SO WHERE IS THE ‘FAKE’ MONET?
THE walls of the Picture Gallery in Prince Charles’s Dumfries House are a vivid emerald, an appropriate colour given the artistic gems it holds.
There are Dutch masterpieces from the 17th Century and one of world’s most dazzling collections of Chippendale chairs. A series of antique clocks bought after the Prince suggested the great Palladian mansion in Ayrshire ‘lacked a heartbeat’ add to the sense that this is a place where art matters.
Yet Dumfries House has now been revealed to be at the centre of some of the most audacious claims of art fakery in royal history. For it was into this illustrious company of artworks that James Stunt, the bankrupt, bling-loving former husband of Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone, is claimed to have inserted three replica paintings. They had allegedly been knocked up on a kitchen table in California by Tony Tetro, a man who once served a prison sentence for art fraud.
Tetro ages his canvases with splashes of black coffee and bleach. ‘With the coffee you can smell it sometimes,’ he says. ‘If you put your tongue on to it you can even taste it.
He dips the copper tacks which stretch the canvases over wood in vinegar to make them look antique. And it’s his expert application of a brown pigment called umber, diluted with linseed oil, which finally gives the paintings the yellowed appearance of an old masterpiece.
Tetro claims three of his pieces hung in Dumfries House, including the fake Monet, designed to look like one of the 250 studies the great French impressionist made of the water lilies in the garden at his home in Giverny in Normandy, all blues and greens and shots of lemon. ‘I was very proud of that,’ says Tetro. ‘It was a good Monet.’
There was a striking ‘Dali’, glossy and dark, of the crucified Christ. And finally there was an unmistakeable ‘Picasso’ of people at the seaside, resembling the artist’s 1937 masterpiece On The Beach.
It is a different style to Picasso’s famous paintings of people’s faces with their features rearranged. That, Tetro says, is much more difficult to replicate. ‘Picasso can be hard, you know, all those faces and eyes. Cubism is complicated.’
The paintings were on a ten-year loan to Dumfries House from Mr Stunt’s extensive collection in an apparent act of philanthropy organised by Prince Charles’s controversial aide Michael Fawcett. The three works in question had been valued for insurance purposes at £104 million in total.
The ‘Monet’ was first identified as likely to be a fake, then suspicions cast on the other two. The Monet was withdrawn from display and sent back to Stunt.
Now Dumfries House and the Prince’s staff are urgently investigating how this could have happened. Stunt sent 17 pictures up to the property, but they have now all been returned to Stunt, Dumfries House says.
The scandal leaves many questions to be answered.
First, how could three fakes have slipped into a collection so closely associated with the Royal Family? Dumfries House is the headquarters of Prince Charles’ charitable venture The Prince’s Foundation, launched last year. He famously saved the stately home for the nation, stepping in with a £20 million loan when it looked set to be sold to pay off death duties in 2007. Ironically, he led the consortium buying the property because he believed so passionately in the artistic integrity of the stately home and its contents.
Second, why was the heir to the throne accepting art on loan from a disgraced bullion dealer who was declared bankrupt in June amid claims he owed up to £14 million.
Stunt has long courted controversy with his fleet of 200 supercars, his £400,000 wine cellar, his high-profile security detail and the kind of gambling habit which meant he could boast of a £5 million credit line at every casino in London, Monaco, Las Vegas and Macau. His godfather is Terry Adams, head of Britain’s most notorious crime family.
And third: where’s the Monet now? At Stunt’s bankruptcy hearing in June his barrister Timothy Higginson said he was set to sell an unnamed Monet worth £2.1million through the Sotheby’s auction house at a private sale in Hong Kong to help pay his creditors. It was said to have previously been loaned to Dumfries House.
Judge Clive Jones told the court he was ‘extremely sceptical’ the auctioneers would have completed their provenance checks on the painting, establishing its authenticity and history, having received it just a week before the hearing.
If that’s the Dumfries House picture, it would have then had the cachet and credibility of Royal association. But if so it also raises a discrepancy between the value given in court and the £50 million Stunt said he had obtained as an insurance value.
The super wealthy often keep acquisition and ownership of expensive artwork secret for security reasons. Many things are opaque.
But what is clear is that the Prince is an unwitting victim, accepting the loan at face value.
Charles has written several letters to Stunt – and never a man to miss an opportunity, Stunt has had them framed and put on display in his office.
When he becomes King, Charles, of course, will preside over The Royal Collection, the most significant art collection in the world.
Yet, thanks to Stunt, his life has now intersected with that of Tetro, the world’s greatest living art forger. Tetro’s genius – if one can use that word – is his ability to replicate the work of any Old Master or modern artist. Only Pissarro has defeated him. ‘Too fiddly, all those dots,’ he admits.
Tetro’s name and work might be familiar to viewers of the longrunning BBC1 art detective programme Fake Or Fortune hosted by Fiona Bruce and art historian Philip Mould. They featured him in April 2015, seeking his opinion of a fake Marc Chagall picture. ‘I know a lot about Chagall. I think I have painted more Chagalls than Marc Chagall ever did,’ he says. By fluke, it was thanks to Fake Or Fortune that he met Stunt.
Tetro had bought a vintage Ferrari online from an Essex dealer. While it was awaiting shipping, it caught Stunt’s eye. The dealer, knowing Stunt was an art obsessive told him the man who’d acquired it was an artist who had just been on TV. He offered to introduce them. Within a week Stunt was calling Tetro at his one-bedroom apartment in Newport Beach, California.
