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John Myatt, John Drewe, and the Forgery of Provenance Itself

By prove.art Editorial · · 5 min read

Every case in this series so far has centered on a forger skilled enough to fool the eye. John Myatt, by his own admission, was not that. His fakes used ordinary household emulsion paint mixed with a bit of K-Y Jelly for texture, and some were painted in an afternoon. What made the fraud he became part of arguably the most damaging of the 20th century wasn’t the paintings — it was his collaborator John Drewe’s success at forging something much harder to fake convincingly: institutional memory itself.

A struggling painter and an advertisement

John Myatt was born in 1945, the son of a farmer, and discovered early on that he could convincingly mimic other artists’ styles. Unable to support his children on his art career alone, he placed an advertisement in a local paper in the late 1980s offering “genuine fakes” — copies sold openly as copies, which was, and is, entirely legal. One of the people who answered that advertisement was a man calling himself Professor John Drewe.

Drewe was not a professor of anything. He was, according to the investigative account later written by journalists Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, a confidence man with a gift for inventing credentials and institutions out of nothing. He commissioned Myatt to paint works in the style of artists including Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Nicolas de Staël, and Jean Dubuffet — then set about doing something no forger profiled in this series had attempted at this scale: manufacturing the documented history to match.

Buying access to the archives

Drewe’s method was procedural, almost bureaucratic in its patience. In 1989, he approached the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London posing as an interested collector, gained access to its letter archives, and donated two of Myatt’s forgeries to a fundraising auction — establishing a paper trail of his own generosity before ever needing one. He later reused the Institute’s own stationery to produce fabricated documents.

His most consequential move targeted the Tate Gallery. Drewe offered the Tate two paintings attributed to the French artist Roger Bissière; when Bissière’s son declined to authenticate the gift, Drewe withdrew the paintings but nonetheless donated £20,000 to the gallery. In return, the Tate granted him research access to its archives. Once inside, Drewe altered existing catalogue pages and inserted entirely new, fabricated ones, quietly writing Myatt’s forgeries into the documented exhibition and ownership history of real artists. He is reported to have used a similar approach to gain access to the Victoria and Albert Museum, supplying a fake reference for himself when one was required.

Investigators who later searched Drewe’s home found a typewriter matched to the fabricated documents, further stolen archival papers, and counterfeit exhibition stamps and stickers — the physical toolkit behind a scheme that worked because the paperwork, not the paint, was what experts and auction houses actually relied on to authenticate a “rediscovered” work.

Selling the fiction

With provenance manufactured to order, Myatt’s paintings moved through the market far more easily than their technical quality alone would have allowed. One piece, a supposed Ben Nicholson titled Composition 51, sold at Phillips auction house for £4,234; when its owner later tried to sell it through Christie’s, the auction house grew suspicious and the painting was seized by police. Another, sold as a Nicholson titled Mexican, went to London dealer Peter Nahum only after he checked with a Tate Gallery curator — precisely the kind of due-diligence step Drewe’s fabricated archive records were designed to survive.

How it unraveled

The scheme held together for roughly a decade before it came apart through an unglamorous route: Drewe’s estranged partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, found incriminating letters he had left behind after their relationship ended and, in 1995, went to both the police and the Tate Gallery. Myatt, who had already grown uneasy with the arrangement, was arrested that September and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

The two men were tried at Southwark Crown Court beginning in September 1998. Drewe, notably, dismissed his own lawyers partway through and conducted his defense from the dock, cross-examining witnesses himself. On 13 February 1999, Myatt was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to one year, serving four months before release. Drewe, treated by the court as the scheme’s architect, received six years and served two.

An archive that still hasn’t been fully cleaned

By the time of the trial, prosecutors estimated the two men had produced more than 200 forged paintings over roughly seven years, of which around 120 were believed to still be circulating in the art market at the time — some still hanging, unknowingly, in private collections, galleries, and museums. The institutions whose archives Drewe compromised have said publicly that purging the false records he inserted would take years, and the full extent of the contamination may never be completely known.

Why the story still matters

This is the case that most directly illustrates the argument this journal keeps returning to: an object can be authenticated by science, connoisseurship, and expert opinion, and still be sold as something it isn’t, if the paper trail behind it has been quietly rewritten. Myatt’s paintings were, by general consensus, competent but unremarkable. What they needed — and what Drewe supplied — was a plausible, institutionally-backed history. Once that existed inside the Tate’s own archive, no amount of scrutiny applied to the canvas itself was going to catch it.

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