Eric Hebborn
Hello, dear members of Incredible India.
Here´s another forgery story with an unexpected ending.
Eric Hebborn
The forger who criticized the critics
Eric Hebborn was born in a London suburb in 1934. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother kept her children in line through force. Hebborn himself described her as "a big woman who hit hard," and credited her with instilling his love of boxing.
At the tender age of eight, Hebborn set fire to his school and was sent to a reformatory where he attended art classes. His teachers encouraged him to study art, and he was allowed to attend Meldon School of Art. At fifteen, he held his first exhibition and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
To pay for his studies, Hebborn began working for the art restorer George Aczel. He started by cleaning canvases and doing retouching. It wasn't long before Aczel asked him to undertake more serious restorations, such as repainting large areas, adding backgrounds, simulating age-related cracks on new canvas, and adding striking details to mediocre works.
Hebborn learned from Aczel that an improved work, placed in a beautiful frame, could be sold for a good price.
Eric Hebborn - Portrait of a Master Forger
A Vast Forgery
Hebborn soon realized that he didn't need to create his own original work; he could simply imitate antiquity and copy any style that interested him.
As is common in the world of forgers, Hebborn decided to mock the critics who ridiculed his work. Unlike Chang Dai-Chien, he used each copy and imitation as a form of derision. He imitated the styles of Piranesi, Rubens, Brueghel, Corot, van Dyck, Tiepolo, and others.
In 1978, similarities were found between two of his copies, raising red flags. Curators examined both works and confirmed their forgeries.
Hebborn slightly altered his style and sought out new intermediaries. Thanks to this, he was able to deceive even more art dealers and experts.
Eric Hebborn - Portrait of a Master Forger
A Combative Confession
In 1984, Hebborn grew tired of being an anonymous artist and convened a press committee to expose himself and accuse the experts of not being as competent as they claimed. He also accused the intermediaries of harboring doubts and keeping them to themselves in order to sell.
Museums, collectors, and dealers panicked. There were no experts good enough to distinguish between the originals and their copies.
Computer tests had to be conducted to dispel the doubts, but this wasn't enough to detect all the forgeries.
He wrote two books: Autobiography of a Forger (1991) and The Art Forger's Handbook (1996), in which he explained his techniques for aging, selling, and forging. "From time to time I continued creating copies, mostly for fun," he said.
On January 8, 1996, Eric Hebborn was found dying in his home in Rome. Someone had broken in and attacked him with a hammer, perhaps in revenge for the deceptions and the loss of credibility in the art world. He died three days later without regaining consciousness.
