Know-your-client rules are not just bureaucratic boxes to tick. In some art trade transactions they can be the difference between sniffing out a fraudster and losing possession of, say, an early Gustave Courbet painting.
The London gallery owner Patrick Matthiesen learned this the hard way. He had purchased an 1844 oil painting by Courbet, Mother and Child on a Hammock, at a French auction house in 2015 and was looking to sell it. In 2023, he consigned the painting to the Nicholas Hall Gallery in New York, which specialises in Old Master works, to show it at the Tefaf Maastricht fair of that year, and the painting was listed for sale for $650,000. It did not sell, but the Nicholas Hall Gallery was interested in displaying the picture in New York. That would have been a better plan than what ended up transpiring.
“I was introduced to a Thomas Doyle, whom I never had heard of and who just appeared out of the woodwork through an email,” Matthiesen tells The Art Newspaper. Doyle claimed that he was in the US Air Force “and was a ‘Top Gun’. He also said that he was a government contractor, and he also told me that he dabbled in art [dealing].” According to Matthiesen, Doyle said that his mother was involved in the art world, making reference to the prominent auction house Doyle Auctions, adding that “his family had a substantial trust that invested in art”. Matthiesen was told that while Doyle had been cut out of that family trust for unspecified reasons, he still had access to important art.
Matthiesen had done some checking up on Doyle, who used the name “A.J. Doyle”, rather than Thomas Doyle. Thomas Doyle had 11 convictions for fraud, while A.J. Doyle was not known. Matthiesen says he contacted people at leading auction houses who told him that there was a Doyle in the art world. One Thomas Doyle’s convictions was for stealing a bronze Edgar Degas statue of a dancer in 2007, for which he spent two years in prison. “It all appears to be a bit casual,” says Julian Radcliffe, the chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen works of art.
Red flags might have been waving, but Matthiesen became convinced that Doyle was on the up-and-up based on works that he sent for the London dealer to examine. There were two El Grecos (“not in good enough condition for me to want to handle”, Matthiesen recalls), a Peter Paul Rubens and a drawing that Doyle claimed to be by Michelangelo—“Very beautiful, but I believed, and I had confirmation of this by a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that it actually had been drawn by one of Michelangelo’s assistants,” Matthiesen says. The London dealer was impressed nonetheless. “I believed in the man, because he produced real things.”
In 2024, Doyle offered to partner with Matthiesen in selling a painting by Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot, but the dealer was leery because of so many fake Corots on the market. Unbeknownst to Matthiesen, Doyle had been sued and arrested in 2010 for allegedly attempting to arrange a fraudulent purchase of a Corot painting. Doyle pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to six years in prison. At his sentencing, according to The New York Times, the judge told Doyle: “You are a career criminal by any definition of the term.”
Doyle claimed that he knew of a buyer for the gallery’s Courbet and asked Matthiesen if he could borrow the painting to show this person, brokering a sale. Without ever once meeting Doyle in person, Matthiesen sent him the work and never saw it again.
“Patrick asked us to release it to Mr Doyle, which we did,” says Nicholas Hall. “It was in fact picked up by a representative” for Doyle, Hall says, adding that “Patrick subsequently told me that Mr Doyle had indeed sold it for him”.
For his part, Matthiesen called Doyle “a kind of Walter Mitty”, referring to the character in a James Thurber short story who claims expertise in areas he only dreams of—“very convincing”.
Doyle claimed that the unnamed buyer for the Courbet was willing to pay $550,000 for it, an amount agreeable to Matthiesen. Doyle had a partner in this, the dealer Shalva Sarukhanishvili, who took charge of selling the painting to the Jill Newhouse Gallery in New York City for $115,000, and that gallery promptly resold the work to the noted art collector and Bruce Springsteen business manager Jon Landau for $125,000. For both sales, a false provenance was provided to the two buyers, indicating that Doyle had in fact been the painting’s owner.
No money was ever turned over to the Matthiesen Gallery and, in an email dated 4 March 2025, Doyle acknowledged to the London dealer that he had been lied to, recommending that Matthiesen contact Sarukhanishvili in order to get either the painting back or his money paid for it. Matthiesen attempted to contact Sarukhanishvili but received no response.
On 14 November, the 68-year-old Doyle was arrested by agents from the FBI’s Art Crime Team and charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years. The case is being handled by the Office’s Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit. Sarukhanishvili is also being sought by law enforcement agents.
Remaining, however, is a lawsuit filed in late September in a New York district court by Matthiesen against Doyle, Sarukhanishvili, the Jill Newhouse Gallery and Landau. The London dealer claims that neither Doyle, Sarukhanishvili nor the Jill Newhouse Gallery had the right to consign or sell the Courbet. The complaint alleges that “Newhouse is an active participant in the art market who knew, or should have known, that Matthiesen… had been offering the painting for $650,000 or more for several years”, and that “Landau knew or should have known that Newhouse lacked the ability to pass good 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 $650,000 or more.”
Steven Schindler, a New York City lawyer representing Matthiesen, says that both Newhouse and Landau “should have known that this deal was too good to be true”. A reasonable amount of research, he claimed, would have made evident that something was wrong in this sale, although he added that “I’ve certainly seen people do less due diligence” in the art trade. The lawsuit seeks either the return of the painting to Matthiesen or the value of the work, placed at $550,000.
Jill Newhouse and her lawyer, Amelia K. Brankov, declined to comment to The Art Newspaper while the case was ongoing.
Jonathan Kraut, a lawyer representing Landau, tells The Art Newspaper: “Based on applicable law, Jon Landau is the rightful owner of that painting.”
The moral Radcliffe draws from this episode is that “the art world needs a database of people who have defrauded someone, who have not paid their debts or should not be traded with. A database like that would be a major deterrent to these kinds of crimes, getting the art trade closer to the standards of other industries, like banking and insurance.”
