Eric Hebborn was born in London in 1934. His mother was a gipsy. According to him, she beat him constantly. At the age of eight, he stated in his autobiography, he set fire to his school and was sent to a borstal (reform school). Teachers encouraged his painting talent and he became connected to Maldon Art Club, where he first exhibited at the age of 15. He later entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he won the silver medal and received a scholarship to a British School at Rome in 1959. He formed acquaintances and friendships with many artists and art historians, including the art ‘expert’ and infamous Communist spy Anthony Blunt, who told him that a couple of his drawings looked like the work of Poussin. That remark sowed the seed of Hebborn’s future career. He returned to London, where he was hired by the picture restorer George Aczel and quickly learned that restoration meant so much more than simply cleaning and retouching. He progressed to ‘restoring’ paintings on entirely blank canvases, so that they could be sold. ‘Improved’ pictures went into gold frames and the plush surroundings of a dealer gallery, where a sale often netted Aczel a five-fold profit. Aczel and Hebborn’s relationship ended with a falling out over the proceeds of these ventures. Hebborn and his lover Graham David Smith frequented a junk and antique shop near Leicester Square, where Eric befriended one of the owners, Marie Gray. In organising the prints catalogued in her shop, he began to understand paper, its history and uses in art. It was on some blank, old, pieces of paper that Hebborn produced his first drawings. His first forgeries were pencil drawings after Augustus John and were based on a drawing of a child by Andrea Schiavone. Graham Smith has stated that several of these were sold to their landlord, a Mr Davis, several to galleries in Bond Street and a few even went through Christie’s sale rooms. Eventually, Hebborn decided to settle in Italy with Smith and they founded a private gallery. When critics did not appreciate his paintings, Hebborn began to copy the style of old masters such as Corot, Castiglione, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, Rubens, Jan Breughel and Piranesi. Art historians declared his paintings to be both authentic and stylistically brilliant and his paintings were sold for tens of thousands of pounds through auction houses. A Renaissance bronze Narcissus was authenticated by Sir John Pope Hennessy, and a ‘Parri Spinelli’ drawing was purchased by Denys Sutton, editor of Apollo, for £14,000. Most of the drawings he created were his own work, produced to resemble the style of historical artists – and not slightly altered or combined copies of older work. In 1978 Konrad Oberhuber, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was examining a pair of drawings he had purchased for that institution from Colnaghi, a reputable Old Master dealer in London, one ostensibly by Savelli Sperandio and the other, by Francesco del Cossa. Oberhuber noticed that the two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper. He was much taken aback by the similarities and alerted his colleagues in the art world. Upon finding another fake ‘Cossa’ at the Morgan Library, Oberhuber contacted Colnaghi, the source of all three fakes. They in turn informed the curators that all three had been acquired from Hebborn and rather unsurprisingly, the market for Old Master drawings in London then crashed. Colnaghi waited a full 18 months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then, never mentioned Hebborn’s name, for fear of provoking a libel suit. Hebborn manufactured at least 500 more drawings between 1978 and 1988. In 1984 he confessed to the forgeries and used the resulting publicity to denigrate the art world. In his 1991 autobiography Drawn to Trouble, he continued his assault on the art world, critics and art dealers. He boasted of how easily he had fooled supposed art experts and how eager the art dealers were to declare his works authentic to maximise their profits. On one page, he offered a side-by-side comparison of his forgeries of Henri Leroy by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and the authentic drawing, challenging ‘art experts’ to tell them apart. On 8 January 1996, shortly after the publication of the Italian edition of his book The Art Forger’s Handbook, Hebborn was discovered in a Rome street, with his skull crushed. He died three days later in hospital. To this day, the provenance of many paintings connected to him, some of which hang in renowned collections, continues to be hotly debated.