Giovanni Cavino and Pirro Ligorio: (1500-83) Italians.

Counterfeiters and forgers of medals.

Cavino was born in Padua in 1500 and was a goldsmith  who faked medals and coins. Scholar Alessandro Bassiano often assisted.

Both Cavino and Ligorio were master 16th century coin counterfeiters which is one of the earliest forms of faking and fraud.

Coins have been counterfeited since they were first introduced by King Gyges of Lydia in 670 BC and it was pretty easy to accomplish. Casts could simply be made from original coins and new ones minted!

William Henry Ireland   (British)

Document and script forger.

See Worlds Greatest Art Fakers - Section 1   GO

Riccardo Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti (Italian)

The Ricardi family:

 The scandal of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors 

In 1915 a fantastic treasure, in the guise of  a life-size Etruscan warrior figure made of terra-cotta emerged from the darkness of time in an Italian field near Bagnorea and was sold to John Marshall, the purchasing agent for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for an undisclosed sum.

It was soon to be followed by a massive warriors head from the same site and a further warrior sculpture.

 Not until the 1960s were they embarrassingly confirmed by experts as fakes.

How did they find out they were fakes? They contained manganese which wasn't known to the Etruscans and were made of segmented pieces, certainly not a technique used by artisans in the time frame.

It transpired that the works had actually been created by two genius Italian sculptors, Riccardo Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti and their assistants, who having ingeniously fabricated them in their studio, planted them on the site of an ancient temple and passed them off as priceless Etruscan artefacts.

Unfortunately for him, Riccardo was killed in a fall from his horse in 1918 and his place in the family faking business and the creation of the third artifact, taken by two cousins, Teodoro and Virgilio who were far less skilled at their work than he.

Confronted in 1961 by ever mounting evidence of fakery, Fioravanti confessed to the deception and the sculptures taken away from public view at the museum.

A full account of the story can be found in an excellent book by David Sox,  “Unmasking the Forger, The Dossena Deception” (1987)

Alfred André:  (D 1919) French

Jewellery forger.

Andre was a talented Parisian goldsmith and restorer who worked for a time for the Rothschild family.

In 1994 Rudolph Distelberger, an Austrian museum curator, became suspicious of jewellery that had been given to the National Gallery of Washington by the American millionaire Peter Widener. His subsequent research lead him to the Andre workshops.

There, Distelberger found drawers full of plaster casts and wax models of his fakes. It is known that Andre worked for Frederic Spitzer, a collector and dealer who channellled fakes through his collection to other major collectors of the day.

At Sotheby's Rothschild sale in 2003, were three of André's fakes all with their history clearly marked. "Not only was André expertly restoring original Renaissance pieces," says the catalogue. "He was also creating examples in the Renaissance manner to satisfy the high demand among the collectors of the period.'

 No known

image

James Edward Little: (1876-1953) British

Artefact forger

Little was a successful antiques dealer and restorer who worked and lived in Torquay on Devons' south coast where he specialised in selling ethnographic material and Polynesian artifacts and although he'd never set foot in the South Pacific in his life. His specialism was forging and selling Maori artefacts.

His modus operandi was to place advertisements in the Exchange and Mart newspaper and soon had a string of serious collectors as clients. Starting up in the process, one of Britains first antiques mail order businesses.

In his career, Little fooled museum directors, scholars and art collectors across the world. All bought into the idea that his forged or stolen Polynesian artefacts and their associated documentation were real.

Little's best work was often direct copies of authentic Maori artefacts, instruments, curiosities and trinkets. His master plan was to steal artefacts from museums, copy the pieces accurately, replace them with fakes and sell the originals on. As a master thief however, he was next to useless and he bungled many criminal attempts.

In 1915 he stole a decorated Maori wooden box from a Wiltshire museum, substituting the original for one of his fakes. But it was noticed.

Little was tracked down by police having signed the visitors' book at the museum with a false name in - Another 'Little' bungle as he was the only visitor at the museum in three days!

Subsequently, he was arrested and sent to prison for six months, serving more time up and into the 1930's for attempted theft from various museums and auction houses. Even so,  he was never actually convicted of forgery.

No known

photograph exists

The Gokhman Brothers &  Israel Rouchomovsky (1860-1934) Russian.    

The unknowing faker.

Jewellery and artefact forgers.

Rouchomovsky was a brilliant Jewish goldsmith who was born in Mozyr, a small town near Minsk in Russia.

His claim to infamy is that he unwittingly created an exquisite gold artifact which was sold as an ancient Scythian Greek tiara known better as the “Tiara of Saitapharnes” to the Louvre Museum in Paris but apparently without his knowledge. Experts there dated it to the third century B.C.!

In fact, the beautiful work, a tiara, bearing a Greek dedication in the form of a convincing inscription which confirmed it in their eyes as an ancient artifact, was actually a great deal younger.

It came to light that it had been created in Odessa in Russia only two years earlier in 1880 after a commission to the young Rouchomovsky by shady dealers known as the Gokhman brothers. 

