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Eric Hebborn: The Forger Who Wrote the Manual

By prove.art Editorial · · 5 min read

Most forgers try to stay hidden. Eric Hebborn spent his final years doing the opposite: publishing detailed, illustrated confessions of exactly how he had deceived the Old Master drawing market for two decades, daring anyone to catch him. Weeks after the Italian edition of his last book appeared, he was found on a street in Rome with a fatal head wound. His murder was never solved.

From restorer to forger

Eric Hebborn was born in South Kensington, London, in 1934 and trained at the Royal Academy, where he won nearly every major student prize on offer, including the Rome Prize. Contemporary art didn’t sell for him, so he took work restoring Old Master drawings — a trade that meant handling genuine period paper, ink, and pigment on a daily basis, and studying exactly how four-hundred-year-old drawings age. According to people who knew him, including critic Brian Sewell, part of what pushed Hebborn toward outright forgery was anger at Colnaghi’s, one of the most respected Old Master dealers in the world, over how his own restoration and connoisseurship work had been treated.

Whatever the trigger, by the 1960s Hebborn was no longer restoring drawings attributed to the Old Masters — he was manufacturing new ones. He worked in the manner of Pieter Bruegel, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Jacopo Pontormo, Camille Corot, and Augustus John, among many others, using period-correct paper, house-made inks, and a draughtsman’s technical fluency that had already won him the Royal Academy’s top honors. One of his most notable pieces — a purported Anthony van Dyck preparatory drawing for Christ Crowned with Thorns — was purchased by the British Museum itself in 1970.

Exposed, and never charged

Hebborn’s scheme became public in 1980, when experts began identifying a pattern of drawings, sold through different dealers over many years, that all traced back to him. By his own estimate he had produced somewhere between 500 and 1,000 drawings in the styles of dozens of Old Masters, mixed in among the thousands of genuine works he’d also handled as a working dealer — a practice that made it extraordinarily difficult to separate his fakes from the legitimate inventory he’d touched.

What happened next is the detail that makes Hebborn’s case unusual: nothing did. He was never arrested, indicted, or formally interrogated over the forgeries. Part of the reason was practical — to protect himself legally, Hebborn had made a habit of never personally attributing the drawings he sold, leaving that step to dealers and buyers. But part of it was structural. Hebborn’s forgeries were embedded so extensively across the Old Master drawing market that aggressively prosecuting him risked forcing major dealers and institutions to publicly disown works they had already authenticated and sold — an outcome many preferred to avoid entirely.

Confession as a second career

Rather than stay quiet, Hebborn wrote two autobiographies confessing his forgery career in detail — Drawn to Trouble and Confessions of a Master Forger — and appeared on television discussing his methods, including a 1991 BBC documentary, Portrait of a Master Forger. In it and elsewhere, he was unapologetic, framing the deceived experts and an overheated market as more culpable than the forger who had simply given collectors what they wanted to believe.

His final act was the most direct provocation yet: The Art Forger’s Handbook, published in Italian in early January 1996 and in English later that year, which laid out his working methods as an illustrated manual — recipes for aging paper and mixing period-correct ink, techniques for replicating watermarks, and a side-by-side comparison of one of his own Corot forgeries against a genuine Corot drawing, daring readers to tell them apart. A review by former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving called it “delightful and thoroughly dangerous.”

A murder that was never solved

On the night of 11 January 1996, weeks after the Italian edition appeared, Hebborn was struck from behind with a blunt object while walking home in Rome’s Trastevere district. He died in the hospital shortly after. Italian police investigated only minimally, and no motive was ever officially established. Speculation at the time ranged from an aggrieved collector or dealer to organized crime, reportedly connected to debts Hebborn had accumulated late in life — but none of it was ever confirmed.

Why the story still matters

Hebborn’s case is the starkest illustration in this series of a structural problem: forgery can become too embedded to prosecute. Once his work had passed through enough respected hands and hung in enough respected collections, exposing him fully meant exposing the market’s own authentication failures — and much of that market had a strong incentive not to do that. The provenance of numerous works linked to Hebborn, including some reportedly still in major public collections, remains disputed to this day, decades after his death, simply because no one with the standing to settle the question has had the incentive to try.

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