John Myatt
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John Myatt, (born 1945), is a British painter who painted forgeries for art dealer John Drewe.
Myatt lived in the Staffordshire village of Sugnall. He also wrote music and released a single, "Silly Games", which reached the UK Top 40 in 1979.
Myatt began to paint in the 1980s. When his wife left him and their children in 1985, he decided that he needed to work at home to be with his children, and placed an advertisement in Private Eye magazine: "19th- and 20th-century fakes for £240". He was contacted by John Drewe, who claimed to be a nuclear physicist who wanted the paintings for his home. When Drewe later told Myatt that Christie's had accepted his Albert Gleizes painting as genuine and paid £25,000, he began to paint more forgeries.
According to later police reports, Myatt painted about 200 forgeries in a regular schedule and delivered them to Drewe in London. Police later recovered only 80 of them. Drewe sold them to the auction houses of Christie's, Phillips and Sotheby's and to dealers in London, Paris and New York. Myatt painted 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.
In September 1995, Scotland Yard detectives arrived to arrest Myatt. He went quietly and confessed, stating that he had created the paintings using emulsion paint and K-Y Jelly, a mixture that dried quickly but was hardly reminiscent of the original pigments. He estimated that he had earned around £165,000, and offered to return £30,000 and to help to convict Drewe. He had come to dislike the deception and Drewe.
In April 16 1996 Police raided Drewe's gallery in the Reigate suburb of London and found materials he had used to forge certificates of authenticity. Drewe had also altered provenances of genuine paintings to link them to Myatt's forgeries and added bogus documents to archives of various institutions in order to "prove" their authenticity.
The trial against Myatt and Drewe begun September 1998. On February 13, 1999, John Myatt was sentenced to one year in prison for a conspiracy to defraud and was released the following June after serving four months of his sentence. Drewe was sentenced for six years for conspiracy and served two.
After his release, Myatt has continued to paint commissioned portraits and clear copies, and has held exhibitions of his work.