Tom Keating: the most moral art faker?

This is the strangest Faked Art story I've ever seen. Tom Keating (1917–84) was born into a poor London family. His father worked as a house painter, and barely made enough to feed the household. At 14, Keating was turned away from the college of his choice, so the teenager started working for the family business as a house painter instead. 

View Towards St Mary Dedham, by Keating
inspired by Constable

Artnet

He enlisted as a boiler-stoker in WW2. The benefit of his military service was eligibility for a 2-year re­habil­itation art course, enabling Keating to enter Goldsmiths' Col­l­ege, University of London. But in the programme, he discovered the cultural chasm separating him from his upper-class peers. And alth­ough he achieved high marks for paint­erly technique, his or­ig­inal­ity was called poor. It was humiliating.

While at Goldsmiths’, Keating did weekend jobs for art restorers, includ­ing Hahn Brothers in Mayfair. Utilising the skills he learned in these jobs, he began to restore paintings for a living. He ex­hib­ited his own paintings, but failed to break into the art market. And after 2 years, he left Goldsmiths' College ungraduated.

His forgery career started in art restorer Fred Roberts’ workshop, a man apparently not over-burdened by ethics. Am­ongst the many can­vas­es passing through Roberts' shop was a win­t­er scene by Frank Moss Bennett, an early C20th British artist whose works were widely reproduced cheaply. When Keating crit­icised a Bennett work, Roberts chal­l­enged him to “create a Bennett painting” himself. When he created his own Bennett-like piece, he was so proud of it that he signed it with his own name. Roberts saw it, unilaterally changed the sig­nature to FM Bennett and con­sign­ed it to a West End gallery.

Only twice did Keating say he was seduced by the spirit of a dead artist. In 1962, Edgar Degas “instructed” him to fake the French­man’s self-portrait. Later in life Keating found that Francisco de Goya “ord­er­ed” him to create a self-portrait, by firmly guiding the young man’s hand. That Goya and Degas had chosen him did not surp­rise Keating; past masters must have recognised themselves in him!

Keating, French Countryside

inspired by Monet's Poppy Fields

the editorial magazine

In 1963, he started his own art school. This is where middle-aged Keating met 16 year old Jane Kelly, a student! Kelly really enjoyed Keating's teaching and asked her parents to pay for fulltime art classes. They be­came close friends, then lovers and then business partners. Four years later, the two started an art restoration business in Cornwall together. 

Keating created 20 fake watercolours based on Samuel Palmer works. Keating and Kelly chose the best 3 forgeries and Kelly took them to gallery specialists for auction. Keating viewed the gallery system to be domin­at­ed by American avant-garde fashion, with nasty critics and dealers often conspiring to line their own pockets at the expense of both naïve collectors and of impoverished artists. So Keating retaliated by creating forgeries to fool the experts, hoping to destabilise the art world. He acknowledged that he planted time-bombs in his art, leaving clues of the paint­ings' true nature for fellow art restorers or conservators to find. He deliberately added flaws, or used C20th materials.  

Sunflowers by Tom Keating

inspired by Sunflowers (1850) by Vincent van Gogh.

Photo from London's National Gallery.

The art market became Keating’s focus, giving him a ration­ale for ad­­opting other painters' styles and earning money in their name. Keating's preferred approach in oils was a Venetian tech­nique insp­ired by Titian's practice. His paintings took time to complete, but they had a richness of colour, special optical effects and a variety of texture that Rembrandt would have loved.

In 1970 auct­ioneers noticed that there were 13 Samuel Palmer water­colours for sale, all depicting the village of Shoreham in Kent. The Times of Lond­on arts journalist, Geraldine Norman, looked into the 13 Palmers, sending them to be scient­ifically tested by a spec­ialist. They were fakes. But it was not until Jane Kelly's brother met Norman that she heard about Keat­ing’s story. Then she met Keat­ing who explained his life as a restorer and artist.

