The UKs Greatest Art Forgers Reveal Their Secrets

This is just a little storeroom. So you've got a Caravaggio. Six and a half foot basket. There's another Modigliani there. Oh, is this a Picasso? I mean, I do Picassos. Sometimes I can do two or three in a day before breakfast, you know, because they're not that difficult. And I gave one to a friend of mine. He sold it. Someone bought it, and they took it to the auction, and they valued it at a million. Forgery is one of the greatest challenges the art world faces today, with fakes and misattributions estimated to be To combat this, there has sprung a multi-billion dollar industry of authentication services. However, away from the premier art circuit, there is a blind spot where forgeries get through with ease. I'm on my way to meet David Henty and Billy the Brush Mumford, two convicted forgers who have made thousands selling their fakes on eBay. The two lads like to go to this car boot sale to find historical materials appropriate to whatever they're forging. Although they claim to have hung up their forgery boots, they're going to show me how they would fake a painting. Then I'm going to take that painting to one of London's premier authentication services to see if they can clock it's a fake. Quick, Billy, quick. Sydney. Hiya. How you doing? Hi, how are you doing? Hiya, Billy. Nice to meet you. Take me through this license plate. Van Goghs. I've got Van Gogh as well. Have you? Yeah. You bought all the Van Gogh options? Yeah. Well, I'm also, I'm just buying one. F-O-R-6-3-R. Forger. What have you got here? Billy's got a load of catalogues, so I'm going to be looking through these later on this afternoon and thinking, oh, if I get a little canvas like that, you know, I'll stick something on. You know, you get some good ideas from here. We're going to go down to the market now, but just before that, unfortunately, I served some time in a prison about two or three minutes away, so we might go via there. Before Billy was caught under the police's Operation Sketch and sentenced to two years, he'd forged 1,000 pieces that had made their way across the globe. Detectives have only managed to find 40 so far, meaning there's a lot still in circulation. So how did you get into art forgery? Well, I was dismissed from St Martin's in 1968. It was something to do with me being intoxicated in a life drawing class. It was either get a job or use what limited artistic skills I had, and that's the road I went down. Do you still forge art? No, not at all. Wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Do you do any art? Yeah, I doodle sometimes, yeah. Do they look similar to any other pieces of art? Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. So have you served any time for art forgery? I served time for forgery. Forging passports. Right. I went into the prison art department. I thought I'd just go in there and read about art and learn about it. But the teachers there said, no, you've got to actually paint. When I came out, I thought, this is what I want to do. But it's very difficult to sell your own work. But then I painted a lovely little Paul Henry, Irish artist. I put it on and I got 1,000 pounds. I was getting, I wouldn't say too much, because I've straightened the tax man out now. I had the criminal tax investigation because I was making so much money there. We'd better go, Billy. OK. We'd better go, or we're going to miss all the old canvases. You certainly are. What's your favourite thing about the art world? The money. Mark Rothko, a wonderful American abstract painter, said that to be an artist, you have to steal a space on a rich man's wall. And I love that. I don't forge famous artists per se. I do the one that they could have painted. When I used to do eBay and stuff like that, there was a caveat saying there's no paperwork or provenance with this painting. So sold in the style of or after the artist. That way, you're covered by law. You could go to the auction and put it in and not say anything. And if they go yes, then it goes through. And Billy and I get all the art catalogues. And quite often, you'll open it up and you'll see... So do you think auction houses profit off not asking questions? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if they can turn a blind eye. They want it to be right, because if it isn't right, they ain't going to earn a dime. So how would we go about finding the tools? If you want to get it past the forensics, you have to use age-appropriate materials. That's fun for you, isn't it? Is this what you're asking? Yeah, this is, yeah. Is it all right if I have a look? Yes, of course. Yeah, Windsor and Newton. It's an old one. About 1910, 1915. Perfect. Perfect for a little painting. I could do a Lowry on there, couldn't I? Yeah. Like an early Lowry, yeah. How much are they? I'll do the two for 20. Lovely. These are old letters. Look at that. One of Lowry's things that he did, he'd draw on any of it, you know, any letters in his pocket and envelopes and stuff. They turn up every now and again. And if they're from the 50s or 60s, they've got a good chance of being a Lowry drawing. That was a good buy, mate. I shall do a little masterpiece on here later. The whole purpose of coming here is for David to have a look at some frames. How much are these, Billy? Nice selection, David. Let's get them out before we talk. I can't talk money in the dark, Dave. I cannot talk money in the dark. In case I faint at the price. This is Rusty Nails. Oh, how did they get like that? With the salt water, I expect. Why would anyone want Rusty Nails? Pissed the hell out of me. I think it's time. Passage of time, really. I don't think it's a chemical process. No, don't lump them all together, Dave. They're individual prices, David. Individual price. This one, beautiful, 90 quid. You're adding it up. 70 quid. What? Where is she? This, one and a quarter. Done. This one here, for my friend as a gift. Nothing, Gornish. It's nice, that little one, isn't it? Yeah, lovely. It's a little Italian painting, isn't it? Yeah, are you adding these on? Yeah. What's that, 375? Yeah. I'll throw you 40 quid, 23. Mazel tov. Pleasure to meet you all. I wish I could say it was a pleasure. What do you mean? Come here, you schmuck. Should I take in these ones in here? Yeah, if you wouldn't mind. I've got to be so careful, don't I? God, don't say that. Hello. Come on. Come on, Rocky. Rocky. Oh, wow. This is insane. This is just a little storeroom. It's from my paintings in. So you've got Caravaggio. Caravaggio. I think there's another one. Oh, there's Caravaggio there as well. Salvador Mundi. That went for the most money ever at auction, didn't it? It did. 450 million, yeah. Six and a half foot basket. You could take that and do the forensics on it. Yeah. And it would come back as genuine. Really? Yeah. There's another