Major Byron claimed to be Lord Byron’s illegitimate son, born of an affair with a Spanish countess. The title page of this book has four lines of verse and Byron’s signature, as forged by the so-called Major Byron. Forgery of Lord Byron (1788-1824)įorged Byron manuscript, undated, in a copy of Essays on Petrarch (London: J. Beside them is a note advertising the items for sale by James Stillie, a dealer who often worked as a co-conspirator with Smith. In this example, Smith had fabricated a sixteen page manuscript of a genuine Burns poem, “The Jolly Beggars,” along with a letter by Burns, also forged, purporting to present this manuscript to John Maitland, circa 1786. He served twelve months in prison and vanished from the historic record. Arrested, Smith was charged and convicted of selling forgeries under false pretenses. Here, Smith’s day job undid him: a reader saw that the handwriting in the forgeries was similar to Smith’s.
#Old manuscripts vellum series#
In 1892, the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch published a series of articles on the fakes and included facsimiles of some. Smith flooded the market, often selling at bargain rates. In making and selling fakes, Smith benefited both from his technical skills as well as from customers who, having spent a great deal of money on fakes, did not want to see them exposed as frauds, and thus became complicit parties. Allegedly, the bulk of Smith’s profits funded his drinking habit. (He started by selling genuine manuscripts that were given to him by his employer he moved on to fakes after running out of real ones). A law clerk, he used his forgeries to supplement his income, beginning sometime in the late 1880s. He created hundreds of forged documents, and he specialized in Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. James Stillie (circa 1803-1893). Manuscript note, Īlexander Smith (also known as “Antique” Smith) was a forger from Edinburgh. Finally, chemical analysis has shown that he was using pigments that did not exist in the Middle Ages, including ultramarine blue, Scheele’s green, and copper arsenite, which were not available until 1828, 1775, and 1814, respectively. When reusing medieval leafs, he often selected religious texts and supplied them with unrelated scenes of secular life. Quite noticeably (and as can be seen here), his female figures are drawn with exposed cleavage, which is not found in medieval art. He produced figures with facial expressions that were unlike those found in medieval illustrations. Stylistically, the Spanish Forger’s creations are unlike real medieval artwork. His forgeries were first debunked in 1930 by Bella da Costa Greene (1879-1950), curator at the Morgan Library. Many of his fakes were based on medieval illustrations that were reproduced in books by Paul Lacroix between 18, which indicates when he could have begun his forgeries. Sometimes he would complete unfinished illustrations or add new ones to real manuscripts. In order to give his work an appearance of authenticity, the Spanish Forger used genuine medieval vellum and parchment for his work. To this day, nothing is known about his identity.
Stylistic similarities suggest that the forgeries were made by one person, but there is also speculation that the Spanish Forger was actually a group of collaborators. In reality, the Spanish Forger was probably not Spanish: most of his fakes first appeared in France. He was known as the Spanish Forger because one of his first-known forgeries was mistaken for a genuine piece by the fifteenth century Spanish artist, Jorge Inglés. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the so-called Spanish Forger was responsible for a great number of fraudulent medieval manuscripts. Pawnbroker, with a young couple buying or selling a gold cup, illuminated manuscript leaf on vellum, įrank W.
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