Ingenious Imitations
Cornelius Krieghoff’s acclaimed paintings of nineteenth-century Canada are found in galleries and private collections around the world. But many of the works attributed to him are actually forgeries.
IAM AN ART COLLECTOR. THIS STORY IS ABOUT HOW HUNDREDS OF “Cornelius Krieghoff” paintings held by galleries and private collectors in Canada and abroad are in fact brilliantly reproduced fakes.
This story is not a work of fiction, and none of the names have been changed to protect the guilty. This is the true account of a quite remarkable period of a modern Wild West art world in which gunslingers (well, brush slingers) ran free on the creative range.
Let’s set the scene: It was the 1960s, and in “The Lanes” of Brighton, England, anything could be bought. You could take your pick from “genuine” historical sculptures to great paintings by some of the world’s most famous artists. And you could buy them at a fraction of the prices realized at auctions or tony London galleries. The Lanes were warrens of stalls and shops with dealers set up along the sidewalks. This was Portobello of London, the flea markets of Paris, and the Stanley Market of Hong Kong all rolled into one. Treasures could be found in every stall and around every corner.
And, when the treasure hunting was complete, one could find several excellent restaurants nearby. One such establishment was run by an affable Italian who decorated the walls of his establishment with art, all of which was for sale.
The restaurateur was Gabrio Bonaveri, and the establishment was named La Dolce Vito after his early business partner, whose name was Vito. Bonaveri combined the duties of chef, restaurant owner, and art dealer. He had what the art community called “a good eye,” the ability to discern quality from worthless junk. But often in The Lanes quality did not equate with authenticity. Quality was a question of how good the piece looked, and that was where the copyists and forgers came into play.
Bonaveri was a shrewd dealer, and according to those who knew him he was also a bit of a miser who hoarded his money and lived quite simply. Little is known of his background. He described himself as an orphan, but when he died he left his money to his father.
He was, by all accounts, a delightful character who entertained artists in interesting ways. The artists would bring him paintings, and he would bring them food and wine in exchange. The paintings would then hang on the narrow walls of La Dolce Vito, offered for sale. They sold quickly. But not all of this art was what it appeared to be.
Some of the pictures on the walls of La Dolce Vito were genuine. Bonaveri and his restaurant acquired a bit of fame when Canadian industrialist Alfred Bader and his wife, Isobel, patrons of the restaurant, purchased a small dirty painting off Bonaveri’s wall.
Bader described the discovery this way: “Years ago, Isobel and I were wandering around Brighton in Sussex, England, looking for somewhere to have a minestrone for lunch. We went into a small restaurant owned by an Italian Gabrio Bonaveri. On the wall were many paintings for sale.” Bader then recounted in a story in the Queen’s Alumni
Review how for 600 pounds sterling he purchased the painting Adoration of the Shepherds and how Bonaveri was so pleased with the sale that he did not charge the Baders for their minestrone.
Bader obviously had an eye as good as Bonaveri’s, as the dirty little painting was authenticated by the venerable auction house Christie’s as the work of none other than the Greek artist El Greco (1541–1614). The masterpiece then went through a sale at the auction, with the purchase price covered by Bader and the painting subsequently donated to Queen’s University (Bader’s alma mater) in Kingston, Ontario.
In the Queen’s Alumni Review story, Bader described the transaction: “I sent the painting to Christie’s, who accepted it as attributed to El Greco, although it was unpublished. I promised Queen’s to cover whatever price it reached at auction and, many years after we bought it, it arrived safely at Queen’s.”
La Dolce Vito closed in 1993, and paintings that had graced the walls at the time of the closing, as well as those in Bonaveri’s storage room, began to appear on the market. Among this collection were a number of excellent examples of the “potboiler” works of Cornelius David Krieghoff.
A word or two on the nature of the potboiler business: Cornelius David Krieghoff (1815–72) was a seriously talented artist. Scholars such as Dennis Reid, Raymond Vezina, and J. Russell Harper have studied his work and written about his life.
Notwithstanding the Dutch Canadian’s artistic talent, he also needed to make a living, and good money was to be made by mass producing souvenir paintings to be flogged to British garrison soldiers in Montreal and Quebec in the 1840s. These small, often twenty-by-twenty-five-centimetre paintings were potboilers, so named for providing the artist with the means to “boil the pot” — that is, pay for essentials like food.
Krieghoff and another artist, Martin Somerville, had studios in the same stone building at 26 St. James Street in Montreal, and they produced similar works. Surviving from this period is a lovely painting, entitled Marie of Montreal, of a Caughnawaga woman standing in front of the building circa 1849. She is holding moccasins for sale. The painting is pictured in J. Russell Harper’s 1979 book Krieghoff.
Marie of Montreal reappeared in London, England, on April 1, 2015, at the Christie’s sale of items from the Winkworth Collection that had been amassed by Peter Winkworth (1929–2005). Christie’s held a sale preview at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
There, art historian Dennis Reid and I had the pleasure of standing side by side viewing what Reid described as “a lovely little picture.” The painting was offered as attributed to either Cornelius Krieghoff or Martin Somerville. Even though the moccasins are wrong, I believe it to be Somerville’s work — but who knows?
I will now make a personal confession: I was the underbidder at the Christie’s auction for this painting, and it is the only painting that I have ever deeply regretted not buying. I set an upper limit on what I was willing to bid and missed the purchase by a few thousand dollars. My consolation prize was another smaller version of Marie of Montreal attributed to Somerville that now hangs proudly on my wall.
So, in the 1840s, Somerville and Krieghoff were engaged in producing attractive art for the masses. No one is certain of the quantities produced, but most certainly they were in the hundreds, perhaps many hundreds.
