Controversy in the 1970s
Palmer received a great deal of media attention in the 1970s, following the discovery of a number of fakes of his Shoreham work produced by famous art forger, Tom Keating. In February 1970, Geraldine Norman, Sale Room Correspondent for The Times, published a glowing report on a rare Shoreham Palmer painting, which 'probably dates from 1831', Shepherds with their Flock under a Full Moon, that was purchased by a major Bond Street gallery for £9400. At the top of the page was a four-column-width photo of the picture. A month later, David Gould, an authority on Victorian paintings with a special interest in Palmer, wrote a Letter to the Editor calling it a fake.
In June 1973, Norman reported that a Palmer landscape, The Horse Chestnut Tree, sold at Sotheby’s for £15,000. Shortly thereafter, Gould privately alleged to Norman that it too, was dubious. In 1974 Gould told Norman he had identified six more Palmer fakes, and he believed all were done by the same hand.
In 1976, Norman began researching over a dozen suspect Palmers, and after consulting with recognized Palmer experts from the Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam, Tate, and British Museums, as well as author Geoffrey Grigson, she published an article on 16 July 1976, on page one of The Times, asserting that thirteen Palmer pictures that had appeared on the market over the previous decade were forgeries. Several tips from readers convinced her the master faker she was looking for was Tom Keating, a picture restorer in Dedham, Essex, whom she named in another page one article the following month. A few days later, Keating wrote a Letter to The Times, confessing to ‘flooding the market’ with fakes –– not for material gain, but rather as a protest against greedy art merchants –– adding that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could believe his ‘crude daubs’ were authentic. The lead story in the Daily Express the same day read, ‘I FAKED THE LOT!’
The following week, Mr. Hugh Leggatt, a well-respected art dealer in Westminster, offered to host an exhibition of Keating’s ‘Palmers’ at his gallery in St James's Street. The Cecil Higgins Museum in Bedford had a Palmer called A Barn at Shoreham, purchased in 1965, on advice by Edward Croft Murray, the Keeper of Pictures at the British Museum, that it was authentic. They took it down in August 1976 when it was discovered to be a Keating fake. They rehung it four months later. Museum trustees commented ‘that there seemed to be more public interest in the drawing now it was known to be a fake than there had been in the genuine article.’ A Barn at Shoreham remains on view in the museum's art store.
Norman went on to publish a total of eleven articles on the scandal, from July 1976 to February 1977, for which she won the British Press Awards News Reporter of the Year. In June 1977 she published an essay on Art Trading and Art Faking, in Keating’s autobiography, as well as a companion book The Tom Keating Catalogue, with descriptions and photo illustrations of 166 of his known pastiches, including 26 Palmers, which she hoped would provide scholars, collectors, and art dealers with sufficient information to detect his work, and help locate and identify as many of them as possible.
Keating later claimed to have painted upwards of eighty fake Palmers, most of them moonlit scenes in dark sepia wash, heightened with white. Four of them sold for thousands of pounds each, including The Horse Chestnut Tree, which Sotheby’s auctioned in June 1973 for £15,000 — ‘a record price for the artist’. These same four pictures were illustrated in James Sellars’ 1974 monograph, Samuel Palmer, and their sales resulted in Keating being arrested and put on trial for art fraud at the Old Bailey in 1979. He was later released due to failing health, and all charges were dropped. In the May 1977 BBC1 documentary, A Picture of Tom Keating, the master forger, commenting on Palmer’s captivating self portrait (see at top of this page), called him ‘a child genius, who’s eyes stare at me with a majesty and beauty... I look back on them now and say I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done, because his name is now more famous than ever.’
Times journalist David Carritt replied: ‘How insulting Palmer would have found the new stock...his magic vision diluted by a crop of heartless impostures, conceived in spite and peddled for gain’.
