A “quintessential con artist” has allegedly defrauded a London gallery owner of a 19th-century French painting worth almost £500,000.
Thomas Doyle was described as a “Walter Mitty” character by Patrick Matthiesen, who had entrusted Doyle with Gustave Courbet’s Mother and Child on a Hammock.
Doyle, who is American, was charged with wire fraud this month in New York in relation to the alleged attempt to defraud Matthiesen.
Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, said that Doyle had told the artwork’s owner “a series of brazen lies … so he could keep the profits from the sale of the painting for himself”.
In 2007 Doyle admitted to stealing a Edgar Degas sculpture from an art collector. In 2011 he was sentenced to seven years in prison after being convicted of an $880,000 fraud in relation to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s painting Portrait of a Girl.
Preet Bharara, then the New York US attorney, had called him a “quintessential con artist”.
Upon his release, however, Doyle, who is also known as AJ or Austin Doyle, allegedly conjured up a scheme to defraud Matthiesen, who founded his eponymous gallery in St James’s in the late 1970s.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Portrait of a Young Girl, which Doyle was convicted of an $880,000 fraud in relation to
Matthiesen told the Art Newspaper that Doyle had “appeared out of the woodwork” in 2023 when he was trying to sell the Courbet artwork. He had bought it in 2015.
Doyle claimed to have been a “top gun” in the US air force who, with the help of prominent family members in the art world, had “dabbled” in collecting.
Matthiesen said that Doyle had shown him various artworks, including two El Grecos, adding: “I believed in the man because he produced real things.”
He subsequently granted permission for Doyle — whom he had never met in person — to try to sell his Courbet after he had claimed there was a buyer willing to pay $550,000 (£415,000). A “representative” for Doyle then picked up Matthiesen’s painting from storage.
According to court filings, Doyle’s associate then sold the Courbet to the Jill Newhouse Gallery in New York for $115,000, providing “false provenance”. The gallery then sold it to a collector for $125,000.
This collector, according to the Art Newspaper, was Bruce Springsteen’s business manager, Jon Landau.
The indictment says that Doyle did not return any proceeds from the sale and spent the money on “personal expenses and his own debts”.
In March this year Doyle allegedly emailed Matthiesen to say he had been “betrayed” and “lied” to by an associate.
Matthiesen has also filed a lawsuit in New York against Doyle, Landau and the Jill Newhouse Gallery.
He claims Newhouse should have known that the painting had been valued at $650,000 (£490,000) previously, as should Landau.
Matthiesen’s lawyer, Steven Schindler, said they should have known the deal was “too good to be true”.
Landau’s lawyer said that “based on applicable law, Jon Landau is the rightful owner of that painting”. Newhouse’s legal team told the Art Newspaper they would not comment while the case was ongoing.