When appearing on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune, celebrity art dealer and TV personality Philip Mould clearly seeks to give us the impression that art forgers are only interested in faking really famous artists whose work fetches many thousands of pounds at auction. However, unless my father is much more famous than I think he is, this is most definitely not the case. Deliberate forgeries, as well as misattributions, of Clifford Hall’s work have been turning up at auction for the past 10 years at least.
Some people with whom I have discussed this issue, sensing no doubt my ill-disguised annoyance at the situation, seem inclined to try and assuage me by comparing the forger with the acolyte and suggesting that this fakery could be viewed in a somewhat positive light as a kind of flattery. Well indeed, it would be nice to think that these fraudsters are predicting that the artist, Clifford Hall, is destined to become very famous, and therefore hugely valuable, one fine day. But sadly, I doubt that there is any such positive aspect to be found in the nefarious activities of these scoundrels. They are, I believe, merely out to make a quick dishonest buck without any thought whatsoever for my father’s reputation, and have nothing more than a purely mercenary regard for his artistic achievements. They know that a ‘Clifford Hall’ is worth a few bob and are aware that they can take advantage of this fact. Because, despite being moderately valuable, Clifford Hall’s work is not widely understood or that easily recognised by the art market as a whole. He was not an artist with one easily identifiable ‘signature style’. He was versatile and diverse; just not interested in finding a formula that sold which he could then repeat for all it was worth. Generally speaking, the market finds the genre artist whose work seldom, if ever, strays far from a clearly defined idiom much easier to deal with than those who are versatile in terms of technique and diverse in their choice of subject matter. Artists who are difficult to categorize, label and stick in a box are a problem for the art market. Such creative souls must almost always struggle for solid recognition and lasting success . Better a compliant artist who is satisfied to just find his audience and feed them what they like, at least until it goes out of fashion. Better a man who is willing to repeat himself ad nauseam until he is forced to try something new – or simply retire gracefully from the fray.
So, despite his diversity, when there is a picture to be sold and a story to be told, the market still sometimes tries to categorize Clifford Hall as mostly a painter of ‘this’ or a painter of ‘that’. Because that is how the market is designed to operate.
For example, it is known that Clifford Hall sometimes painted pictures of the circus – especially the clowns. And so a painting or a drawing of a clown, which is signed ‘Clifford Hall’ or is otherwise identified as a Clifford Hall, turns up at market and it is assumed to be genuine and therefore moderately valuable. But other than that, quite often, very little attention will be paid to the picture itself. Or so it seems.
Some while ago, in the summer of 2016, this specimen called ‘Circus Entertainers’ turned up at a provincial auction house in England:
It is a reasonably competent watercolour copy of a fairly well-known oil painting by Dame Laura Knight. This one:
http://www.damelauraknight.com/artwork/three-clowns-1930/
But bizarrely, it is signed and dated ‘Clifford Hall 56’.
Now, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that my father could have made a copy of a picture by an artist like Laura Knight for some reason. However, he would never have signed and dated it as his own work: he had far too much respect for his own reputation, as well the reputations of his fellow artists, to do such a silly thing.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the artist who made this copy was not the same person as the one who forged (very badly) my father’s signature on it. But either way, whether the signature was added by the copyist or sometime later by someone else who had acquired the copy somehow, there really is no ‘flattery’ to be found in this now, is there? Just casual greed and/or complete contempt. Complete contempt for the market: and, of course, for both the artists concerned.
On the subject of contempt, this ghastly daub
claiming to be a signed framed oil painting of a ‘Sad Clown’ by Clifford Hall ( 1904-1973) turned up on the market a few months before the Laura Knight copy. A ‘sad clown’ he undoubtedly is – but by Clifford Hall (1904-1973) he most definitely is not. Never, ever, in a million years is this sorry little chap a Clifford Hall.
‘Dear God! How could anyone think that **** is by my father?’ was my reaction when I first saw it pop up on the-saleroom.com website.
Regrettably, I was not able to get it withdrawn from the auction in time to prevent it from being sold as a work by my father for the derisory hammer price of £50. The auctioneers even (proudly?) announced this sale to the world by uploading an image of the thing on Pinterest. They (the auctioneers) did not respond to my infuriated emails but they did remove the pin pretty damn sharpish when I complained about it. I also eventually succeeded in getting the offending image removed from the-saleroom.com website. Nevertheless, this ‘sad clown’ kept turning up on Google image searches for ‘Clifford Hall’ for a number of months after that. However, thankfully, it finally disappeared. Now, of course, with the publication of this blog post, it may start turning up on Google image searches again. But at least anyone who clicks on it now should be informed that this ‘painting’ is a forgery.
