Group of Seven Forgeries
Some of you may already be aware of this case but I’ll try to make it fun to relearn about it. In the 1960s multiple cases of art fraud were discovered, specifically relating to the Group of Seven, an iconic Canadian art collective, what ensued landed two people in prison.
The Group of Seven
For anyone who’s not Canadian, or doesn’t know about the Group of Seven, here’s a very brief background on them. Also known as the Algonquin School, they were a group of Canadian landscape painters active from 1920-1933. The official original members were Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnson, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. A.J. Casson was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald joined in 1932. You might be surprised not to see Tom Thomson on the list as he is commonly associated with the group but he died before the official founding, in 1917 (if you want to know more about that one of the very first posts on this site is about his mysterious death). For all intents and purposes we can say he was a member of the group as he had a significant impact on it, even after his death.
The group believed that distinct Canadian art style could be developed through direct connection with nature and they are best known for their paintings, many en plein air (which means painted outside), of Canadian landscapes.
The Case at Hand
Now that we all know a little bit about the Group of Seven, it’s easy to see that their works are highly treasured pieces of Canadian history and museums like The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa have large collections of their sketches, drawings, and paintings.
So, fast forward to 1962, J. Russell Harper, curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada, wrote an open letter to the Ontario attorney general. In this letter he expressed his concern about the fact that a large number of fake paintings were flooding the Canadian art market. Many of these paintings were trying to be passed off as created by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, David Milne, or other members of the Group of Seven. The fakes were being sold out of Ben Ward-Price auction house in Toronto.
Luckily the attorney general took this seriously and they appointed Inspector James L. Erskine of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) to investigate. Erskine had a smart approach, he knew he didn’t know anything about art but he did a bunch of research and he actually hired Group of Seven member A.J. Casson as his art consultant, Casson got a police badge and everything.
What Casson started to see was that some forgeries were actually pretty good but some were so bad he was genuinely fearful that they would do serious damage to the real artists’ reputations.
The forgeries in question were being created by a Scottish artist named William Firth MacGregor. He emigrated to Canada in 1925 and was, by all accounts, a talented artist, he even worked at a Vancouver school with Group of Seven member Fred Varley for a while. After his initial success in Canada he kind of fell off the map for a while until he started creating forgeries for an art dealer named Neil Sharkey.
According to MacGregor he thought these forgeries were being given away or sold as small souvenirs or something, he claims not to know what was really happening. Sharkey would bring MacGregor images of paintings like A.Y. Jackson’s A Painter’s Country and have him make a copy of it. Sharkey would then frame it, mount a brass plaque on it with the “artist’s name”, rub some dirt on the back to create the illusion of age, and then sell them at auction. MacGregor also said he was paid $5 for each copy he made when they were going for anywhere between $950 and $1,500 at auction.
Some paint MacGregor as a co-conspirator with Sharkey and say that he must have known what was going on and that’s why he never signed his own name on any of the reproductions he created. However, in my personal opinion he’s a tragic figure in this story, shell shocked from WWI and broke in Toronto working to make some money using his artistic talents creating these paintings, not knowing where they ended up. I think this was just a man in a desperate period of his life using whatever skills he could to make money. Also, getting $5 for something that sells for hundreds if not thousands of dollars doesn’t sound like a deal a co-conspirator would agree to, if you ask me.
Regardless of how you view him in this story, MacGregor was never charged with anything. Neil Sharkey, however, and Haynes art gallery owner Leslie W. Lewis were found guilty of fraud and sentenced to one and two years in prison. The craziest thing about this is that the art dealer, Ben Ward-Price wasn’t charged with any crimes either. This guy is selling hundreds of paintings and drawings per year, more Tom Thomson’s than he could ever have created in his lifetime, how could he not know that some of them were forgeries? A woman even confronted him during an auction in 1962 saying that some of the drawings by Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald couldn’t be real and he replied, “an auctioneer’s job is to sell what is sent to him – and the house cannot be expected to guarantee the authenticity of every painting it sells” (Miller, 2022).
Fast Forward to 2022
Art Historian Jon S. Dellandrea received a box with newspaper clippings about this case along with information about MacGregor and he decided to investigate this scandal that has largely been forgotten about. He published a book in October 2022 titled The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven & Tom Thompson Forgeries where he dives deep into what happened with the case and the trial.
One of the biggest things he is still concerned about is the amount of forged artwork still hanging in homes, offices, and galleries around the country. Dellandrea believes this type of fraud still goes on, and I’m sure it does. He gives an example of an A.Y. Jackson painting he saw for sale in 2022. He went to go examine the painting and told the dealer that it was 100% a fake but the dealer wouldn’t listen and sold the piece anyways for $40,000.
With Group of Seven paintings fetching multiple millions of dollars at auction now Dellandrea calls the forgeries an artistic time bomb. “Should they surface in the market all these years later they will be difficult to distinguish from the genuine as many of them, thanks to William Firth MacGregor, are rather well done” (Miller, 2022). Let’s hope it doesn’t cause too much damage when this does all blow up.
Works Cited
Gessell, Paul. “The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case”. Galleries West. 2022. https://www.gallerieswest.ca/magazine/books/the-great-canadian-art-fraud-case/
Miller, Harry. “Forgeries, Frauds, and Canada’s Great Fake Art Debate”. Canada News Media. 2022. https://canadanewsmedia.ca/forgeries-frauds-and-canadas-great-fake-art-debate-the-globe-and-mail/
Rachini, Mouhamad. “New Book Revisits 1960s Art Fraud that Stained Canada’s Art Scene with Forgeries”. CBC. 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/new-book-revisits-1960s-art-fraud-that-stained-canada-s-art-scene-with-forgeries-1.6692535