Car boot sale Picasso appears to be the work of a master ... forger
THE painting signed by Picasso and picked up at a car boot sale for just £230 had Brighton’s leading auction house hugely excited.
If genuine, the oil on board study titled Seated Bather would be worth £1million and possibly much more. It bears Picasso’s signature on the front and a second with a note on the back.
The auction team at Brighton and Hove Auction Room said they were “stunned” and declared it a possible “preliminary study” when antiques collector Philip Stapleton brought the artwork in for examination.
But their hopes of finding a genuine Picasso may be dashed. The likely hand behind the painting is David Henty, a prolific art forger, previously jailed for forging passports in the 1990s.
When asked by The Telegraph if the paintings was one of his, Mr Henty, 60, who lives in Brighton, said: “It looks very familiar. I gave some paintings a while ago to a friend of mine. There are a few stray ones [out there].”
In a subsequent text message, he said: “It’s all a bit of fun, but sometimes they do end up in funny places”, accompanied by a photograph of the original painting in a Picasso art book in Mr Henty’s possession. Mr Henty was first exposed as an art forger by The Telegraph in 2014 when he was selling dozens of copies of works by Picasso, LS Lowry and others on ebay. The publicity led to him being feted on television programmes and his copies, marked clearly as “Henty’s” now sell for £5,000 and upwards.
Rosie May, Brighton and Hove Auction Rooms’ art researcher, said she did not believe Mr Henty had painted Seated Bather. “He is a liar,” she said.
Mr Stapleton, of Crawley, West Sussex, said: “I thought that I’d paid quite a lot of money for a fake picture. But I went to the auction house, and I thought I’d get my money back on it.”
Philip Mould, the art dealer and presenter of the BBC series Fake or Fortune?, said: “No one in the serious art market is likely to take it seriously unless it was authenticated by the Picasso family and estate. It’s a titanic task to get the evidence to satisfy them. The road to authenticity with Picasso is paved with rejection.”