The subjects were often Indigenous figures, such as moccasin and basket sellers, hunters, and families out in snowy terrain. They were handsomely done, skilfully executed, and are now consequently quite valuable.
Finding these small Kreighoff paintings in the United Kingdom is not unusual. The 1840s garrison soldiers returned to their home countries with their souvenirs, and
over time the art passed from one generation to the next. The value of the paintings increased substantially with each passing generation. One can imagine the excitement of a patron of La Dolce Vito spotting a small Krieghoff for sale at a modest price on the walls of the restaurant.
Iam an art collector, an art detective, a writer, and an art historian, but most of all I am a treasure hunter. I love finding lost interesting things that turn up mysteriously. While I was in university, my future mother-in-law and I dug through an abandoned nineteenth-century railway dump, discovering antique bottles and pots. (I financed a bit of my university education by selling them.) As scuba divers, my wife, Lyne, and I explored the depths of the Mattawa and St. Lawrence rivers. As antique and Canadiana collectors we haunted the weekend markets and country auctions in search of treasure. But then, in the mid-1990s, along came eBay. This was a treasure seeker’s dream. Millions of items from all over the world were suddenly at our fingertips.
A revolution was happening in the art world. Overnight, the volume of available art increased exponentially. Some was good, some great, some terrible, some genuine. And then there were a whole lot of fakes.
But back to the story of how I got involved in all of this. In 2014, twenty-one years after the closing of Bonaveri’s restaurant, a rather attractive Krieghoff potboiler depicting an Indigenous hunter on snowshoes was offered for sale on eBay. I corresponded with the sellers, Peter and Joanna Bryan, and learned that the painting had come from an Italian restaurant that had operated near Brighton, England. A purchase of this painting, at a not totally modest price, was negotiated, and thus began this journey of discovery.
Joanna Bryan wrote to me and said, “There are, I think, other examples of these works in the garage. I will do my best to empty out the garage and find them. I know that another buyer bought some of Gabrio’s collection that decorated the restaurant. I will ask him if he has anything left from the parcel, although I remember that initially he put some through the local auction. It is worth asking him, however.”
One month later Joanna Bryan wrote back to say, “The garage and shed yielded three additional snow scenes which were stored on edge in a box. They had become a little dirty as I suspect that the surface of the paint was a trifle sticky from their days in the restaurant, with the nicotine and catering activities. They are being lightly cleaned and revarnished.”
Over the subsequent two years I acquired another ten paintings from the Bryans that had clearly been executed
by the same hand. The burning question was, whose hand? Krieghoff? Somerville? Or someone else entirely?
The signatures were right. The canvasses and stretchers were mid-nineteenth century. The subjects were accurate, but something was just not right.
The Krieghoff paintings that I acquired from Joanna and Peter Bryan over several years were “cleaned” before they were sent to me. Upon receipt of said paintings I was gobsmacked! They were bloody brilliant. And therein lay the problem.
They were too brilliant. The small canvasses were old and grubby on the back and clean and shiny on the front. The images were delicately done. The skies were perfect Krieghoff skies. The snow puffed up through the hunter’s snowshoes, and the snowflakes were divine.
The paintings were so clean that it was hard to imagine that they had been painted 175 years ago. Was it more likely that they had been painted forty years or so ago, about the time Bonaveri opened his restaurant? And, if so, by whom?
Why did I keep acquiring these suspect paintings? I guess I did it because they were enigmatic mysteries.
The paintings found their place on my walls, and I enjoyed looking at them every day. But this little project of discovering their true provenance was tucked away as I diligently tried to finish writing the book on the subject of the famous Canadian art fraud case of 1962–64. This concerned a flood of Canadian art forgeries of the works of well-known painters, including members of the Group of Seven.
The Brighton Krieghoffs project would most likely have remained on the shelf were it not for an email I received in early October 2020 from Peter Bryan. The email was to apologize for not having adequately responded to my request some years earlier for more information about the origins of the paintings.
Now for a bit of background on the Bryans: Peter was born and raised in Brighton. As a youngster he hung out in Brighton’s pool halls with the “knockers,” some of whom went on to become big international dealers. (A knocker is someone who goes door to door looking for old art and antiques to buy at bargain prices and, in this case, intends to resell them in The Lanes of Brighton at a considerable profit.) Over his career Bryan was a model, an art dealer, an artist, a Brighton pub owner, and a friend of Gabrio Bonaveri.
Peter Bryan met Joanna in the 1970s when she was a student at Eastbourne College of Art. Together they sold more than a few paintings over the years. Joanna was also a friend of Bonaveri, and Peter had met Max Brandrett, a local forger, years earlier through a fellow tavern keeper. Brighton was a small world, and art, both genuine and fake, was at its centre.
Over the days following Peter Bryan’s initial email, he and I had a series of fascinating exchanges about the characters and forgers of twentieth-century Britain. I learned about Tom Keating, one of Britain’s most famous forgers; of David Henty, now regarded as the best forger in the world; of William Mumford, a.k.a. “Billy the Brush,” who produced thousands of quality fake paintings; and about Max Brandrett, the protege of Keating and a hugely colourful figure in the world of art forgery.
Some of these characters went to jail for their efforts. After serving time, they became celebrities. Some, like Brandrett and Mumford, are now doing quite well financially, selling copies of great art under their own names, rather than passing off fakes.
One of the sellers is Jim Hartey of the Global Art Gallery at the Bridge House Antiques Market at Langham, England. Hartey is selling great imitations of Chagall, Picasso, Modigliani, and Stubbs. All are the products of William “Billy the Brush” Mumford.
In an article in Dorset Life magazine about Mumford, titled “Art for Art’s Sake,” Hartey is quoted as saying, “Billy can paint as well as many of the greats, yet none of them could paint like the others. The major art houses were