Fiji Mermaid:
In 1842, the showman P.T. Barnum exhibited the “Fiji Mermaid” in his American Museum in New York. He advertised the creature using drawings of beautiful mermaids with long, flowing hair, but this mermaid was anything but. It was, in fact, made from the head and body of a small monkey sewn on to the tail of a fish, and it was believed to have been made by a Japanese fisherman. In Barnum’s autobiography he described it exactly as it looked: “an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen ... its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.”
Han van Meegeren:
Han van Meegeren was a classically trained Dutch artist living in the 1930s. His work was criticised for being unoriginal, and as a way of getting revenge on his critics, he decided to create a “new” work by an artist called Johannes Vermeer – an old master who lived in the seventeenth century. Van Meegeren was very clever and made sure he used a genuine seventeenth century canvas and pigments, and then he added a substance called Bakelite which, when baked in the oven, made the paint dry very hard and crack, giving the impression that the picture was hundreds of years old. He fooled everybody, and over the next few years he created six more “Vermeers” as well as paintings by other Dutch masters. Van Meegeren was eventually arrested for treason shortly after World War II when it came to light that he had sold a painting to a Nazi leader. His only defence was to admit that the artwork had been forged. The story was big news at the time, and Van Meegeren became known as the world’s greatest art forger of the twentieth century. By this point he had accumulated the equivalent of $30 million!
Platypus:
And then we have the rather confusing hoax that wasn’t a hoax… The duck-billed platypus. This creature baffled European scientists when they first encountered its preserved body in 1799. It had a duck-like bill, a body like an otter and a tail like a beaver. It was no surprise that they thought that, just like the Fiji Mermaid, the creature had been stitched together as a hoax.
Pierre Brassau – the monkey artist
In 1964, four paintings by a previously unknown French artist, Pierre Brassau, were exhibited in Sweden. The praise for the paintings from art critics and journalists was pretty unanimous. One critic said, “Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” Just one found the work disagreeable, saying, “Only an ape could have done this.” They were correct. Pierre Brassau was in fact a four-year-old West African chimpanzee called Peter from a zoo in Sweden. The hoax has been thought up by a journalist to put art critics to the test. Could these “experts” tell the difference between modern art and paintings by a monkey? I wonder what Marika Loft would have made of it all?
It seemed that Peter quite enjoyed painting and he always had a bunch of bananas beside him while he worked. Apparently, he would eat as many as nine during a ten-minute art session.
1917 Cottingley Fairies
One of my favourite hoaxes was actually instigated by children. Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9) lived in Cottingley, Bradford, in the early part of the twentieth century. The two girls often played by a stream at Elsie’s house, telling their parents they went there to see the fairies. To prove it, Elsie borrowed her father’s camera and after the photograph was developed, it appeared to show Frances smiling at the lens while four fairies danced in front of her. The girls went on to produce four more “fairy” photographs, which caused a great deal of interest from the public, scientists, and even from the Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was convinced that the photographs were evidence of psychic phenomena.
Just like the excitement waned over the treasure hunt hidden in the painting ‘An Enigma in Oil’ in my book, interest in the Cottingley Fairies declined after 1921 and it wasn’t until the 1980s that Elsie and Frances finally admitted that they were fakes. Imagine keeping a secret like that for all of those years? They said that the fairies were, in fact, cardboard cut-outs – something that the scientific investigations failed to spot. However, the story doesn’t end quite there because Frances still maintained that the fifth and final photo was completely genuine… So maybe it wasn’t entirely a hoax after all?
Don’t miss …
In the dead of night, Nate and his mum run away to a tumbledown cottage in the middle of a dark forest.
Read an extract now…
“Why can’t we stay with Grandma?” I asked Mum.
We sat in the car as the rain hammered down and stared at the dirty grey cottage that was lit up by Mum’s headlights. The image I’d pictured of a holiday we’d once had in a cosy, quaint cottage completely vanished. About thirty years ago this house was probably quite pretty, with its white walls and roses around the door. Now the walls were the colour of a muddy puddle and it looked like it was slowly being swallowed by blankets of thick, dark ivy. I didn’t recognize this place at all. The dirt track that we turned down from the main road must have been at least two kilometres long. Mum was right: this was really off the radar.
I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted us to turn around right now and go somewhere else.
“I thought it might be a bit untidy … but this?” said Mum, and she leaned forward and rested her chin on the steering wheel. “This is terrible! How has it been left to get in such a state?”
“We should go, Mum. I don’t like it here. Let’s go to Grandma’s.”
She ignored me again. Mum and Grandma had a big argument and hadn’t spoken since Granddad’s funeral, which was months ago now.
“Wait here, Nate, and I’ll go and find the key. This weather is probably making it look worse than it is. I bet it’s not so bad inside.”
