Tom Keating on Painters

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Tom Keating (1917–1984) was a fascinating character who you don’t really hear about today, despite his brief flush of notoriety in the late 1970s. A versatile artist, Keating worked for many years as a restorer of old pictures, cleaning huge history paintings while also helping art dealers turn damaged canvases into saleable works. The ease with which he could imitate other artists and their techniques prompted some of his employers to start requesting wholesale fakes, which he produced for a while until he discovered that his paintings were being sold for substantial sums while he was still being paid a labourer’s wage. His defence of his subsequent career as an art forger hinged on this experience; he claimed that the situation turned him against the entire art market, and prompted a resolve to undermine the galleries and auction houses by flooding them with as many fake paintings as possible. Keating’s illicit activities became headline news in the late 1970s when he and his partner were prosecuted for selling a number of fake Samuel Palmers.

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Episode 1: Turner.

Being a versatile artist myself I’ve always been intrigued by the forgery business. If you have any degree of skill in an artistic medium the thought soon arises that you could turn that skill to imitating the work of an artist who used similar techniques. In my case this has never gone further than doing one-off pastiches. Outright forgery raises the level of the game; it also raises the stakes since you open yourself to legal consequences if the forgery is exposed. Art forgery is an unusual combination of skill and cunning (the artists being forged must have plausible gaps in their oeuvre; provenance has to be invented), archaeology (the older the work being faked, the more important it is to use authentically aged or antique materials), and a peculiar bloody-mindedness to go to all this trouble while never being able to admit in public that you were the creator of the forgery.

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Episode 2: Titian.

Tom Keating on Painters was a short TV series broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1982, in which Keating demonstrated his knowledge of historical painting techniques by imitating the work of several well-known artists. If he hadn’t presented a follow-up series about Impressionist artists two years later Tom Keating on Painters would be unique in being a rare TV series about painting which isn’t a guide intended to instruct the amateur artist. Keating’s sole concern in these short films is to show how five artists—Turner, Titian, Constable, Rembrandt and Degas—created their work. In each film he describes the stages of the painting process (pastel in the case of Degas) but this is never a course of instruction. In the sixth film he talks about art restoration, something he continued to work at once his forging exploits had been exposed. Art forgery is one subject he doesn’t mention at all.

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Episode 3: Constable.

The main thing I remembered about this series was that two of the demonstration paintings were reverse views of a pair of pictures that always top lists of the nation’s favourite works of art. Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire and Constable’s The Hay Wain are monuments rather than mere artworks, occupants of that rare class of painting that you see so often in reproduction it can be difficult to set aside their ubiquity and see them afresh. Keating achieves this to some degree by taking each painting back to the bare canvas then building it up again from a different point of view, showing us the stern of the old warship in Turner’s painting, and the arrival of the horse and cart at the river in the Constable. The demonstrations repeat work that Keating had already done when he painted finished versions of the reversed views for his own amusement. The films only show the early stages of the paintings but enough is demonstrated to indicate the opposed techniques of each artist. Turner and Constable were exact contemporaries but Turner’s later paintings seem to belong more to the 20th century than the 19th. So too with his technique which begins with a light canvas rather than working up light colours from a dark ground.

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Episode 4: Rembrandt.

The films about Titian and Rembrandt show more of the traditional approach, with Keating copying Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, and inventing a self-portrait of Rembrandt with his son. The latter is the least successful of the five imitations, Keating doesn’t seem to have been very good with portraits. Much better is his variation on The Ballet Class by Degas, an oil painting which he recreates using the pastels that Degas often favoured for his other work. This last picture is the only one that really looks finished but then pastel is a simpler medium. All of these films would have benefitted by being longer and going into more detail but such is the nature of television, the most compromised medium of all.

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Episode 5: Degas.

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Episode 6: Restoring Pictures.

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Painting the Henge

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Wiltonia sive Comitatus Wiltoniensis; Anglice Wilshire (1649) by Atlas van Loon.

Avebury doth as much exceed Stonehenge in grandeur as a Cathedral doth an ordinary Parish Church.

John Aubrey

John Aubrey (1626–1697) was the pioneering antiquarian and archaeologist whose interest in the ancient sites of southern England made him the first person to subject Avebury to any serious study. As a consequence his comparison between Avebury and Stonehenge may contain some bias—Stonehenge’s site on the desolate Salisbury Plain made its presence well-known even if it was little understood—but it should be noted that in Aubrey’s time there were more stones at Avebury than there are today, and the long avenues leading to and from the outer circle were still intact. The stones of Avebury were unfortunately small enough to be broken up by the locals for building materials.

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Stonehenge (1835) by John Constable.

The size of the stones, and the isolation of the site explains why Stonehenge has proved more attractive to the arts than other Neolithic monuments. William Macready in the 19th century added Stonehenge-like trilithons to his stage designs for King Lear, an addition that persisted for decades; Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) famously ends with a scene at the stones, while in the 20th century Stonehenge was shoehorned into Night of the Demon (1957), Jacques Tourneur and Charles Bennett’s film adaptation of Casting the Runes by MR James. James was an antiquarian himself so may well have approved of the inclusion, especially the way the stones are used in the opening scene.

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Stonehenge at Sunset (1835) by John Constable.

Painted renderings of the stones tend to be a mixture of archaeological studies and depictions like those featured here. The site had an understandable attraction to the Romantics, and drew both Constable and Turner there. (See Turner’s paintings and sketches here.) Constable’s watercolour of the stones against a turbulent sky is oft-reproduced. Some of the stones seen in 19th paintings and drawings lean more than they do today, having been restored to the vertical in the 20th century.

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Stonehenge – Twilight (c. 1840) by William Turner of Oxford (not to be confused with his more famous namesake).

Closer to our own time there’s Henry Moore’s marvellous series of lithograph prints from 1973 which study the stones from a variety of angles. These include close views, something few other artists seem to attempt. The photo print below shows the site as it was in the 1890s with cart tracks passing nearer to the stones than visitors today are allowed to venture.

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