and the relining canvas was achieved with the use of cheap poster colors thinned out with water. These earth-toned stains were brushed, sprayed, and blotted onto the stretchers and canvas, creating a mottled effect. Then, to even out the finish and simulate a layer of dust, a solution of rotten-stone powder and water was sprayed on and allowed to dry in the sunlight of the courtyard.

Once again José and I were traveling to Britain. This time, we were carrying duffel bags. One bag would carry a collection of as many as ten of my larger and improved sporting and marine pictures, all relined, varnished, and rolled up into a single bundle. Two other bags carried the “antique” stretchers, all broken down, taped together, and marked with the names of the paintings they belonged to. Indeed, the risks of being noticed by customs were increased but that just made it all the more thrilling.

Back at the Vicarage Gate, the bundle of paintings was unrolled and assembled. Then each painting was taken to a framer. A few days later, the paintings were distributed to the various auction houses around the city. With the addition of the marine paintings, I was able to consign two, and sometimes three, paintings at each house.

All the pictures were enthusiastically accepted at the valuation counters. I watched carefully as the experts looked over each painting, first the front, then the back. Although the paintings were created entirely of modern materials and assembled only days before, at no time did any of the experts show any suspicion.

After all the paintings had been placed, we packed our bags, rented a car, and headed out to Bath. The next month was spent exploring Cotswold villages that could have been drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, and hunting through antique markets for period frames.

For the next year, we shuttled back and forth to Britain with our cargoes of paintings in duffel bags. But to avoid suspicion, we had to keep spreading the paintings out to different places. Soon we were traveling around the countryside to place pictures in Phillips’ regional auction houses in cities like Cambridge and Oxford, but our best connection was the Phillips right in Bath. Rich tourists, many of them American and eager to take home a piece of British history, often bid up prices to three times the high estimates. At one sale, I was seated next to a wealthy woman from Boston. She was buying up half the paintings. We chatted a bit, and she asked me, “Do you think it’s an original?” as a “Herring” hit the block.

The auctioneer in Bath, a handsome Cambridge-educated Englishman, welcomed me with open arms every time I walked in with more paintings. My works were doing very well in his sales, and in time he realized that I was the artist as well. But he wasn’t interested in the provenance; in fact, he usually gave me a hint of what he would like to have for his next sale.

Sotheby’s, I discovered, had converted a fine old country place in Surrey, Somerset House, into salesrooms. For me it was a delightful day trip out in the country, especially if I was in London alone. With a painting all wrapped up in brown paper, I’d leave the Vicarage and catch a morning train to Billingsgate. Usually I sat outside between the cars in the fresh air, watching the beautiful countryside roll by. When I arrived at the station, I’d catch a cab for the short ride to Somerset House. I loved going there. It was a place where gentlemen could do their business at their leisure, a place to chat with the country squires attending an exhibition or meeting the local trade. Sometimes it served as a back door to Bond Street. “Yes, a very interesting painting indeed,” I was informed once by the resident expert. “Perhaps with your permission we could send this up to London?”

More than once, the painting never made it to the expert at all. On one occasion, I was unwrapping a lovely portrait of a bay hunter à la J. E. Ferneley outside the entrance so as not to make any noise inside. As I was doing so, I noticed, as had happened once in New York City, that I’d become the object of attention—this time of a group of men standing nearby and sporting Barbour jackets and flat caps. I guessed that they were country antique dealers. One gentleman in a tweed sports coat and ascot slipped away and went into the house. A second later he emerged, walked right up to me, and cheerfully asked, “Well, what have we brought today?”

I realized he was passing himself off as Sotheby’s staff. Playing along with the ruse, I presented the unwrapped painting for his inspection. “I would like to have an opinion on this,” I said. Instead of offering an estimate, he asked me how much I was hoping to get. “Well, I’ve got seven hundred in it, but I was hoping it might be worth a couple thousand,” I replied. With that, he asked me if I’d mind, and took the painting over to his waiting colleagues. The next instant, they were hustling me over to the car park, out of Sotheby’s view, and offering me fifteen hundred quid, cash. “Oh, I thought you were with Sotheby’s!” I declared with feigned astonishment. “Haw, haw, haw,” laughed the squire. “He thought I was with Sotheby’s!” he declared to his friends, and then went on to explain, all in good humor, why I would be much better off taking the fifteen hundred now instead of consigning the painting to Sotheby’s and waiting months to get paid. “And besides,” he assured me as his mates looked on with glee, “they’re just a bunch of thieves anyway!” Twenty minutes later, fifteen hundred pounds richer and confident the Mafia wouldn’t be chasing me, I was enjoying a lunch of Cumberland sausage and a pint at the local pub.

Back in Florida, José and I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Paintings that we’d gone to so much trouble to get into Britain and sell in the auction houses there were turning up in the United States! “Look at this!” I said over breakfast in the courtyard one morning, and handed José a decorator’s magazine I was looking through. “We put that painting of a bull in a sale last winter in Ipswich! Hell, that’s near the North Pole, and now it’s hanging in a millionaire’s home in Texas!”

“Yeah,” José said, “we could have just driven the painting over there.” Other paintings that we had sold in Britain turned up in New York auction houses as well. It was this boomerang effect that gave us the inspiration for the third and final phase of the British School.

