I’ll admit to having always had a bit of a fascination with forgeries. I’ve felt the same way about impersonators, too, and I know my thinking is quite naive here, but even as a child I wondered about “Elvis impersonators” — the question being, “If they sound like Elvis, why aren’t they famous in their own right?”

And so it is with art forgers. If they have the talent to paint like an old master or a famous artist from another school, why are they forging art? Why aren’t they painting their own works?  Again, I suppose the question is somewhat naive, and maybe it goes to show that talent alone doesn’t account for success or fame.

Over the last few weeks, as you know, I’ve been studying tonalism and learning about the artists who were a part of this beautiful movement in American landscape art. I’ve fallen…