Keating estimated that 2,000+ of his forgeries were in circ­ul­ation. He had created them as a working-class social­ist protest against art traders who got rich at the artists’ expense. But note that he refused to list his forgeries. Keating connected even more deeply with her Geraldine’s husband Frank Norman, a petty-thief-turned-playwright. The two old rogues started swapping stories. Within a few hours, Frank had agreed to ghost Tom's autobiography.

Thus Keating published his auto­biography, The Fake's Progress, with Geraldine and Frank Norman in 1977. In it he wrote it seemed disgrace­ful to him how many artists died in poverty, having been exploited by unscrup­ulous dealers. The time had come for the art establish­ment to learn that this old socialist was avenging his brothers in art; his goal was to make the Old Mast­ers widely available and affordable, even for working families.

Keating & Jane Kelly were finally arrested in 1977, accused of conspiracy to defraud and obtaining payments through deception amounting to £22,000. Kelly pleaded guilty, promising to testify against Keating. But Keating pleaded innocent, on the basis that he'd never intended to defraud; rather he was simply working under the Old Mast­ers' guidance. The charges were eventually dropped due to his poor health after he was very injured in a motorcycle accident, worsened by heart disease. Since Kelly had already pleaded guilty, she had to serve her time in prison. However Keating served no time, and his health soon imp­ro

Starting in 1982, tv episodes of Tom Keating on Painters showed the working methods of Rembrandt and the Old Masters. In each very popular programme, the ageing Londoner dem­onstrated how to paint eg Turner's ships or van Gogh's sunflowers.

Keating died in 1984, and was buried in Dedham chur­ch­yard. After his death, many art coll­ect­ors and celebrities began to collect his work which became increasingly valuable. Even Keating’s known for­geries, des­cribed in cat­alogues as after-Gainsborough or after-Cézan­ne, now attain high prices.

A great Wool Museum, Geelong.

Sheep arrived in Geelong in 1832, before it was proclaimed a town in 1838. When it was developing as a Victorian port, Australia was still a series of separate colonies which levied customs duties on goods coming from overseas and goods passing between colonies. For some years, all customs clearances had to be made through Williamstown, forcing ships trading with Geelong to travel north for customs before offloading the goods back in Geelong.

Merino sheep across Victoria produced wool that was soft, plentiful and appealing to Britain's mills. And so in the 1840s, wool became Geelong's most important industry. The raw product was transported into Geelong, processed there and exported from Geelong. Wool heading for the Australian colonies was taken to the port in loosely packed bales, but wool to be shipped to Britain was packed in solid bins.

National Wool Museum, Geelong

Victoria's Museums

Pioneer merchant James Ford Strachan constructed his first bonded store in 1840, the first stone building in newly colonised Geelong. Only when Geelong was declared a free port in 1848 was a proper Customs House needed near the Geelong wharves. The officers made sure that duty was fully collected, on both colonial and overseas trade. The Geelong Customs House was built in 1856 as a three storey ashlar sandstone and basalt structure, and a slate roof. Architect WG Cornish’ distinctive colonial Georgian style clearly reflected the influence of earlier NSW colonial buildings.

In 1857 Charles Dennys conducted Geelong's first wool auction. Wool stores were needed, as close to the foreshore as possible. In the very early days, the difference between a wool store and one for general merchandise was largely the existence of a wool press.

Not until 1872, with Dennys Lascelles bluestone wool store, was a specific design of building evolved for wool. A row of very impressive wool stores stretched down the street in a unified manner. Wagons entered from the street via an archway, discharged their load and moved out into a right of way on the other side of the building.

Sheep shed

Trip Advisor

Dennys, Lascelles, Austin and Co. was the proud owner of an important early modern structures in Australia. This concrete woolstore, designed by Edward G Stone, was mostly free of architectural decoration, and was in a style that anticipated European and Australian trends of the inter-war years. Dennys buildings had used solid bluestone in 1872, cement render in 1880 and a mansard tower in1889. And when expansion was planned in 1900, the firm elected to use the most modern material, reinforced concrete.

