The trials and tribulations of the Clementine Hunter forgery scandal against William and Beryl Toye drew to a conclusion when guilty pleas were submitted in a Lafayette courtroom last month. For over twenty five years the eccentric Baton Rouge couple sold numerous paintings by the well known Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter. The problem is that the Toyes painted the works themselves and then attributed them to the highly collected and sought after Louisiana folk artist.
Clementine Hunter lived most of her life on the Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches in northwest Louisiana. First she worked in the fields and then later worked in the "big house". The charming and engaging Miss Cammie Henry enjoyed the company of artists, writers and cultural leaders, and frequently extended invitations to stay at her plantation home near the Cane River.
As the story goes, the New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left behind tubes of paint and paint brushes after a visit to Melrose Plantation; they were discovered by Clementine while she was cleaning up. Inspired to create, Clementine began to paint. Since she did not have access to canvases, she painted on unconventional surfaces such as of window shades and building boards.
Clementine’s paintings of life on Melrose plantation soon became popular with the locals and college students, and by the 1970s collectors regularly made their way to Natchitoches to visit her at her cabin, where they could tour the paintings for a charge of 25 cents, and purchase paintings. As her popularity and the demand for the paintings grew, she created images of cotton picking, funerals, baptisms, flying angels, uproarious Saturday nights at the juke joint, and vibrant still lives of Zinnias.
Unusual for a living artist, there were troubles with fakes and forgeries of Clementine’s work. Her grandson Frankie, painting alongside his grandmother, sometimes signed with the well known intertwined CH monogram of his grandmother: creating a series of fakes. A member of the Henry family painted her own versions of Clementine Hunter’s paintings, also signing them with the artist’s monogram, thus creating another series of fakes. There have since been several other attempts at forgery.
The Toye Clementine Hunter paintings have proved to be the best and most difficult to discern if real or fake, at least initially. Collectors, auction houses, galleries and museums were all taken in by the Toye’s versions. “He fooled me.” admitted New Orleans Museum of Art’s curator and authority on folk art, William Fagaly. Eventually the characteristics and qualities of Toye’s Clementine Hunter paintings were deciphered by Tommy Whitehead and the late Shelby Gilley, both of whom knew the artist and have written and lectured on her work.
The colorful and eccentric Toye’s have certainly made good copy with articles in The New York Times and the New Orleans Times Picayune. John Ed Bradley in Garden and Gun magazine relives his hilarious visits to the couple’s unkempt home and yard that reeked of urine from their numerous cats. The Toye’s, both elderly, apparently are not mentally or physically well, and will probably not serve any time in jail for their lengthy careers as art forgers. Always defiant, William Toye shook his cane at a New York Times photographer and declared his innocence as he left the Lafayette courtroom.
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