Drewe had already been given access to its archives. And by the time it realised that the original half million it had been promised would never materialise, it was too late. The Bissieres might pass muster on the open market, he argued, but the Tate was one of the world's most prestigious museums and it would be mad to try to fool its curators.Įven after Drewe retrieved the Bissieres, and offered an extra cash donation of £20,000 in their place, the Tate suspected nothing untoward. When Myatt realised that Drewe had given the Tate the Bissieres, he insisted that he ask for them back, claiming they were among his poorest works. In prison Myatt earned the nickname 'Picasso' by doing portraits of other inmates in return for phonecards Posing as a wealthy art collector and travelling around London in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, he organised lunches at Claridge's for senior art figures including Sarah Fox-Pitt, an aristocrat in her 40s who was the notoriously fearsome gatekeeper of the Tate's archives.ĭespite her formidable reputation, Fox-Pitt was impressed by Drewe's claim that his father invented the atom bomb and was reeled in by his promise to give his Bissieres to the Tate, along with a substantial donation of £500,000 towards the upkeep of the archives. Organisations were constantly on guard for people removing material from their files, but who would suspect that someone would want to put documents in? And so by inserting false credentials for Myatt's paintings into these records, he could lend them instant and impeccable pedigrees. But Drewe came up with an ingenious idea. While potential buyers were presented with photocopies of these documents, the originals were often held at the major museums and galleries. Myatt poses with actress Jane Horrocks and her portrait for television programme Brush With Fame A smearing of dust from a vacuum cleaner bag gave the finished artworks an authentic, weathered look.Īll that remained then was to provide them with a 'provenance', a collection of receipts, old exhibition catalogues and other documents which demonstrated a painting's history beyond question. With the addition of KY lubricant jelly, which made it flow easily across the canvas, this was apparently indistinguishable from modern oils. Even so, he and Drewe showed an extraordinary parsimony in their fraud.Ĭoncentrating on modern works because it would be too expensive to buy the ingredients found in the old master's pigments, they cut costs further by mixing ordinary emulsion paint with turpentine and linseed oil.
Paranoid that a neighbour might drop in and see him at his easel, he painted only at night and lived in constant fear of being exposed. But while he tried to salve his conscience by giving some of these earnings to a church, the guilt preyed on him. Myatt took the cash, reasoning that it would tide him over until he could find a legitimate source of income. 'You can make a decent living at this,' Drewe said, handing Myatt a fat brown envelope containing half the proceeds. No one knows exactly what he did in that time, but he no doubt relied on his astonishing ability to absorb information on any given subject and regurgitate it so authoritatively that people believed he was whoever he purported to be. In truth, he was the son of Sussex telephone engineer Basil Cockett and his wife Kathleen.īorn in 1948, he left school when he was 16 and began working as a clerk at the Atomic Energy Authority, only to resign at 19 and disappear without trace for the next 15 years. The only consolation for Drewe's victims was that they were not alone in being deceived - for Drewe was one of the most plausible conment of recent times, which I reveal in a new book about the daring fraud.Ī compulsive but utterly believable liar, he often told people that his father was a scientist. These fakes were key to what Scotland Yard later called the biggest art fraud of the 20th-century - a multi-million-pound scam which saw hundreds of forgeries sold to highly respected museums, galleries and collectors across the world. In the frame: Renowned art forger John Myattįar from being the modern masterpieces Drewe claimed, they had, in fact, been painted just two weeks earlier, using ordinary household emulsion and framed with wood left over from building work at his home in North London.
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