My picture? You don’t know your arts from elbow
Peter Doig wins court case against man who claimed namesake’s work was his
AN ARTIST has been awarded £2million over false claims he gave a prison officer a painting after being jailed for drugs possession.
Peter Doig, a celebrated Edinburgh-born painter, was the subject of bizarre allegations by a Canadian man who claimed he gave him the work of art in 1976 at a prison in Ontario.
Bob Fletcher alleged Doig had been held at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre as a teen for being caught with LSD.
He sued the Scot for more than £4million in the US, alleging Doig’s denial that the painting was his had potentially cost him millions because auctioneers refused to sell it.
In 2016, Chicago district judge Gary Feinerman ruled Doig did not paint the artwork.
Fletcher, his art dealer Peter Bartlow and their legal team have now been ordered to pay £2million towards Doig’s costs in the case.
Doig, 63, had argued the landscape painting – a desert scene of red rocks and a receding pond – was painted by another Scot called Peter Doige, who he said had once spent time locked up in Thunder Bay for a drug offence.
Doig said he has never been in Thunder Bay and only began painting on canvas in 1979.
Judge Feinerman told Fletcher and his team they should have dropped their lawsuit after it became clear it was “factually meritless and stood no chance of success”.
He said: “Plaintiffs should have known by May 2014 that their primary evidence – Fletcher’s recollections, at that point – was irreparably shaky and, in fact, wrong.
“Given the evidence that defendants had marshalled by that date – much of it from neutral sources in Canada, showing that it was Doige, not Doig, whom Fletcher knew in Thunder Bay and who created the painting – Fletcher could not reasonably have believed that his identification of Doig as the painter was accurate.
“The remainder of plaintiffs’ case consisted largely of attempts to poke holes in Doig’s story as to his whereabouts in the 1970s.
“Even if plaintiffs succeeded in poking some such holes – which is entirely expected for events occurring some 40 years earlier – those holes could not reasonably imply that Doig, not Doige, was the painting’s author.
“No reasonably objective person viewing the case could have expected that the plaintiffs’ story would prevail over Doig’s.”
The disputed artwork is a 86cm by 105cm canvas, signed “Pete Doige 76”.
Fletcher, 68, claimed he bought the painting from Doig for £80 to help him out and only realised in 2011 that he may own the work of a famous artist when a friend noticed the canvas.
Doig and Doige were both born in Scotland in the 50s.
Doig’s family immigrated to Canada when he was a child and he has admitted dabbling with LSD as a teen.
But he called the lawsuit a “scam” and, when shown a photograph of the canvas, said: “Nice painting. Not by me.”
The Scot, who splits his time between Trinidad and London, denies ever being in Thunder Bay or in any prison.
Doige’s sister Marilyn Bovard said she believes her brother, who died in Edmonton, Canada, in February 2012, was the painter.
In 2007, a painting of Doig’s entitled White Canoe sold at Sotheby’s for £5.7million, then an auction record for a living European artist.