Why not authenticate this delectable painting? Go and search the archives, where, lo and behold, you find details of the colours he liked and letters telling how he painted it!
Maybe even notes about it from some lady friend! You're convinced. The painting the dealer offered you is genuine!
But what if those references, old auction records, detailed notes in the archives themselves are fake? Then you've been had. You'll go smiling brightly, and buy a forgery. It's terrible. Why? Because you have no come-back. Your savings are down the chute. You'll have bought a daub not worth the price of the canvas. In short, you're broke.
The Nicholson con trick, then, is simple. You fake a painting 'in the style of some artist.
You gain access to a gallery's archives, pretending to research the artist's life and works. While you're down there, you slip into the archives details of some historical auction that never in fact took place, and include a description of your faked painting.
Then only do you emerge, smiling brightly, and sell your fake. It's now archive-authentic. The archives which you've cunningly altered are there for all to see. Poor Ben Nicholson's name? Well, his were the paintings that brought the trick to fame. And the Tate's name is forever linked to this con. Scotland Yard's men are plodding about the vaults of our esteemed galleries even as you read. They'll get nowhere, take my word.
It came into being a few years before the new millennium. Strangely, the works were all easily fakable, from du Buffet to Sutherland, Nicholson, Giacometti. And in the V. & A. as well as the Tate, I suppose on the principle that you never change a winning con.
So the Nick Trick rides with us into the sunset, 'proving' forgeries and fakes to be infallibly genuine. It's a disgusting con, begun at the gallery established by the most decent bloke who ever trod land. Aren't we rotten? I decided that London's oldest gallery deserved a look. Where was the harm?
I decided against taking 'Lydia to the Dulwich PictureGallery.
There's no doubt, women hold life's core. Blokes don't. I don't mean understanding, so much as power. Give an example: Edna was bonny, with that magic colouring that holds your gaze even when you don't know why the heck you're staring. Shapely blondes with blue eyes have it. Middle-aged women with quiet faces and greying hair have it. And Edna - blue-rinsed, grey-eyed, bow-mouthed Edna - had it. She caused me problems, though, did Edna, because she was a chef who cooked by astrology. This astrologist moved in with me, installing ovens, fridges, shelves. She had the water and electricity turned back on.
Blodge, our local greengrocer, was deliriously happy at the sudden rash of deliveries. I couldn't move for bags of spuds and cauliflowers. If I stood up my head vanished among a forest of dangling herbs and onions. It was okay, though, because she was a skilled cook and a rapacious lover. Paradise? For a short spell, yes. I'd nothing against a chef checking for planets and comets before basting her carrots. Edna though was ruled by heavenly bodies.
For two days we ravished and dined, loved and noshed. The third evening I found no grub ready, so smilingly reached for her. Pale, she shoved me away. The cottage was still, kitchen cold. The planets had struck.
'It's Raphael's astronomical ephemeris, Lovejoy,' she said. 'I've made a terrible mistake.
Just look at the Complete Aspectarian.' Edna never went anywhere without a folder containing charts.
'Eh? Does it matter?'
'We mustn't eat until the Planet Saturn's off the cusp, Lovejoy.
'I can't remember the details - it might have been Planet Cusp for all I knew. The gist, however, was that starvation was our menu all day.
And the next day.
By then, though, I'd fled, surviving by eating the Treble Tile down to its last butty. For three days I never went home. When finally I tiptoed into the garden, my cottage was bare. Edna had gone, taking her last twig of parsley.
See my point? Women have this terrific omnipotence. Women rule. Edna said 'Starve,'
so I did, at least for an hour, until I was at death's dark door. It's their reasons that puzzle me. Starving in a good cause is fine, but because stars move about more on some nights than on others? I ask you.
The only original toll still going in London's tangled spread is in Dulwich's College Road.
The guide books say that your motor is allowed past for five pence. Don't believe a word. By the time this gets printed it's like to cost you an arm. A lorry costs you a leg, which is important if you're casually dropping by to steal the Dulwich Picture Gallery's entire contents. It happens, incidentally, to be our kingdom's oldest picture gallery.
History books tell you that it's all owned by 'Alleyn's College of God's Gift'. Means some school.
Edward Alleyn was an actor who made a fortune from bear baiting, dog fights, 'sports'
like bull baiting in James I's time. He made even more by owning Paris Garden in Southwark - the same noble mansion house where the fated Jane Seymour, of Henry VIII fame, lived before. In 1613 Alleyn started building a school, with chapel and lodgings. Poor lads were to be taught there. It worked. The Fellows nobly pawned the college silver for the (losing) royalist side in the Great Civil War. Cromwell's Roundheads later gave tit for tat, melted the college's organ pipes into bullets. I walked past the college, round the pond, and into College Road.
With theft in mind.
Of course, you can deceive without actually storming a single rampart. Like, a famous Aboriginal artist lately painted highly sought primitive masterpieces - until a white highborn Australian lady was shown to be the creator. Good for her, I say, and no harm done, for who's to say she wasn't somehow influenced - maybe even darkly taken over
- by some Aboriginal spirit? Sorry if this seems blasphemous, but how can we know?
Then again you can storm ramparts, like the man with the shotgun in the famous Lefevre Gallery theft in London's posh West End. He calmly walked in, took Picasso's portrait of the delectable Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress, and zoomed off, politely paying the taxi's fare in Battersea. Timing is everything in robbery.
From across the road I stared at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It's so beautiful that tears wet my eyes. That it is
