Thomas Patrick Keating was born at Lewisham in south London on 1 March 1917. He was the son of a house painter and had a fairly grim working class childhood. He studied at the Croydon School of Art and at Camberwell. During the Second World War, he served with Naval Intelligence. He then became a full-time student at Goldsmiths’ College at New Cross in south London, where he  established a reputation as a talented, rough-diamond. He went on to lecture in art at St Andrew’s College, London. Keating then worked as a restorer and house painter, exhibiting his own paintings, but failing to break into the art market. He perceived the gallery system to be rotten, dominated, he said, by American ‘avant-garde fashion, with critics and dealers often conniving to line their own pockets at the expense both of naive collectors and impoverished artists’. Keating retaliated by creating forgeries to fool the experts, hoping to destabilise the system. He planted ‘time-bombs’ in his creations and left clues to their true nature for fellow art restorers or conservators to find. For example, he might write text onto the canvas with lead white before he began the painting, knowing that x-rays would later reveal the anomaly. He also deliberately added flaws or anachronisms, or used materials peculiar to the 20th century. Modern copyists of Old Masters use similar techniques to protect themselves against accusations of fraud. Keating’s approach of choice in oil painting was a Venetian style inspired by Titian, though modified and fine-tuned along Dutch lines. The resultant paintings, though time-consuming to execute, have a richness and subtlety of colour and optical effect, variety of texture and depth of atmosphere unattainable in any other way. Unsurprisingly, his favourite artist was Rembrandt. For a ‘Rembrandt’, Keating would make pigments by boiling nuts for ten hours and filtering the result through silk; such colouring would eventually fade, while genuine earth pigments would not. As a restorer, he knew a great deal about the chemistry of cleaning fluids; so, a layer of glycerine applied under the paint layer ensured that when any of his forgeries were cleaned (as all oil paintings need to be eventually), the glycerine would dissolve, the paint layer would disintegrate, and the painting – now a ruin – would stand revealed as a ‘Sexton Blake’ (fake). Occasionally, as a restorer, Keating would come across frames with Christie’s catalogue numbers still on them. To help in establishing false provenances for his forgeries, he would call that auction house to ask whose paintings they had contained – and then painted the pictures according to the same artist’s style. Keating also produced a number of watercolours in the style of the English pastoral artist Samuel Palmer and oil paintings by various European masters including Francois Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Rembrandt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Kees van Dongen. The sale of a drawing titled Sepham Barn in a church hall at Woodbridge in Suffolk in 1969 attracted the attention of a number of London galleries when it was ascribed to Samuel Palmer. Leger Galleries subsequently purchased it for £9,400.  A photograph of the drawing was published in The Times. In response, the dealer  and restorer David Gould wrote to the paper, challenging the provenance of the work. Leger stuck to its guns and in 1971, purchased three more drawings from the original source. In 1974 the Faustus Gallery in London were offered four more ‘Samuel Palmer’ productions, but declined the approach, after taking expert advice. By the mid 1970s, to the consternation of Gould,  many ‘Samuel Palmer’ moonlit landscapes were circulating in the London trade and salerooms. Two drawings even passed through Sotheby’s and one through Phillips. The Times conducted its own investigation into this remarkable development and concluded that a master forger was at work. The whole affair was exposed in the paper in July 1976, which drew a furious response from David Posnett, Managing Director of Leger’s. Then came the strangest development of all. The artist Graham Sutherland and the etcher Paul Drury, who, having studied the work of Palmer for more than half a century, were probably the greatest living experts on the work of the artist, were given the opportunity to study the drawings. They jointly wrote to The Times pronouncing them to be ‘crude’ and ‘maladroit’ forgeries, obviously not realising that they were the handiwork of a former student of theirs from Goldsmiths’ College many years before.  A little journalistic digging quickly brought Keating’s name into the public domain and the scam began to unravel. Keating confessed that they were his work and estimated that more than 2,000 of his forgeries were in circulation. He had created them, he declared, as a protest against those art traders who enriched themselves at the artist’s expense. He also refused to list the forgeries. Keating was arrested by the police in 1977 and charged with conspiracy to defraud. However, in a surprisinf twist, he turned to Drury to assist his defence as an expert witness. Drury had fond memories of Keating from his Goldsmiths’ days 30 years earlier and agreed to help, believing that the onus of provenance fell on the dealers. In consequence, he had a colossal falling out with his longtime friend Graham Sutherland over the case. The Director of Public Prosecutions eventually withdrew the case in 1979 on account of Keating’s failing health. However, the seamy underside of the art world had already been given a good airing and substantial damage had been done to the reputations of various dealers. Years of heavy smoking and the effects of constantly breathing in the chemicals used in restoring, together with the stress induced by the court case, had also taken its toll on Keating’s health.  Somewhat unexpectedly, the court case and the murky shenanigans of the art world exposed thereby, inadvertently cast him in the role of  loveable rogue.  He then went on to present television programmes on the techniques of the Old Masters for Channel 4 Television. He also co-authored the book The Fake’s Progress with Geraldine and Frank Norman. Keating died at Colchester in Essex on 12 February 1984 at the age of 65. He had claimed that, in his opinion, he was not an especially good painter. Somewhat ironically given the hardships and tribulations of his earlier years, by the end of his life,  many collectors and celebrities were avidly collecting his work. After the master forger’s death, his paintings became increasingly valuable collectibles. The same year as his death, Christie’s auctioned 204 of his works. The amount raised was not announced, but it is believed to have been considerable. Even his known ‘Sexton Blakes’ now described in catalogues as ‘after’ Gainsborough or Cézanne, attain high prices. The Sygun Museum in north Wales has one of the largest collections of Tom Keating originals.