The Art Forger's Handbook (Complete and Concise Guide to Forging Drawings, Paintings, Oil and Tempera, with Recipes for Glue, Size, & Aging Techniques, Resource for Recreating Old Master Forgeries, Illustrated with Examples, Old Papers, Aged Panels, Etc.)

A superb copy, handsomely bound in heavy dark blue finely woven cloth and stamped brightly in gold along the spine. Internally fine and tight; virtually unread. With numerous photographic plates of famous paintings and forgeries printed on glossy paper. In a near-fine dust jacket with the original price of £20.00 at the bottom of the inside front flap. The white jacket is clean and crisp and printed in purple, red, and black with a photo of Hebborn producing one of his forgeries on the rear panel. While the spine lettering is mostly bright the orange of "Eric Hebborn" is slightly faded. A splendid first edition of this elusive work on art forgery. Many of Hebborn's works have gone unquestioned as orginals. This is the follow up to his autobiography "Drawn to Trouble: The Forging of an Artist". This volume is scarce because of the forger's secrets, and it comes with a disclaimer on the copyright page: "All the art techniques and practices described in this book are for information only and should not be undertaken without full regard to their legal consequence." A collectible copy of the first UK edition. Eric Hebborn was born in South Kensington, London in 1934.[1] His mother was born in Brighton and his father in Oxford. According to his autobiography, his mother beat him constantly as a child. At the age of eight, he states that he set fire to his school and was sent to Longmoor reformatory in Harold Wood, although his sister Rosemary disputes this. Teachers encouraged his painting talent and he became connected to the Maldon Art Club, where he first exhibited at the age of 15.Hebborn attended Chelmsford Art School and Walthamstow Art School before attending the Royal Academy. He flourished at the academy, winning the Hacker Portrait prize and the Silver Award, and the British Prix de Rome in Engraving, a two-year scholarship to the British School at Rome in 1959.[2] There he became part of the international art scene, establishing acquaintances with many artists and art historians, including Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt in 1960, who told Hebborn that a couple of his drawings looked like Poussins. This sowed the seeds of his forgery career.Hebborn returned to London, where he was hired by art restorer George Aczel. During his employ he was instructed not only to restore paintings, but to alter and improve them. Aczel graduated him from restoring existing paintings to "restoring" paintings on entirely blank canvases so that they could be sold for more money. A falling out over Hebborn's knowledge of painting and restoration destroyed the relationship between him and Aczel.Hebborn and his lover Graham David Smith[3] also frequented a junk and antique shop near Leicester Square, where Hebborn befriended one of the owners, Marie Gray. In organizing the prints catalogued in the shop, Hebborn began to learn more about paper, and its history and uses in art. It was on some of these blank old pieces of paper that Hebborn made his first forgeries.His first true forgeries were pencil drawings after Augustus John, based on a drawing of a child by Andrea Schiavone. Smith states that several of these were sold to their landlord Mr Davis, several to Bond Street galleries and two or three through Christie's sale rooms.[3]Eventually Hebborn decided to settle in Italy with Smith. They founded a private gallery there.When contemporary critics did not seem to appreciate his own paintings, Hebborn began to copy the style of old masters such as: Corot, Castiglione, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Poussin, Ghisi, Tiepolo, Rubens, Jan Breughel and Piranesi. Art historians such as Sir John Pope Hennessy declared his paintings to be both authentic and stylistically brilliant and his paintings were sold for tens of thousands of pounds through art auction houses, including Christie's and Sotheby's.[4] According to Hebborn himself, he had sold thousands of fake paintings, drawings and sculptures. Most of the drawings Hebborn created were his own work, made to res.…