By the 1880s, no other Australian city had the diversity of wool related industries as Geelong. This city was eventually called the Wool Centre of the World.

Handling the recently sheared wool

The Strachan, Murray, Shannon and Co. wool store was systematically developed as the wool industry expanded, this four storey brick complex stylistically unified from the 1889 section onwards, to present an impressive austere Classical Revival structure of great note. 

The 2 storey brick Wool Exchange in Corio St was constructed in 1927-8, designed by local architects. The Wool Exchange was and is one of Geelong’s major public buildings from the inter war period and as a late example of the renaissance revival. Roofed with a barrel vault, the main sales room had a striking interior decorated with Neo-Greco detail. Sales of wool, sheepskins, hides, tallow and other products were conducted weekly at this site. Alongside Western District properties, railways, gorgeous wool stores, woollen mills, scouring works and port facilities, the Exhange illustrated the economic and social history of late C19th and early C20th Geelong.

Processed wool being readied for the loom

Trip Advisor

Dennys Lascelles and Co. still forms part of an historic woolstore precinct. Today it hosts the National Wool Museum, Australia's only comprehensive museum of wool, showcasing wool's enduring impact on Australia social and economic life. To explore the past, present and future of the Australian wool industry, the Museum acquires, documents, preserves, stores and exhibits objects and materials directly related to the Australian wool industry.

Completed items of clothing

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The collection shows textiles, images, machines and records with 25,000+ objects aross the City. Before you travel to Geelong, see some of the treasures on-line.

young Russians & 1917 Revolution

Andy Willimott wrote an excellent journal article on a generation of young Russians who embraced new ideals of socialist living. I have added my own family’s experience in this amazing era.

Communist Youth League/Komsomol, 

The youth were healthy, ideological and proud

1924 poster

The October Revolution, which started when the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace on 25th Oct 1917, promised a new future. It became a radical break with the past of Tsarist aut­ocracy, exploitation and misery. Bolsheviks were later willing to use viol­ence in pursuit of their goals but import­antly, the Bol­sh­eviks galvanised hopes that had gained momentum during 1917. Socialist visions offered an attractive altern­at­ive to the horrid rest­r­ictions of tsarist autocracy, monarchy, nob­il­ity, Church, private ownership and worker exploitation.

The new social and political order of Oct 1917 offered an escape from the inherited world for the oppressed. This is why the Soviet Union continued to be held up as an alternative historic path throughout the C20th, even after its earliest ideals were later corrupt­ed. It offered an alternative to the injustices of the old imperial order, to the cruelties of modern capitalism.

As the Bolsheviks came to power, factory workers rejected the clearest symbol of exploitation: bosses. Awful managers were carted out of the factory doors and dumped. Some workers went on to form factory committees, replacing sym­bols of old authority and implem­enting workers control. At home and work, citizens of the newly formed Soviet republic drank tea and discussed social­ist enfran­chisement.

One section of society was most susceptible to the promise of a new future: youths belonged to the future and had the tend­ency to reject their parents’ old ways. Soviet youth literature prom­ot­ed the idea that life could be rationally redesigned to foster social­ism, reshaping culture and society, with Soviet youths in the vanguard.

My grandfather was a perfect example. Born in 1898 as the third last of a very large group of Russian siblings, he was 19 during the Russian Revolution. He and his siblings were mesmerised by the rise of socialism and the free­dom it offered their impoverished, working class, Jewish family who remembered the pogroms so clearly. He ded­icated the rest of his life to volunteerism, equality of all citizens, provis­ion of community services to ordinary families, and educational facilities for the Jewish community. In Australia he was a core member of the Labour Party.