After paying for it, the Gokhman brothers immediately took the tiara to Paris, where it was shown to the curators at the Louvre. Once there the Gokhmans cleverly let it slip that they were on their way to sell their priceless Greek find to the British Museum. After that, it didn’t take long for the officials to get all hot and bothered, promptly purchasing the crown for a huge amount of money, some 200,000 gold francs!

It was only much later when German archeologist Rudolf Furtwanglerfirst labelled it as a forgery, that eyebrows were raised and others chipped in. It only took the Louvre seven years to announce to the public that the tiara was indeed a fake and they promptly removed it from public view!

Not wanting to be beaten, the Louvre once again bought artifacts which they didn't know emanated from the Gokhman shop in Ochakov. Here at the shop, it transpired that L Gokhman would sketch out artifact orders which would magically become treasures in silver and gold and pass the plans to jewellers and craftsmen to manufacture. They operated an extensive and very successful network of agents with one, Anyuta, a woman from Peroutino, a village on the site of the ancient city of Olvia, who would make regular visits to museums, offering up highly plausible stories of how the treasures were discovered buried and exhumed from a grave or turning up in excavations and so on!

So once again, this time in 1939, the Louvre bought another Scythian artifact in the form of a Golden horn in the likeness of a boars head!

Said E R Stern, Director of the Archaelogical Museum in Odessa; "The shop would forge everything!

Scythian artifact

Jean de Sperati: (1884-1957) French  

Known as: The King of Counterfeits and as the Rubens of Philately.
Stamp forger

Sperati was the master forger born in Italy but spending most of his life in France.

He was noted as the faker of pre-1920 Australian stamps which even the authenticators believed to be authentic. This included the red 1913 - £2 stamp and the Hong Kong olive 1865 - 96 cent stamp.

Like many before him and indeed after him, he considered himself to be an artist and not a counterfeiter.

In 1942, Sperati came into conflict with the law when French customs officials seized a shipment of German stamps and found some to be forgeries. Sperati claimed that they were not forgeries but simply copies.

It didn't wash and he got a year for his trouble and was fined 310,000 Francs for his criminal intentions.

Sperati is best known in Australia for his excellent 1913 £2 Kangaroo stamp forgeries of which dozens are now in collector hands. 

Today, the stamp forgeries of Jean de Sperati are considered to be some of the best of the world and ore selling at Sotheby's and Christies, legitimately as fakes, for thousands of pounds.

Jean de Sperati

Joseph Cosey  aka   Martin Coneely: (1887-1950) American

Autograph and Historical Document forger

Cosey stole a Benjamin Franklin pay warrant dated from 1786 from the Library of Congress in the 1930's which began his career as a brilliant autograph forger and copyist of presidential handwriting. He is known as one of the most notorious forgers of the early 20th century.

Some of his most famous forgeries were documents allegedly to have been written by Abraham Lincoln, fooling the experts for decades.

The list of other known reproduced tsignatures of American legends, included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Button Gwinnett, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. It is also known that he forged documents and signatures of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling and Walt Whitman.

In January 1937 he was finally arrested for selling a letter purportedly written by President Lincoln to a stamp dealer. He admitted his crime and was given a sentence of three years but paroled after serving only one.

It is believed that Cosey continued with his illicit work up until his death in 1950 and that many of his forged documents still exist in collections and museums where they are still believed to be real!

Martin Coneely

Ellic Howe: aka. "Armin Hull" (1910-1991) British

 Espionage forgers

Armin Hull, was the non-de-plume of Eric Howe and it was Howe who became the man who was put in charge of Britain's forgery and counterfeit operation during World War Two with SOE (the Special Operations Executive)

As a younger man in the 30's, he had made a special study of German typography and printing techniques and had been a professional printer before the war. As an expert, he was made responsible therefore for espionage forgeries and propaganda parodies of postage stamps.This includes the forgery of German ration cards, orders and letters.  The scale of the operation was massive.

As the Daily Express’s chief foreign correspondent Sefton Delmer wrote later:

"....it became necessary for us to forge signatures and handwriting. Once we needed to forge a letter written by one of Goebbels's astrologers. Hull produced the perfect forgery within three days."

Waterlows in Dunstable was where forged documents for secret agents were printed in the UK and the printing itself took place at local newspaper presses in Luton.

There you go Luton, you are famous for something.

Bernhard Kruger:

Was Howes German counterpart:

SS Major Bernhard Kruger and Kruger's forgers were based in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp located near Oranienburg bei Berlin

Ellic Howe

Major

Bernhard Kruger

Eugene "Pinny." Field II    American

Autograph and Historical document forger.

The son of  an eminent American poet from Chicago, began his career by forging the signature of Abraham Lincoln in books once owned by his grandfather and sold them to unwitting collectors.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he formed a nefarious partnership with a fraudster called  Harry Dayton Sickles, it is alleged, forging countless historical documents and autographs in their careers including the "Coachman Forgeries." The two men continued working right up till the 1940's but were never formally charged with a crime.

The full story is brilliantly told here by Daniel E. Pearson and does not need to be recounted by me : 

http://webpages.charter.net/lincolnbooks/Butts.html

Eugene Field II