John Myatt

John Myatt: a story of fame and forgery

Lauren Laverne sits for Myatt's interpretation of Chinese Girl by Vladimir Tretchikoff.

An art faker's journey from prison to mainstream television.

"The fakes I do today are actually better than the fakes I was doing when I was a crook," says John Myatt, on the phone from his home in Staffordshire. Between 1986 and 1994, in what Scotland Yard called "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century", Myatt forged "new" works by artists including Renoir, Giacometti and Matisse. "I'm a bit like the kid who takes a clock to pieces and tries to put it back again. I just want to know how things work, except in my case it's paint on canvas. It's liberating to cast off your own mannerisms and try on someone else's, particularly if they throw the paint around a bit."