FBI Investigates Fake Clementine Hunter Paintings

by Ruth Laney

Paintings by renowned folk artist Clementine Hunter (1887-1988) have long been sought after by collectors. Hunter, who could not read or write, began painting in her 50's after picking up discarded tubes of paint left behind at Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where she worked as a cook. Holding a canvas or board in her lap, Clementine (pronounced Clementeen) "marked" pictures of plantation scenes familiar to her—baptisms, weddings, cotton picking, nights at a juke joint. It is estimated she created about 5000 original works, which she at first sold for a dollar or less, but by the time she died at the age of 101, her paintings were commanding thousands of dollars when sold by dealers.

In the fall of 2009, some apparent Hunter paintings became the center of a scandal that involved the sales of fakes of her work. Following a successful application for a search warrant, FBI agents raided the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, house of William and Beryl Toye.

According to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court, there is probable cause to believe that the Toyes and New Orleans antiques dealer Robert Lucky Jr. "engaged in a conspiracy and a scheme to defraud several victims [in] Louisiana and in other states... [and] knowingly sold forgeries as original, authentic works of art by Clementine Hunter."

As of press time, no charges had been filed.

On September 30, 2009, armed with a search warrant, agents swarmed the Toyes' house for five hours, hauling away artwork (including five purported Hunter paintings), painting supplies, typewriters, computers, and documents. Witnesses said the scene on the normally quiet street was chaotic. "The whole neighborhood was watching," said one neighbor. "You could not drive down the street. It was completely blocked. There were a dozen unmarked cars, a fire truck, a police car, an ambulance. It was quite a spectacle."

According to witnesses, Beryl Toye was removed from the house by ambulance and taken to a local hospital. William Toye confirmed this, saying his wife was hospitalized for three days after she "panicked, collapsed, and fainted." A unit from the local animal control center removed several cats from the premises.

Interviewed six weeks after the raid, Toye, 78, said he is not concerned about a possible indictment of him and his 68-year-old wife. "I'm not worried," he said. "No indeed. For what?" He led visitors to a cluttered studio on the second story of his house, where he showed them a model for an opera set he claimed to be designing. He also stated that he had created several paintings of cats that hung on the walls.

Toye, who uses a cane and walks with difficulty, is alternately described by those who have dealt with him as "charming," "disarming," "eccentric," "totally nuts," and "a con artist." He claims to be a conductor and composer, to have worked for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and to be a designer of opera sets. He also claims to have designed an internal combustion engine, reciting the patent number from memory.

According to documents from the U.S. Patent Office, a patent was granted to William J. Toye of New Orleans in 1972 for an internal combustion turbine. In a recent interview, Toye claimed to have sold the patent to American Motors.

Toye was working as an artist in New Orleans as early as the 1960's. According to a 1969 newspaper account, Toye reported to police that his apartment had been broken into and that 50 paintings by him had been stolen or "slashed with a sharp instrument," including paintings of the red-light district of Storyville that he had planned to exhibit at a gallery.

In 1974, according to newspaper accounts, Toye was arrested in New Orleans on 22 counts of forgery for making and selling ersatz Clementine Hunter paintings. Hunter herself viewed the paintings and said she had not made them. Discussing the case recently, Toye said he had been framed and that his attorney had the charges dropped.

Documents show that from 1967 through 2000 Toye and his wife, Beryl, established several corporations in Lousiana, all of which are now inactive. They include two flood-control companies, a "funding" company, and two building companies. Information on a corporation established in July 1994 gives the Toyes' address as the same one that was the subject of the FBI raid.

Toye has told several people that he and his wife were left destitute by Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in August 2005. Yet in a recent interview Toye stated that he has lived in Baton Rouge since 1994. He claimed that a warehouse where he stored opera sets he designed had been flooded, leaving him without a source of income.

In 1996 the Toyes consigned paintings to the Louisiana Auction Exchange (LAE) in Baton Rouge. Ultimately a number of the works, including a "Matisse" and a "Degas," were determined to be fakes. Toye accused Ronald Causey, an attorney and owner of LAE, of counterfeiting the works. Toye also filed complaints against Causey with the Louisiana Auctioneers Licensing Board, stating that Toye had not been paid for paintings Causey sold at auction. (For details, see M.A.D., April and August 1997.) Causey died in 2004.