Modigliani there. Basket. How often are you doing these paintings? Every day. I get up every day. I work seven days a week just because I really enjoy it. Oh, is this a Picasso? I mean, I do Picassos, you know. Sometimes I can do two or three in a day, you know. They're not that difficult. And I gave one to a friend of mine. He sold it. Someone bought it and they took it to the auction and they valued it at a million. And they had quite a lot of interest in it. But it came out in the papers that this forger said it's his. The guy who owned it started threatening. And he told a friend of mine that goes in there that buys stuff, you know, tell him I'm going to get someone to burn his house down. Your house? My house, yeah. They're going to put a firebomb through the letterbox. So I reported it to the police. And I've got all cameras put up in the front of my house and stuff. I just said on Twitter, I said, do due diligence. You know, if you're selling a million pound painting, get it authenticated. So did it sell? And all the TV cameras were there and the news channels, and it flopped. I think they said they sold it for 8,000. Amazing. Quite a view. Yeah, yeah, it's good. So do you often work out here? Yeah, if I can. I love to work out here just because it's, yeah, it's nice. It's peaceful, you know. I'm going to paint a little seascape. So how much, like, have you studied Lowry, then, to understand how he paints, like, down to a T? So I've been to the Lowry Gallery. I bought every book I can find about Lowry. When you've stepped in their shoes, you understand a bit more than an academic. You're actually living it. But this one I'm making up. You're making up? So I put a bit of sky. So it could be, like, a lost Lowry that's just ended up at auction. Well, it might well do. Do you think there are, like, any problems with art forgery? Well, I think there's a lot of problems with people making money off dead artists, you know, and that didn't make any money in their own lifetimes, you know. There's more of a problem with that, I would have thought. You know, you're an ordinary girl. You love Picasso or you love Modigliani. You haven't got 5 million or 10 million or 100 million, but I still want a painting. I don't want a print, a lifeless print. So, you know, is that wrong? I think the basic thing is I don't care about the money. I love the art. When I go to bed at night, I can't wake up in the morning. If I'm working on, you know, something that I really, really like, you're in your own world, basically. If I was a multimillionaire, I'd still get up in the morning and paint pictures. Obviously, technology's advanced. Do you think that makes it harder to make good forgery? No. No? No, no. I think you can beat the forensics and the rest is about good craftsmanship, really. So, what do you think? We're passable. OK, well, give me a call when it's ready and I'll take it to the lab. OK. And I'll let you know how it goes. As long as we get halfs on it. OK, deal. So, I dropped off David Henty's Lowry the other day and they're going to run a few tests, so fingers crossed for David. Hello, I'm Sydney. There it is. Here it is. So, here's the Lowry, basically dismantled. In taking it out of its frame, the tape's still quite sticky, which means it wasn't on there for a long time. Taking the painting out, he's clearly used one of these old notebooks, 1955, so no question about it, this is old. This isn't particularly impressive. Now we're going to take that and have a look down the microscope. Straight away we can see that it's very yellowed looking and this is typical of forgeries because you want the object to look old and if you just paint it in nice, fresh, bright colours, it's going to look new. There's no obvious cracking. And, yes, we've got an obvious fake patina. You see it right away. We did find what we think is a pet hair. They have two dogs. Old master artists. We're really careful about their materials and you don't find dog hairs. So now that we've, with our tiny scalpel, taken our tiny samples, we're going to take them to the lab and see what we've got. Hi, we brought a stub with some samples from the Lowry painting. So what's this machine? It's actually one of our best tools for looking for forgeries. It does the best job of anything in this room for looking for modern 21st century pigments. Is there any way that anyone could trick these machines? No. So now we'll go have a quick look at our imaging room where we'll be taking an X-ray as well of the Lowry. The way this works is the painting's placed in the chassis and then the camera moves. So it's like Google Earth. You get lots of little tiny images that are then put together in a computer and you can zoom in and zoom out. It's like having a microscope without a microscope. So one of the most famous quotes, which is actually on David Henty's website, is, I am a simple man and I use simple materials, ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium. However, we found cadmium red instead of vermilion. We're accumulating evidence and the evidence... It's not looking good. It's not pointing in the right direction. Here's our X-ray of the Lowry. As you can see, it's kind of not very controlled-looking strokes. And looking at other Lowrys, we see that there's kind of a control. So David was often selling heat on eBay. Do you think that means that there's a bit of a blind spot for getting these kind of Lowrys through? Yeah, I mean, it's for all sorts of things. People love to make discoveries, but it's really buyer beware. If you're not an expert, if you're getting a bargain, it's probably not a bargain. I think for the market he's shooting at, for doing something to sell on eBay, he's going to fool the average punter who's not an expert. But copying things for profit, that's deception and that's where it becomes a criminal act. Forgers will speak about channeling the dead artist as if it was some sort of psychic gift they had, which is all hugely dodgy. It's just justification for profiting on someone else's genius. So as David Henty fears, he's not an artist, he's a criminal. Yeah, basically. And he's a bit overrating himself to say Judge is the best copyist in the world. OK, I won't let him know. Hello? Hi David, how are you? It's Sydney. Hi, how are you doing? I'm good. I just left Art Analysis. Oh, has you? I think it went well. Oh, really? Well, you sound surprised. There was one problem with the paint, the type of white paint. And there was the vermilion. Apparently the vermilion was wrong. I didn't know that. I didn't get the pick-up on it. I mean, I didn't do it to fool anyone, really. No, of course not, David. There's literally no way you could have got past her. Honestly. Yeah, there's no way. Bye, David. Oh, he's so sweet. I thought he was going to get a bit miffed. But I've encouraged him to keep forging.