{"id":320165,"date":"2025-12-02T08:42:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T08:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/320165\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T08:42:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T08:42:23","slug":"con-artist-charged-with-fraudulent-sale-of-courbet-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/320165\/","title":{"rendered":"Con Artist Charged With Fraudulent Sale of Courbet Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAn American con artist has been charged<\/a> for allegedly defrauding a London gallery owner over an early Gustave Courbet<\/a> painting.<\/p>\n

\n\tThomas Doyle,\u00a068, was arrested on November 14 by members of the FBI\u2019s Art Crime Team and charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to court documents filed in a New York district court, London gallery owner Patrick Matthiesen bought the 1844 oil painting,\u00a0Mother and Child on a Hammock, at a French auction house in 2015 and was seeking a buyer. In 2023, he cosigned the work to\u00a0Nicholas Hall Gallery in New York.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Gustave<\/p>\n

\n\tHall presented the work at that year\u2019s Tefaf Maastricht fair with an asking price of $650,000. It did not sell, but remained on display at Nicholas Hall Gallery while they continued to seek a buyer\u2014at which point Matthiesen was contacted by Doyle. Over the next several years, Doyle and Matthiesen communicated electronically regarding Doyle\u2019s purported art dealings; the con artist\u00a0claimed to manage the \u201cart side\u201d of a family trust with assets worth billions of dollars, investigators stated.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year, Doyle told Matthiesen that he had found a buyer willing to pay $550,000 for Mother and Child on a Hammock\u00a0and offered to broker the sale without taking a commission. He then delivered the painting to his partner, artist, art dealer, and business partner Shalva Sarukhanishvili, who sold it to Jill Newhouse Gallery in New York for $115,000. Within days, that gallery resold the work to ARTnews\u00a0Top 200 Collector Jon Landau<\/a>\u00a0for $125,000 in September 2024. The painting was accompanied in both sales by a false provenance stating, among other details, that Doyle had legitimately purchased it in 2019.<\/p>\n

\n\tMatthiesen Gallery<\/a> received no proceeds from the sales, and in a March 4 email,\u00a0Doyle admitted that he had \u201cbetrayed\u201d and \u201clied\u201d to Matthiesen. He advised Matthiesen to contact Sarukhanishvili to recover either the painting or his money from the transaction. Sarukhanishvili did not respond to Matthiesen\u2019s attempts to discuss the deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn late September, Matthiesen filed a lawsuit filed in New York against Doyle,\u00a0Sarukhanishvili, Jill Newhouse Gallery, and Landau. The London dealer claimed that no party had the right to consign or sell the painting. The complaint alleged that \u201cNewhouse is an active participant in the art market who knew, or should have\u00a0known, that Matthiesen\u2026 had been offering the painting for $650,000 or more for several years\u201d, and further argued that \u201cLandau knew or should have known that Newhouse lacked the ability to pass\u00a0good title to the Painting, because Landau previously viewed the painting multiple times at multiple locations other than with Newhouse. Each time he was aware that its retail price was\u00a0$650,000 or more.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAn attorney\u00a0for Jill Newhouse Gallery told ARTnews via email at the time that \u201cThe claims asserted against Jill Newhouse LLC are meritless and we will vigorously defend against them in court.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLandau\u2019s legal representation likewise told\u00a0ARTnews, \u201cWith respect to our client Jon Landau, we view the lawsuit as wholly without merit and we will address it accordingly in court.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSarukhanishvili did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tNotably, in September 2010, the Manhattan District Attorney<\/a>\u2019s office<\/a> charged Doyle for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud for orchestrating the fraudulent purchase of Portrait of a Girl, by Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot, for $800,000. At the time, it had been valued at up to $1.35 million. Doyle\u00a0pled guilty to one count of wire fraud<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the 2010 sentencing hearing, the residing judge noted that Doyle had been convicted 11 times over the previous 34 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou are a career criminal by any definition of the term,\u201d she told Doyle, before\u00a0sentencing him to six years in prison<\/a>. \u201cSociety needs to be protected from you; you are a predator.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An American con artist has been charged for allegedly defrauding a London gallery owner over an early Gustave…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,142227,142228],"class_list":{"0":"post-320165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-gustave-courbet","16":"tag-matthiesen-gallery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}