Around 2000, Robert Lucky, an antiques and paintings dealer, moved from Natchitoches to New Orleans. According to the FBI affidavit filed in federal court, in the summer of 2000 new Hunter forgeries appeared on the market. Lucky told the FBI he met the Toyes in "1999 or 2001" and began selling paintings that he obtained from the Toyes. The FBI affidavit states that Lucky sold 50 to 100 paintings for the Toyes to buyers in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and New York, and that Lucky misrepresented the provenance of the paintings, telling buyers "that the sources of his paintings were other Hunter collectors, not the Toyes."

Eventually, the Toyes and Lucky had a falling out. In a letter to Lucky, Beryl Toye accused him of failing to pay the Toyes for paintings and trying "to extort $16,000 from us," and she stated that the Toyes had to hire an attorney to collect $18,000 Lucky owed them. She also implied that Lucky had forged paintings: "I knew that every painting that came from us was real but could not guarantee what happened to them after they left our hands."

Although Lucky is named in the FBI affidavit, he has not been subject to a search and seizure. Contacted by phone, he said he was "not allowed to discuss" the case. In early December 2009, Lucky's attorney said he had just been engaged and could not comment on the case.

Newspaper articles and court documents show that Lucky has a long history of selling Clementine Hunter works. A longtime resident of Natchitoches, he owned an antiques and art shop there where he sold paintings by Hunter. In 1991 he reported the theft of 32 Hunter paintings from his shop. Lucky told the local newspaper that the $80,000 loss was covered by insurance.

In 1999 Lucky was arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana, on felony theft charges for failing to deliver three Hunter paintings to a buyer who had paid him $21,000 for them. He was later released on bond.

In 2000 Robert Ryan, a New Orleans physician who owned a large collection of Hunter's works, obtained a judgment against Lucky for payment for paintings Lucky had sold for him. Lucky was by then working for a large antiques shop in the French Quarter. According to court documents, Ryan successfully sought garnishment of Lucky's wages, collecting the final payment in 2005.

By 2005, with Lucky no longer representing them, the Toyes began contacting potential buyers individually. In November 2005 William Toye met Donald Fuson, a Baton Rouge businessman and art collector. Although Fuson was not interested in Hunter's work, he said he felt sorry for Toye, who told him that he and his wife had "lost everything" in Hurricane Katrina a few months earlier and were forced to sell their collection of Hunter paintings.

Fuson purchased several pieces from Toye for $30,000. He sold some to friends. In February 2006 one of the buyers called and told Fuson he had shown his Hunter to experts who determined it to be a fake.

Fuson went at once to the Toyes' house and banged on the door for ten minutes before they opened it. He told them he believed the paintings were forgeries and asked for his money back. The Toyes denied any wrongdoing. Beryl Toye told Fuson she had bought the paintings directly from Hunter. Within a few days, she sent Fuson a letter stating, "The onus is not upon us to prove that [the paintings] are real, it is upon you to prove that they are not."

Fuson met with William Toye and painting conservator Margaret Moreland, who had cleaned several of the paintings for Toye. Although Toye told Fuson he would return the money after meeting with his attorney, Fuson has never recovered his $30,000. He filed suit against the Toyes.

Moreland, a respected conservator who has been in business for 25 years, said she was initially taken in by Toye, for whom she cleaned paintings on several occasions. After Hurricane Katrina, Toye took several purported Hunters to Moreland for cleaning.

"He kept asking me, 'Do you think these are real? I don't want people to think they're fake,'" said Moreland, who cleaned the paintings and attached a condition report to each one. "I was not certifying that they are real," said Moreland, who believes Toye showed her condition reports to potential buyers as proof of authenticity. "There is no way I certified them. These are just notes I make for myself to keep track of them."

Soon Fuson discovered that another Baton Rouge resident had also bought paintings from Toye. Janice Delerno, who sells art at her frame shop and gallery, said she first met Toye as a music aficionado. She chatted with him at several symphony concerts and found him "a perfectly charming, lovely elderly gentleman."

Delerno said Toye eventually approached her about buying some of his Hunters. She bought five and put them in her shop but soon became concerned about their authenticity. "I started getting suspicious of him," she said. "Things didn't add up. [He had] this unending collection [of paintings] with anything you could possibly want. You could name the subject matter and size. I just started wondering what was going on."

Delerno took her paintings to a Hunter expert, who told her he believed they were fakes.

Another dealer who bought from the Toyes was Shannon Foley of New Orleans. "Beryl Toye contacted me and told me their story, and I drove to their house in Baton Rouge to see the paintings," said Foley.

Ushered into a den where the art was displayed, Foley was overwhelmed by the squalid interior. "It was dirty," she recalled. "There was dust everywhere. Three, four, maybe five cats were around. I was pregnant, and the stench of cat urine hit me in the face. I thought, 'Omigosh, this is crazy.' I had to get out of there."