The communes, in university dormitories or elsewhere, were res­id­ential spaces in which young radicals sought to establish living social­ism. All moneys were placed communally and shared; all possess­ions be­came shared agricultural property; and each inhabit­ant vow­ed to live in a comradely fashion. By the mid-1920s, many thousands of young activists were ins­p­ired to replicate communal living, mainly in the cities of central Eur­opean Russia. By the later 1920s Komsomol-Communist Youth League saw more and more youths becoming engaged in commune life, providing a space for act­ivist initiative. And for working in well designed factories.

The young socialists allocated rooms for collective events, and for leisure activities. Sexism in the alloc­at­ion of tasks had to end. Hence each commune also allocated the cleaning and cooking fairly between the sexes. Replacing private kitchens with mun­icipal canteens in every city and workplace provided better nutrit­ion, released women into the workforce and fostered a fairer social order.

The communes also discussed sexual equality. The issue of children was raised at the weekly discuss­ions, de­ciding that it was best to use contraception for the time being. It was agreed that if children were conceived, they should be afforded by the community. The biol­og­ical parents would have to place the children in shared pre-schools and schools, returning to their parents after work. But after a few months, the commune de­cided that relations between inhabitants should not be entered into lightly, lest personal divisions and animosity set in.

Striking women workers kick-started the Feb 1917 revolution. 

Then, after the Oct revolution, gained full legal equality.

1920 poster 

This was all part of a struggle for new morals which, across the 1920s, was being referred to as a Cultural Revolut­ion in the press. Leon Trotsky also drew attention to the con­cept of cultural revolution with his publication Questions of Everyday Life 1923; new standards of behaviour and social norms were crucial to the long-term health of the new revolut­ionary state.

The October Revol­ution stimulated a range of social and cultural act­iv­ism in the opening decade of the new Soviet state. The Prolet­ar­ian Cultural-Education Association was a movement of local groups and work­ers clubs that promoted artists & poets, as well as a new working-class aesth­etic in art more generally. The movement peaked in 1920. 

The revolution's emotional energy remained an important cornerstone of the Soviet state, bringing grand utopian visions to life. The best ex­­am­ple outside Russia was Israel's kibbutz movement. Those kibbutz­im founded in the 1920s tended to be larger and more Russian-oriented than those kibbutzim founded prior to WW1, so the issues the members debated were exactly those raised in Willimott’s journal article: shared factory or agricultural equipment, shared work clothing, who does the cooking, who does child care, volunteerism, army service etc. When I did my Gap Year in Israel in the mid 1960s, the kibbutz meetings each month were still discussing the same ideological debates that arose in the Russian communes after the 1917 Revolution.

UK's 1st female parliamentarian: Nancy Astor

American Nancy Langhorne (1879-1964) was born in Virginia, daughter of a wealthy railroad entrepreneur. In the 1890s Nancy and her sis­ter Irene were enrolled in a finishing school in New York where they were prepared for entering high society. Nancy met and married her first husband Robert Gould Shaw II in 1897 in New York when Nan­cy was 18; in 1898 they had a son. However the marriage was un­happy and the couple divorced in 1903.

Nancy and sister Phyllis emigrated to Britain in 1905. Glamorous and charming, Nancy became popular in aristocratic cir­cles, fancying Waldorf Astor, American expatriate son of Observer Newspaper owner. They married & moved to Clive­den, a great Buckinghamshire estate from Waldorf’s father where Nancy became a key hostess. Note the couple had 5 children together.

Nancy Astor became the first female MP to take her seat 

in parl­iament, Dec 1919

X.com

Nancy’s new husband wanted to enter politics. Waldorf was defeated in his first attempt to win election to the House of Commons in the Jan 1910 but was elected for the Unionist Party in Plymouth in a later by-election. Nancy too had political interests; through her social connect­ions she was involved in a political circle advocating unity and equality among English-speakers.

Waldorf enjoyed a promising political career for some years and in 1918, when his constituency was dissolved, became MP for Plymouth Sut­ton. After his father’s death in Oct 19­19, Waldorf's son succeeded to the peerage, inheriting a] the title 2nd Viscount Astor and b] dad’s seat in the House of Lords. He had to relin­qu­ish his seat in the House of Commons, triggering a by-election.

