John Myatt – Vincent Van Gogh – Haystacks at Moonrise – Genuine Fake

Description John Myatt – Vincent Van Gogh – Haystacks in Moonlight – Genuine Fake When his wife left him in 1985, Myatt gave up teaching to spend more time with his children and attempted to make a living by painting original works in the style of well-known artists. He placed an advertisement in Private Eye magazine which read, “Genuine fakes. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings from 150″. He was initially honest about the nature of his paintings, but John Drewe, a regular customer, was able to resell some of his paintings as genuine works. When he later told Myatt that Christie’s had accepted his “Albert Gleizes” painting as genuine and paid 25,000, Myatt became a willing accomplice to Drewe’s fraud and began to paint more pictures in the style of masters like Roger Bissiere, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Matisse, Ben Nicholson, Nicholas de Stael and Graham Sutherland.