‘James called me, he wanted a Picasso matador, he wanted me to make one up for his house, to show off. A Picasso had just sold for £138 million and elevated the price of every Picasso in the world. Picasso, Picasso, Picasso, it was what people wanted.
‘He said it had to look real. I aged
Stunt ‘planned to sell a Monet’ to settle debts
all his pictures artificially – that costs extra. If people are looking and they pick them up and they see a bright white shiny canvas and new stretcher bars then they know [it’s a reproduction] – and he didn’t want people to know. They would be able to tell in a second the pictures weren’t real, they’d laugh at them. James’s ambition was to hang them on his wall and impress his friends.
‘I’m happy to do it. It’s my job. It’s like getting up in the morning and brushing my teeth and having breakfast, I get up and paint and age a masterpiece.’
The men developed a warm telephone relationship collaborating on the matador picture, which was based on a genuine Picasso image of a bullfighter and a woman. Tetro digitally manipulated the original, removed the female figure, and showed the new version to Stunt who loved it. ‘We talked for hours on the phone before we met. He was generous, cordial but he goes on and off like a switch.’
Tetro then went to work at the small round table in his west-facing kitchen which catches the afternoon light. It’s a peaceful place, painted in a shade he mixed himself which he nicknames ‘ Tetro taupe’. His own nudes hang on the wall. ‘I don’t use an easel. I prop the canvases up against a vase of the famous Three Graces statue which holds my paintbrushes. I do three or four hours a day. Any more and I get bored, burn out.’
They met for the first time in 2015 at the £67.5 million mansion Stunt and Petra had bought in Los Angeles. Tetro delivered the picture of
‘James wanted a Picasso – and it had to look real’
a matador, along with a second Picasso, the Monet and a Rembrandt, all to be offered on spec to Stunt. Stunt took them all but Tetro was stunned when he paid not with cash but with a genuine painting – a portrait by Joshua Reynolds. Tetro auctioned it for £146,500 at Christie’s in December that year.
Stunt would eventually purchase 11 Tetro replicas in total, including a Degas, a Van Gogh, a Chagall and a Rembrandt. Tetro also sold him a fake Caravaggio portrait of Leonardo da Vinci as a young man. It’s actually a self portrait of Tetro when he was in his teens.
‘Take 50 years off my face and you can see it’s me. James still doesn’t know it’s me. I didn’t tell him. Why would I?’
Tetro had even cracked the painting by hand, emulating the cracks which would exist in a real Caravaggio by now. ‘You crackle a picture with two different varnishes, first a base coat and then a top coat, which goes on when it is still tacky. You let it sit at low humidity until it cracks and then I allow it to dry and fill in the cracks with umber.’
Tetro is clear that Stunt was only ever interested in the finished product, not the painting and ageing process. There was only one exception and that was when Stunt asked Tetro to amend a work he had on an office wall which resembled a Constable painting.
‘He wanted me to put a rainbow on a Constable – Constable did a lot of rainbows but this was someone else’s painting which just looked like Constable, some other Old Master.
‘He was directing me, make that bridge darker, put a rainbow on. But you know, new paint on an old canvas, you shine a light on that and it’s going to light up like a glowin-the-dark poster. That was the only time he got involved. Other than that he never offered direction or showed an interest in how the fakes were produced.’
Tetro has never suggested his work would dupe art authorities. Modern pigments contain 21st Century chemicals and additives. New canvas is flexible but then becomes brittle with age. Stretcher bars usually come with an array of stamps from the galleries and collections which have housed the picture down the years.
He says of his work: ‘ You can impress your friends with it, decorate your home with it, but it would never pass [ as the real thing]. The value of art today is so high, the scrutiny so intense. I know more about that than anyone who i s not a conservator. And the provenance of a painting is worth more than the picture itself. No one would purchase without provenance and I made that endlessly clear to James.’
Nonetheless, Stunt seems to have wondered what an expert might think of it.
In 2016 Tetro painted and delivered Dying Christ by Salvador Dali to Stunt. Tetro says Stunt hosted a dinner in London for the world’s foremost Dali expert and after dinner showed him the Dali only for the expert to exclaim: ‘That’s by Tony Tetro.’
In September 2017 Stunt invited Tetro to London and put him up in his Belgravia town house for four days. Ostensibly it was to discuss further commissions but he says Stunt spent most of the days asleep, leaving the artist in the company of the servants and bodyguards who eventually drove him back to Heathrow.
When he returned to Los Angeles communication between t hem cooled and, although Tetro painted another Picasso for him, to order, it has never been delivered. ‘He asked for a good Picasso so I did one of Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress. But he stopped returning my calls.’
It was about this time, he says, that he learned of the existence of loan contracts between Stunt and Dumfries House for the Monet, the Picasso and the Dali which he knew to be his.
Fearing he would be implicated, he has now decided t o speak publicly about his relationship with Stunt.
‘I don’t want trouble, I don’t want any part of this. This has got to be stopped now rather than later,’ he said. ‘James knew they were mine.’ Interestingly, in one final twist to this caper, Tetro reveals that Stunt paid for a second tranche of work with another picture by Joshua Reynolds. Tetro put it up for auction with Christie’s. The day before the sale, the auctioneers called him.
They were pulling it. The reason? They thought it was a forgery.