Tom Keating

Tom Keating (1918 - February 12, 1984) was an art restorer and famous art forger who claimed to have forged over 2000 paintings of over 100 different artists.

Tom Keating was born in London as a Cockney. After World War Two, he began to restore paintings for a living but mainly worked as a house painter. Despite his attempts, he failed to achieve fame and retaliated by creating forgeries to fool the experts.

Keating produced a number of watercolors in the style of Samuel Palmer and oil paintings by various European masters including François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Renoir and Kees van Dongen.

In 1976 Keating was caught when he tried to pass off thirteen of his paintings as genuine Samuel Palmers and confessed. He estimated that more than 2000 of his forgeries were in circulation.

Keating was tried for forgery in 1979, but the case was dropped on account of his bad health.

Keating went on to present television programmes on painting and jointly wrote the book The Fake's Progress (Hutchinson, London, 1977) with Geraldine and Frank Norman.