Eric Hebborn - a brilliant forger

                                                             Art

Tigress with Her Cubs, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Photo Credit: Burton Constable Hall [CC BY-NC-ND]

Eric Hebborn, before he was unmasked in 1978, was a brilliant forger.

Teasing the art world was part of his trade. He fooled the world’s foremost galleries and auction houses with forgeries in the style of Rubens, and Van Dyck, among others. Christopher Wright, an art historian, noted,

“Only a handful [of paintings] have been exposed. There are still Hebborns floating around the art market and in museums. For Hebborn: the greater the expert, the greater the satisfaction of deceiving them.” The art world was too humiliated to press charges.

(The Observer, 3.2.2019)


*Film-makers have unearthed evidence that Eric Hebborn, the greatest art forger of modern times, was working for the Mafia towards the end of his life and may even have been murdered by them. 

The British artist’s death has remained a mystery since 1996 when he was found with a fractured skull on a street near his home in Rome.

Writers Kingston Trinder and Peter Gerard have secured the rights to Hebborn’s explosive memoir from 1991, Drawn to Trouble, and are planning an ambitious eight-part television drama about him.

Hebborn humiliated the art world, deceiving the world’s foremost galleries and auction houses with his forgeries in the style of masters such as Rubens and Van Dyck. He claimed to have passed off around 1,000 forgeries as the real thing.

(The Observer, 14.4.2019)

                                    An extremely likeable rogue.