Eric Hebborn was born to a Cockney family, although his mother was a gipsy. According to him, his mother beat him constantly. At the age of eight, he states in his autobiography that he set fire to his school and was sent to Borstal reformatory, although his sister Rosemary disputes this. Teachers encouraged his painting talent and he became connected to Maldon Art Club where he first exhibited at the age of 15.
Eric attended Walthamstow art school where in 1956 he met and became the lover of Graham David Smith. Smith moved on to the Royal College of Art and Hebborn to the Royal Academy, but the couple stayed together for the next 13 years.
When Eric joined the Royal Academy, flourished there. He won the Silver Award and received a scholarship to a British art school in Rome in 1959. There he became part of the international art scene and formed acquaintances with many artists and art historians, including the British spy, Sir Anthony Blunt in 1960, who told Eric that a couple of his drawings looked like Poussins. This sowed the seeds of his forgery career.
Upon Eric's return from a two-year stay in Italy after winning the Academy's Prix-de-Rome, the couple lived together in the run-down Cumberland Hotel in Highbury
Eric 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 them and make them better. George Aczel graduated him from restoring existing paintings to 'restoring' paintings on entirely blank canvases so that they could be sold for more money.
Eric and his lover Graham David Smith also frequented a junk and antique shop near Leicester Square, where Eric befriended one of the owners, Marie Gray. In organizing the prints catalogued in the shop Eric began to understand more about paper, and its history and uses in art. It was on some of these blank, but old, pieces of paper that Eric made his first drawings.
His first true forgeries were pencil drawings after Augustus John and were based on a drawing of a child by Andrea Schiavone. Graham 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. Eventually Eric decided to settle in Italy with Graham, and they founded a private gallery there.
When contemporary critics did not seem to appreciate his own paintings, Eric 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. According to Eric himself, he had sold thousands of fake paintings, drawings and sculptures. Most of the drawings Hebborn created were his own work, made to resemble the style of historical artists - and not slightly altered or combined copies of older work.
In 1978 a curator at the National Gallery of Artin Washington DC , Konrad Oberhuber, was examining a pair of drawings he had purchased for the museum from Colnaghi a seemingly reputable old-master dealer in London, one by Savelli Sperandio and the other by Francesco del Cossa. Oberhuber noticed that two drawings had been executed on the same kind of paper.
Oberhuber was taken aback by the similarities of the paper used in the two pieces and decided to alert his colleagues in the art world. Upon finding another fake "Cossa" at the Morgan Library, this one having passed through the hands of at least three experts, Oberhuber contacted Colnaghi, the source of all three fakes. Colnaghi, in turn, informed the worried curators that all three had been acquired from Eric Hebborn.
Colnaghi waited a full eighteen months before revealing the deception to the media, and, even then never mentioned Hebborn's name, for fear of a libel suit. Alice Beckett states that she was told "...no one talks about him...The trouble is he's too good". Thus Eric continued to create his forgeries, changing his style slightly to avoid any further unmasking, and manufactured at least 500 more drawings between 1978 and 1988.
In 1984 Eric confessed to the forgeries - and feeling as though he had done nothing wrong, he used the press generated by his confession to denigrate the art world.
In his autobiography Drawn to Trouble (1991), Eric continued his assault on the art world, critics and art dealers. He boasted of how easily he had fooled supposed art experts and how eager the art dealers were to declare his works authentic to maximize their profits. Eric also claimed that some of the works that had been proven genuine were actually his fakes and that Sir Anthony Blunt had not been his lover, as stated in some articles. On one page he offers a side-by-side comparison of his forgeries of Henri Leroy by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and the authentic drawing, challenging "art experts" to tell them apart.
On January 8, 1996, shortly after the publication of the Italian edition of his book The Art Forger's Handbook, Eric Hebborn was found lying in a street in Rome, his skull crushed with a blunt instrument. He died in hospital three days later.
