The book begins in 1993 with the author receiving Ninety Thousand Dollars in cash for a painting of a pair of hummingbirds he had left to be sold at Christies auction house in London. The artwork was one of the author’s forgeries in the manner of Martin Johnson Heade, noted for his brilliant paintings of birds amid exotic flowers.
The rest of the book is a hard-to-believe story: a teen-ager growing up in Palisades Park, New Jersey falls in with a group of wild and crazy artists and eventually becomes an enormously successful forger of American and British “masterpieces.”
Perenyi had real talent as a copier, and with study and experiment was able to devise ways to fool leading art experts. He painted on wood from the bottoms of drawers of 17th century antique furniture, (scrounged from broken and discarded pieces in junk stores), for his forgeries of the Dutch painter van Ruysdael. He learned how to concoct “antique” varnish, create cracks, and finish the backs of the frames with rusted tacks .
He seemed to have no trouble passing these finds along to his many cronies in the art scene. The book is crammed with so many names it is hard to keep track of them all.
Perenyi had several close escapes, was never caught, and is still painting in a studio in Florida.
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