Friday 13th May 2016

 

In what would seem a turn of fortune, the ‘Masterpiece’ Art Forger, Mr Henty, has turned the notoriety to his advantage.  Exposed by the Sunday Telegraph over a year ago for selling his ‘copies’ on eBay, duping thousands of the internet auction site’s customers, Mr Henty has now decided to ‘go straight‘.  At the end of the month, a gallery is set to stage an exhibition of his copies of works by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso and Modigliani and with  paintings priced at up to £5000, Mr Henty has good reason to feel optimistic.

 

‘Portrait of a Woman in a Black Tie’ by Amedeo Modiglani

FAKE OR FORTUNE?

 

In the case of Mr Henty,  after a career in crime it would seem, that contrary to popular opinion, CRIME DOES PAY.  In the 1990s Mr Henty was jailed for five years for forging thousands of fake British passports which he planned to sell to anxious Hong Kong citizens ahead of the handover to China. The scam would have earned him £1 million and might have worked, had not Mr Henty misspelt the words “Britanic” and “Magesty”.  He went to jail a second time in Spain for selling stolen cars.

The ‘Master Forger’s  eBay scams involved copying works by slightly less famous, usually dead artists, luring  buyers in with claims that the paintings had been found in house clearance sales and attics thereby stating that the authenticity could not be guaranteed.

For years Mr Henty sold paintings on eBay taking care not to claim that they were definitely originals by using the legal construct “after” followed by the name of the artist.

The marketing of a signed oil painting in the style of the artist Duncan Grant in early 2015 was typical of his disingenuous approach; “Beautiful spontaneous painting of the ballet, I bought this from a collector of the Bloomsbury artists, there are no gallery receipts with the painting, I think it has been in private hands for years, I am very reluctantly offering the painting as after Duncan Grant”.

One of Mr Henty’s most ambitious works  was a copy of Picasso’s Women Of Algiers, a Cubist masterpiece that was sold at auction in New York a year ago for £124 million.

 

Henty’s paintings sold so well that he became one of eBay’s select band of “power sellers”. However, when a newspaper rumbled him in 2014, although initially denying he had painted the pictures, he eventually came clean  and offered the journalist a tour of his fakes factory. This was an underground storage room comprising of  a trove of ageing canvases, which he would paint over and frames bought in junk shops to give his pictures added authenticity. Henty was handed a lifetime ban by eBay and, while he was able to get round this by various bits of IT sleight of hand, a year ago he decided to go respectable.

The exhibition at the No Walls Gallery in Brighton later this month will be Mr Henty’s first as a legitimate forger.

 

FAKE OR FORTUNE? WE SHALL SEE!

 

Claire Moore BA(Hons)

GALLERY MANAGER

 

WELCOME TO THE FLETCHER GATE FINE ART GALLERY