This Special Interest Day offers a comprehensive overview of the most significant and notorious cases of art forgery over the last 150 years. The lecture focuses on the core motivations of art forgers and explains how the majority of the most prominent art forgers started out as failed artists whose work was ignored by the dealers, auction house ‘experts’ and connoisseurs who function as the market’s ‘gatekeepers’. In many cases, this rejection led to a desire on the part of the overlooked painters to exact a form of revenge against what they perceived as an elitist art world ‘club’ from which they were excluded.
Image - Dr Tom Flynn:
"Me with John Myatt (right), one of the most notorious art forgers of the century, although a charming man. This was taken when I interviewed him at his successful one-man exhibition at Castle Fine Art in Bruton Street, Mayfair in 2014."
How to book this event:
Booking starts in July 2026
Dr Tom Flynn
Dr Tom Flynn is a UK-based art historian, writer and art consultant. He holds a First Class Honours degree in Art History from the University of Sussex, a Master’s in design history from the Royal College of Art and a doctorate from the University of Sussex. His interests include contemporary art; sculpture history; museology and the history of museums; art crime; issues in cultural heritage; and the historical development and professional practice of the European art markets. He is Senior Lecturer at Christie’s Education, Adjunct Professor at Richmond, the American International University in London, visiting Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, and teaches at a number of other UK and European universities. He taught for many years on the summer Post-Graduate Certificate in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies at the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) in Amelia, Umbria, Italy. A former Henry Moore Foundation post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sussex, he has written for numerous international art publications and is the author of The Body in Sculpture (Everyman Art Library, 1998), and co-editor (with Dr Tim Barringer) of Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (Routledge, 1997). He has written monographs on a number of British contemporary sculptors, including Sean Henry, Terence Coventry and Charlotte Meyer. His most recent book, The A to Z of the International Art Market was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2016 and published in a Chinese edition in 2019.