Gang in an artful dodge
A mystery gang came close to pulling off a lucrative art fraud. They managed to get eight supposed works by the Cornish seascape artist Alfred Wallis into the catalogue of a respected auction house, with a total top guide sale price of £115,000.
Trading Standards officers in Dorset warned Dukes Fine Art Auctioneers in Dorchester that the lots were suspect but they were still included in a sale catalogue.
The watchdogs seized the works before they could be sold and tests proved that all eight were created after Wallis’s death in 1942.
The auction house is owned by a partnership, Duke’s 1823 LLP, which this week pleaded guilty to breaking consumer protection regulations and was ordered to pay £18,275 in fines and costs.
Similar charges against partner Garry Batt, 61, were dropped.
Richard Herringshaw, prosecuting for Dorset Trading Standards, told Weymouth magistrates: “The defendants were well aware that there were issues with these works that required further investigation yet they chose to market them.”
Tim Bradbury, defending, said: “There’s absolutely no suggestion in this case that Dukes or any of the directors of the partnership were in any way complicit, connived or knew of the fraud.”
The fakes were supplied by an established art dealer in Cornwall, but the crooks who produced them have not been identified.