Tom Keating, The Artist’s Own Palette

Tom Keating (1917-1984) was a London-born picture restorer who became Britain’s best-known art forger. He claimed to have made more than 2,000 pictures in the manner of other artists, which he called his ‘Sexton Blakes’. His fake Samuel Palmers were exposed in The Times in 1976, and the case against him at the Old Bailey in 1979 was dropped because of his failing health. From 1982 he presented an award-winning Channel 4 series on the methods of the great painters.

The palette is a rectangle with a thumb hole, its surface built up in ridges and swirls of dried oil colour. Pale blues and whites run across the top, with ochres, earth reds, rose and black below. It is set on a navy velvet ground beside a colour photograph of Keating at his easel, holding a palette as he paints a vase of sunflowers in the manner of Van Gogh.

A printed panel reads ‘Thomas Patrick Keating (1917-1984) / Tom Keating’s original artists palette / Which he used throughout his career’. From the artist’s family, with a certificate of authenticity from King’s Court Galleries, Fulham Road, London. In a deep box frame, the moulding flicked and dripped with colour.