Confessions of a Museum

In all its long and stodgy history, the British Museum had rarely put on such a smashing show. There was something for every taste--Bronze Age jewelry, Persian miniatures, African masks, Dresden porcelain, drawings by the top Renaissance masters. But it was not the art that brought the public streaming in. The objects were the museum's most painful mistakes: fakes that had cost the museum dear in pounds and embarrassment.

A year ago, appalled by the number of fraudulent Turner water colors that were cropping up in London, the museum's keeper of prints and drawings, Edward Croft-Murray, decided to warn the public by putting on a special show of fake Turners along with some originals. The idea quickly spread to other departments, and even to collectors and connoisseurs on the outside. Art Historian Sir Kenneth Clark contributed a 17th century unicorn horn; Sir Alister Hardy lent his mummified mermaid. From the museum's storerooms came the famed fabricated Piltdown man (TIME, Nov. 30, 1953), an Etruscan sarcophagus that was once the pride of the departments of antiquities, and the bust of Julius Caesar that graced the pages of Latin textbooks everywhere until in 1936 it was found to be a 19th century job.

Some of the fakers have taken their own places in art history. One Edward Simpson, a 19th century master forger of Stone Age implements, came to be admired among archaeologists as the fabulous "Flint Jack." Two illiterate London mudrakers named Billy and Charley produced and buried thousands of "ancient" metal objects, and such objects are known as "Billys and Charleys" to this day. An ingenious forger named Peter Thompson, actually a carpenter and builder living near Regent's Park in the 1840s, not only forged 17th century "master drawings," but also invented the master. He named the man Captain John Eyre, and after picking a onetime lord mayor of London, Simon Eyre, as a likely ancestor, wrote a convincing biography and genealogy of him. Eyre, according to Thompson, was born in Blakewell in 1604, died 40 years later as a result of wounds suffered at the battle of Marston Moor. He supposedly spoke French and Spanish fluently, was "proficient in music," turned out at least 300 drawings that were found in his lodgings after his death.

Though Eyre's "drawings" deceived London for quite a spell, the museum itself was in this case above reproach. Twice it turned down the opportunity to buy Eyre's Southwark Fair. But in the end Forger Thompson won out anyway. The museum became so intrigued by his work that it bought up the whole Eyre collection as an admirable example of an artful forger's art.

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