As the saying goes, ‘there is no accounting for taste’ and I can only hope that the poor soul who paid £50+ auction fees for this thing bought it because they actually liked it, and not because they thought it was a genuine Clifford Hall. And I suppose it is worth 50 quid if you actually like it enough to pay that much for it. But what if it is actually signed ‘Clifford Hall’ as per the auctioneer’s description? I cannot tell from the jpeg image, which may well have been cropped. If it really has that name on it, this sad little clown remains a problem for me, as he may well turn up on the market again at any moment still carrying his false attribution. There are other fake Clifford Hall’s that have done this and I have even gone so far as to buy one of them to take it out of the running altogether.
This one, called ‘Busy Harbour Scene’:
The forger who created this fake displays considerably more skill than the guys who produced the previous two examples. The signature (bottom right) is really very well done. If I wasn’t too honest to do so, I might even consider giving him, or her, some gainful employment signing my father’s unsigned paintings, of which I have a few. Looking at the photo on the web, it was the painting itself which failed to convince me, rather too busy really, although it did give me pause for doubt and made me seriously consider the possibility that it might conceivably be genuine and just very atypical in the treatment. But no, it couldn’t be right, I was 99.9% sure it couldn’t be right. However, the colour reproduction in the photo might be very inaccurate. It often can be, even with modern digital cameras. So I was not 100% sure until I actually saw it ‘in the flesh’. This disturbed me greatly because most of the forgeries I had seen before this one were very easy to spot, as they are really bad paintings. But this one I rather like. And now that I have it in my possession, I certainly do not have the heart to destroy it. Instead, I will pay to have the signature expertly removed. For again, I cannot be sure the person who painted it is the forger who signed it and I would never dream of destroying an unsigned painting that was not my own work. It is quite simply criminal to do such things; ‘taste’, good, bad or indifferent, has nothing to do with it. And it did only cost me £279.20. But I certainly do not want to make a habit of buying fake Clifford Hall’s in order to permanently remove them from the market. So I informed the auctioneer concerned that I knew they had sold me a fake, and told them what I intended to do with it, and asked them to inform the vendor accordingly. I can only hope they did so. And only hope also that the message got through to the forger concerned and that he will consequently be dissuaded, rather than encouraged, by the news and desist from producing anymore fake Clifford Halls.
Oh my, what an infernal bloody nuisance these forgers are! Especially when their efforts fetch higher prices, the sort of prices that genuine Clifford Hall paintings more generally sell for. Especially when they find their way into more important venues than some little, out-of-the-way, country auction: those sort of obscure places where one might almost expect to find all manner of objects of dubious and uncertain origin, I suppose.
In 2008, this:
presented as ‘Girl On A Beach by Clifford Hall’ sold for a hammer price of £1300 at a well-known auction house in Central London.
An obvious fake to me. As it should be really, for my father didn’t start painting anything remotely like this until the 1960s, by which time I was around and got to see everything he was painting in his studio at the bottom of the garden. I was born in 1957, when my father was 53 years old and had already produced and sold a great deal of his work.
What’s wrong with it then? Apart from the fact that I would almost certainly remember it if it was genuine?
Well, the drawing (particularly of the feet and head ) isn’t good enough. And the use of colour is totally wrong. However, the subject matter is bang on. If it was better drawn and painted with the correct palette, it would look very much like a genuine Clifford Hall painting.
For here:
is a photo of the genuine article.
So now we are dealing with a forger who may well know that my father sometimes used the same model, seen from the same angle and in the same pose, in several different paintings; and while I have yet to come across anymore forgeries of a Clifford Hall bather like this one, I strongly suspect there could well be a few more hanging around, as I have heard rumours to the effect, and it stands to reason that when a forger makes a four-figure sum with one of his efforts he is quite likely to feel sufficiently emboldened by this successful ruse to dash of a few more tricks of a very similar nature. However, I am reasonably confident that no other forgeries like this one have been sold at auction in the UK. But auctions abroad? I really cannot be so sure of. And as for commercial gallery and art dealer sales -who knows? Not everything shows up on the Net. It doesn’t even do so now and certainly didn’t 10 or more years ago. This auction sale also took place before I really started paying attention to what was going on. I didn’t discover it had happened until a couple of years after the event.
And then a couple of years after that, as of January 1st 2012, the beneficiaries and heirs of deceased artists became entitled to droit de suite, aka Artists Resale Rights (ARR), in the UK. Not on sales before January 1st 2012, but henceforward.
For ARR to apply, the sale has to be for €1000 or more and most, though not all, of the fake Clifford Halls I am aware of that have been sold on the professional art market in the UK sold for less than that. However, when they are sold for ARR applicable sums, the artist’s estate is then faced with an additional problem. For me personally, there is no moral dilemma involved: my position is that the artist’s estate simply must not accept ARR royalties on work that is not by the artist, for to do so is not only to become complicit in the fraud but also, in effect, to accept work into the artist’s oeuvre which does not belong there. If you have any genuine concern for an artist’s enduring reputation, you must do nothing to damage the integrity of his provenance. Nothing at all. Provenance is everything, especially where considerable amounts of money are involved.