She pulled her cardigan tightly around her neck then got out into the torrential rain and waded through the weeds to the porch door. She ran her hand along one edge of the roof and then went round to the other side out of sight.
I stared through one of the cottage windows. There was a faint yellow light coming from the corner of a room. The car window steamed up and I rubbed at it with my sleeve and squinted into the gloom but the glow had gone. I must have imagined it.
Mum appeared holding a large key in her hand. She tugged at the ivy on the porch and then fumbled with the lock and began to push at the door with her shoulder. She had to keep stopping to wipe the rain out of her eyes but after ten more shoves the door began to inch open and she squeezed through, tugging at it from the inside before beckoning me to join her.
I stared up at the ramshackle old house. Rainwater poured from a hole in the gutter above one of the windows, which made it look like it was crying. Mum waved me towards her again. She was splattered with mud and her hair was plastered to her face and she was gripping the side of the door as if it was helping to hold her up.
“I don’t want to be here,” I said under my breath, and then I picked up my rucksack and opened the car door.
Mum flicked a light switch in the lounge and a bare bulb dangling in the middle of the ceiling spluttered into life, giving off a feeble glow.
“Look, Nate. We have light!” said Mum, but I didn’t answer.
She made her way back to the front door.
“You wait here and I’ll get our bags.”
I wanted to run after her, shut the stupid, awkward door and get straight back into the car. The house looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for about a hundred years and there was a smell like something was rotting. In front of the stone-cold fireplace was a sofa that was probably quite squishy and comfortable fifty years ago, but now it looked like it had had its insides sucked out. Something moved in the gloom and I jumped. Sitting on one of the arms of the sofa was a scruffy brown chicken. It cocked its head at me, and blinked with a dark, round eye.
“What are you doing here?” yelled Mum, walking in and waving our two bags madly. “Get out! Go on. Shoo! This isn’t your home!”
The chicken gave a squawk and then did a halfhearted flutter up on to the windowsill and jumped through a square of broken g
lass. It huddled outside on the ledge, sheltering from the freezing rain as much as it could.
The sofa was covered in lots of grey lumps and it was only when I stepped closer I realized it was chicken poo, which probably explained the smell.
“We can’t stay here, Mum. Look at the sofa, it’s disgusting.”
Mum didn’t turn around. She just stood in front of the broken window, staring at the bird.
“There’s droppings everywhere. And there are probably rats and all sorts crawling around. And we haven’t even been upstairs yet. Where are we going to sleep? We can’t stay here – we’ve got to go somewhere else!”
The chicken sank its head into its body as far as it could, its eyes barely open as the rain and wind blew, ruffling its feathers. Mum’s fingers were clenched by her sides. She didn’t turn round.
“Mum? I said we’ve got to go! Let’s just get in the car and drive to Grandma’s, OK?”
She was saying something quietly to herself. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the chicken and she was shivering, her clothes soaked through.
“She just wanted a home, Nate. She didn’t mean to make a mess. She just wanted a little home to shelter in.”
Tears were running down her face but she wasn’t making any crying noises. I put my arm around her and patted her hand.
“It’s OK, Mum. It’s just a chicken.”
I looked out into the night-time, at the pounding rain and the silhouettes of dark trees.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Nate. I don’t know what’s right or wrong any more,” said Mum, her voice shaking. “You know that feeling when you think the ground is going to split in two and you could just fall and keep on falling for ever? Like Alice does when she tumbles through that rabbit hole into Wonderland? But rather than floating down and landing at the bottom you just keep on going. Down and down and down.”
I shook my head as she looked at me. I didn’t know the feeling she was talking about. I was scared. I hadn’t seen her like this before. It was as though her body was there but her insides were missing, just like the sofa. She blinked and her eyes seemed to come back into focus again and she quickly wiped her wet cheeks and patted me on the arm.
“I’m just tired, Nate, that’s all.”
She peeled off her wet cardigan and hung it over an old wooden chair.
I held tightly to my rucksack at my shoulder. I didn’t want to go back but I didn’t want to stay here either. Mum headed towards a doorway which must have led to the kitchen.
“I’m going to see what I can find to patch the hole in the window. Why don’t you go on upstairs and see how the beds look? We’ll both feel better after some sleep, I’m sure.”
She turned away and I stood there for a moment, thinking what to do. Then I headed back towards the front door and stood at the bottom of the stairs. I pressed the light switch and the bulb at the top flickered. It looked very dark up there. I took a deep breath and held on to the banister. Each step groaned as I walked but, amazingly, I managed to get to the top without crashing through to the floor. At the top of the stairs was a bathroom with an old-fashioned toilet where you had to pull on a chain to flush it. There was a fat spider sitting in the middle of the bath and I tapped the side and watched as it scurried away down the plughole.
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2020
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Text © Lisa Thompson, 2020
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The Boy Who Fooled the World Page 19