In Nov 1918, just after some women in Britain won the right to vote, the Qualification of Women Act allowed women to become MPs. Nancy made the decision to stand for her hus­band’s vacant seat in the resulting by-election. A gifted campaign­er, Nancy managed to appeal to all social classes with her charm.

In Dec 1919 Viscountess Nancy Astor became the first female MP to sit in parl­iament. She was a member of the conservat­ive Unionist Party for Plymouth Sutton, winning 52%.

As the only woman in parliament for c2 years, Nancy faced nasty sexism. She gained a reputation for heckling and inter­rupting, at the same time working for welfare reforms, equal voting rights and women’s access to the professions. In Feb 1920, Nancy delivered her maiden speech, amid heckling.

Active both in and out of government, she advocated the devel­opment and expansion of nursery schools for children’s educ­ation, working to recruit women into the civil service, police force, education reform and House of Lords. She was con­cerned about the treatment of juvenile victims of crime. Nancy sup­ported raising the age of drinking alcohol to 18 (not 14) and low­er­ing the voting age of women to 21.

In the 1930s both Nancy and Waldorf, and their Cliveden Set colleagues, backed Neville Chamb­erlain’s appeasement policy. The Cliveden Set believed they were reducing the threat of ent­er­ing into a war against Germany. In 1934 Astor publicly asked the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees whether he be­l­ieved that the Jews had brought persec­ution upon themselves over the years. She was critical of the Nazis for devaluing the position of women but she was very sympath­etic to the Nazis’ brutal attitude to comm­un­ists and European Jewry.  Nancy maintained a pro-German stance, even after the war started. Yet she contributed to the war effort by running Canadian Hospital for Soldiers on the grounds of Cliveden. 

Cliveden, 

Waldorf and Nancy Astor’s country house 

Shed always been anti-Catholic, but during the war Nancy started becoming increasingly erratic, suggesting a Catholic con­spiracy was sub­verting the Foreign Office. After 26 years in the House of Commons and 7 successful elect­ions, Nancy lost popularity among her fellow MPs. She retired in 1945 when the Conservative Party found her a political liability.  

Nancy’s retirement put increasing strain on their marriage so the couple separated for some years. Waldorf’s death was in 1952; Nancy died at Grimsthorpe Castle Lincs in 1964.

Now for the controversial question that historians disagree on: how truly feminist was Nancy Astor? Even before 1919, Astor had feminist sympathies. In 1915 she was wrote often to Emmeline Pankhurst and later worked with suff­rage organ­isations facilit­ating meetings with senior Con­serv­atives politicians. And she worked to support legis­lation on women in the workplace and women's safety out on the streets. Despite claiming to be an ardent feminist, and considering herself a representative of working women, Nancy was one of the richest and most aristocratic women in Britain. Did she know how working families lived.. and suffered?

Astor linked up with women’s peace groups and regarded women as natural pacifists. Yet she vigorously pursued Anglo-German neutrality and entertained the Nazi top brass at her Cliveden seat! American-born Astor was xenophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. Certainly Nancy did not invent pre-WW2 anti-Semitism in Britain and was reflecting only what she believed was the prevalent philosophy then. The racist and anti-Semitic prejudices of her time were found in many men who held similar views. Astor was pilloried in the German-appeasement and anti-Semitic debates, yet she was surrounded by like-minded senior men who escaped scrutiny. Her gender made people judge her by a higher standard.

 

Nancy and Waldorf Astor in 1920

Astor quickly grew into her role as the first woman MP. She could well have steered clear of women’s issues, as many of her Tory colleagues did. But she was det­ermined to prove that women were as physically capable of being full participants in the rigours of political life as men; in fact women were even MORE suited to pub­lic life as women had moral courage. Female moral cour­age was a constant theme throughout her speeches. But for a woman like Astor to be openly racist and openly anti-Semitic was nasty.