In 2014, I discovered that a West End art gallery had recently sold a fake ‘Clifford Hall’ painting for a four-figure sum. They had also sold several genuine Clifford Hall paintings for similarly respectable prices. Looking for the first time at this gallery’s Clifford Hall webpage, I was frankly nonplussed: how could they possibly think that ‘thing’ was by the same artist as the others? True, as I have already mentioned, he was a very versatile and diverse painter, but he was not in the habit of producing bad work; and as far as I was concerned the patently obvious “wrong ‘un” in the pack I was looking at was a thoroughly bad painting. Indeed, it made me feel sick as I suspected a monstrous insult to my father’s reputation had been wilfully and cynically perpetrated. However, when I got to speak to the dealer he seemed to think it was a good painting. But he completely accepted my word for it that it could not possibly be by my father and admitted that when he came across it at auction he had felt that it wasn’t in my father’s ‘usual style’. And, as the painting bore no signature, the thing he claimed that had persuaded him that it was a genuine work was the label verso, which indicated that it had been sold at the Clifford Hall ‘Studio Sale’ which took place at Christie’s, South Kensington, on Monday, June 28, 1982. True, such a sale did take place on that date. However, there is nothing listed in the catalogue of that auction with the same name as the work in question. So this dealer had failed to double-check the provenance. Wouldn’t that have been the wise thing to do under the circumstances?
Anyway, the dealer promised to have the image of the fake removed from their website and also assured me that the buyer, a restaurateur apparently, wouldn’t mind that it wasn’t a genuine Clifford Hall as he had just wanted a painting of a girl and he didn’t care who the artist was.
‘Really?’ I thought, ‘if all he wanted was a bad painting of a girl, he could have visited the park railings in the nearby Bayswater Road on any Sunday and picked one up for considerably less money.’ Such paintings abound down there.
Subsequently, the offending image was duly removed from the website and eventually ceased popping-up in Google image searches. Also, thankfully, the dealer was a bit behind on paying out on the ARR and I was able to tell DACS that my father’s estate would not accept the royalty due on this fake. So who did the royalty go too? I don’t know, but I guess that the dealer wasn’t invoiced for it and so got to keep the money for himself.
When I told another art dealer about the affair and that I had declined the royalty payment, his reaction was, ‘Why? Make hay while the sun shines.’
I was taken aback by this retort. No doubt I am a little naive and always will be to some extent.
And no doubt there are others, including some heirs and administrators of other artistic estates, who would take the same line and think me ‘foolishly proud’ – or something of that ilk. So it isn’t just the forgers who are hurting the art market, it is the shortsightedness of other people involved in the art world who wouldn’t dream of actually knowingly flogging a fake themselves. They should know better. I’m sure they do know better. And yet they will still sail dangerously close to the wind sometimes.
For myself, I think it is wise to be a little naive: be naive in the sense of artless that is.
However, I have decided, perhaps against my better judgement, not to publish here an image of this particular monstrous fake: suffice to say it is called ‘The Red-Checked Dress’ and it may well be adorning the wall of some popular London restaurant right now. But I am watching out for it. I will spot it straightaway should I see it – on a restaurant wall or, God forbid, some auctioneer’s website – and then I will have to deal with it again. I will have to ascertain if it really has a label on the back indicating it was sold at the Christie’s studio sale. And if there is such a label, is it on the back of the painting itself or on the frame, or both? And also what, if any, is the title of the picture on the label?
One should keep an open mind in such cases, for it may just be a misattribution rather than an actual fake. If the label is only on the frame and/or gives no picture title or a different title from the one expected, you could possibly be dealing with a frame that used to contain a genuine Clifford Hall painting which has been taken out and replaced by another painting by someone too careless or ignorant to have taken the identifying label off the frame and stick it on the back of the original picture when they did the switch. That’s if the label itself is genuine, of course. If the label is on the back of the painting itself, however, then you are almost certainly looking at a deliberate forgery with a fake label on the back of it. But wherever the label actually is, be it on the frame or the picture or both, it needs to be removed. As long as it remains where it is, the risk remains that it will be sold as a Clifford Hall painting again one day.
Perhaps I am worrying needlessly and the label has been removed already. But honestly, I doubt that the dealer concerned was conscientious enough to contact his customer to inform him that a painting he has sold him is incorrectly identified and therefore the label should be removed. If it was really there, like he said it was when making his excuses, it is probably still there to this day.
With respect to Mr Mould, I suppose that as he apparently only deals in very expensive art, he may well have only ever had experience of dealing with the problems caused by the more ‘high-class’ type of art forgers of this world. The type who would probably not bother wasting his time faking anything as relatively humble as a Clifford Hall painting or drawing. Well, at least not yet.
Enough for now. I will be publishing some further posts on this subject here in the future. These five fake Clifford Hall paintings are by no means the only ones floating around.