I went into the studio and came back with a number of auction-house catalogs from New York salesrooms. As I had once done in London, I turned to the backs of the catalogs, and, with the help of a huge magnifying glass, we searched through “The Conditions of Sale.” Again and again we saw the phrase “Neither Christie’s nor the consignor make any representations as to the authorship or authenticity of any lot offered in this catalog.”

“Hell, they don’t guarantee anything here either!” I said.

“True,” José said. “Well, maybe we could save people the trouble of going to England and sell them right here!”

Within days, a packet of photographs was sent up to Christie’s in New York. It didn’t take them long to send us a reply stating that they “would be delighted” to include the paintings in their upcoming sales.

A week later, we packed up the car with paintings and headed back to the Upper East Side of New York. We pulled up to Christie’s, and José waited in the car while I carried in the paintings. Minutes later, I was back in the car with a contract, and we headed downtown to Katz’s for hot dogs. Thus began the domestic distribution of my British paintings.

In this phase of the operation, we needed to establish a production line and limit our personal deliveries. I was working harder than ever, often turning out two or three paintings a week. The studio was packed with pictures and it became impractical to fit each painting with an antique frame. Our solution to the problem was to order high-quality frame moldings from the best frame maker in the country. We ordered the moldings finished in real gold leaf in simple but elegant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patterns.

After each painting underwent a “screw-press relining,” we cut and assembled a frame for it. The next step was to photograph all completed paintings. Then packets of photos were sent to auction houses in New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Washington, London, and Bath. As soon as the inevitable reply came back, we built our own crates and shipped them out. The demand was insatiable, and we soon had paintings being sold simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

The phones never stopped ringing. Christie’s New York would call one minute and Sotheby’s London the next. Occasionally they asked if I could offer a provenance on any of the paintings they’d received. “What a joke!” I said to José after getting off the line with someone from Christie’s. “She actually asked if I could shed any light on the history of the ‘Herring.’ She should see this place!”

Sometimes the situation became embarrassing, because I couldn’t keep track of which pictures had gone to which auction house. When someone called to discuss estimates, illustrations, reserves, or other details, I’d often confuse the paintings being referred to. To remedy this problem, José set up a bulletin board on the wall above the desk. On large index cards, he wrote Christie’s London, Sloans DC, Phillips New York, etc. with a felt-tipped pen.

These cards were tacked across the top of the board. Then photos of all pictures currently in the hands of the auction houses and awaiting sale were tacked under the houses that had them. Thus I was able to see at a glance how many pictures were out and where they were. The photos were removed as the pictures were sold, and new photos took their place. By avoiding the need to look up correspondence, this system also allowed me to continue painting while I was on a speakerphone talking with experts at the auction houses.

By the late eighties, our distribution had been fine-tuned. We judiciously selected and sent out a continual stream of British paintings from an ever-expanding repertoire to auction houses in the United States and Britain. The paintings were routinely attributed to such artists as James Barenger, Samuel Spode, James Seymour, George Stubbs, John Boultbee, J. E. Ferneley, J. F. Herring, John Nost Sartorius, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, and others of the sporting genre, and Thomas Whitcombe, Thomas and James Buttersworth, Charles Brooking, and others among the marine painters. José had set up accounts with each auction house with standing instructions to wire the sale proceeds into a number of British and American accounts held in his name. To ensure that we always had plenty of spending money for shopping, we set up a joint account in Harrods Bank, a swank little facility in the store’s basement. Now when we traveled to London, we no longer took chances with customs. Instead we went to pick up cash and go on shopping sprees.

On one of our trips to Bath, we went to see a beautiful first-floor flat in the Circus. Built in the eighteenth century and just a block away from the Royal Crescent, the Circus is an architectural masterpiece inspired by the Coliseum in Rome. As its name suggests, the town houses, all thirty-two of them, form a large circle. Palladian in design, they face a common green. The understated elegance of the Circus appealed to me even more than that of the Royal Crescent. The flat was part of the estate of Barling, a famous antique dealer on Mount Street in London, recently deceased. His personal weekend retreat, it was composed of a drawing room, a study, a marble bathroom, and a sunken kitchen with a balcony reached by a hidden staircase. The entire flat was appointed with magnificent architectural details.

It didn’t take us five minutes to make up our minds, and José signed a contract that very day. From a business standpoint, it was a good move in more ways than one. We could save a fortune in hotel bills, use it to store the antiques and picture frames we bought, and of course set up a studio. We left it in the hands of a local solicitor and returned to Florida, excited about getting our own place in Bath.

It was all too good to be true. Everything tumbled down soon after we got back home. José began feeling ill and went to the doctor. It was the worst news possible. He had contracted AIDS, and it had already progressed to a serious stage. It was devastating news for both of us. I was determined not to lose my best friend and insisted we fight it with all we had. For the next year, we tried every experimental drug that came along. But every visit to the doctor and every blood test only confirmed that the situation was getting worse. The deal for the flat in Bath had to be scrapped, and the studio was shut down. As a last-ditch effort we decided to fly to Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where it was reported that a clinic was having success in treating the disease with a new drug. The treatment consisted of a series of injections administered over the course of forty days.

As we could have predicted, the treatment was worthless and the situation only got worse. Our last battle to save José’s life was fought at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He got every experimental drug they had in their arsenal, but nothing could halt the progress of that awful disease. Finally we came home defeated, and José passed away in his bedroom, surrounded by his family.