Although the Toyes' living conditions were unpleasant, Foley said no red flags went up in her mind. "You meet a lot of eccentric people in the art world who are living in bizarre conditions and yet have valuable things," said Foley, who gave the Toyes a check for five paintings before bolting. She quickly sold four of them and proceeded to buy 14 more by mail. In all, she paid $44,000 for 19 paintings.

Foley put one of her Hunter paintings up for sale on a Web site and consigned two more to an auction house in New Orleans. Within days she learned that all three were believed to be fakes.

Foley called the Toyes and requested her money back. "They said all these people were jealous of them, that other people were the forgers," said Foley. "I had several conversations with them. Beryl sent me all these cockamamie letters."

Foley called the client she had sold pieces to, refunded his money, and took back the paintings. She then filed suit against the Toyes, a difficult task in post-Katrina New Orleans. "I went through three attorneys," she said. "They didn't want to handle it. After Katrina, lots of legal things were going on. Art fraud was not considered important."

Like Fuson, Foley has never been able to have the Toyes served with her lawsuit. "They hide and won't answer the door," said Fuson.

Another buyer was Stephanie Hardie, owner of a Baton Rouge financial-services company. Hardie said William Toye approached her in 2006 or 2007 to request a loan of $5000. Hardie, who described Toye as a "meek and mild little old man," ran a credit check and found that his credit rating was too low to merit a loan. Toye offered to put up some Hunter paintings as collateral.

Hardie, who said she likes primitive art, looked at the paintings and offered to buy five of them. She balked at Toye's asking price of $7500, and he agreed to sell them for $2500. "Some were rare ones, like a Christmas tree," she said. "When I asked what else he had, he gave me a spiral-bound notebook. It had Polaroids of all the paintings he had for sale. He told me, 'I can get you any of these you want in lots of sizes.'"

Pasted inside the notebook was a letter dated 1973 from Marc Antony of the 331 Gallery in New Orleans, a business that closed in 1966, according to FBI documents. The letter stated that the Toyes owned 438 Hunter paintings worth approximately $45,000. (Toye also gave copies of the letter to Delerno and Foley as provenance for the paintings.) Hardie gave the notebook to the FBI, which describes it as containing photographs of 60 works of art.

The FBI investigation reaches beyond Louisiana to the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. "The FBI took photos of all thirty-eight of our Hunters," said museum director Lyndel King. "Last March we heard that five of them might be forgeries. It's not clear what the evidence is. We are waiting to see what the FBI says." King said the paintings had been donated to the museum by a local collector and his family.

In mid-November 2009, William Toye said he was not worried about his chances of being indicted for conspiracy and mail fraud. But he grew tearful as he described the scene at his house on the day of the raid, when several of his cats were taken by the East Baton Rouge Parish Animal Control & Rescue Center. "They were running here, there, and everywhere," he said of the cats.

According to animal control records, seven cats were picked up from Toye's house. He signed an impound ticket, giving ownership of the cats to the center. Director Hilton Cole said he spoke to Toye on the phone a day or two later and decided to return one cat to him as a gesture of compassion toward an elderly man. "He's lucky he got one, given what we were told about the conditions the cats were under," said Cole. "I allowed him one, basically for his health, as a companion."

Cole dispatched an agent to take several cats to the Toye residence, where Toye picked the one he wanted to keep. On October 7, a week after being picked up, the other six cats were euthanized by injection. Cole explained that it is the center's policy to hold animals for four days to give owners a chance to claim them. After that, if they are not adopted, they are euthanized.

In 2007 William and Beryl Toye were sued for failing to pay the mortgage note on the house they purchased in 1997. After foreclosure proceedings were brought by the bank, and the property was seized by the sheriff, the Toyes paid more than $4000, and the suit was dismissed.

Another creditor brought suit against the Toyes in 2009 for failure to pay more than $11,000 in credit card debt. Toye responded with a two-page handwritten note denying the validity of the claim and adding that "even if this were to be a legitimate claim, we have no way to pay it."

In 2008 the Toyes sued their homeowner's insurance company, claiming that it had failed to adequately reimburse them for damages suffered in a 2007 house fire. A fire department report states that the fire was confined to a laundry room, extinguished within 45 minutes, and did about $12,000 worth of damage. A spokesman for the insurance company said the Toyes claimed water damage to "rare antique sheet music" and received "a fair, generous amount of money" for that loss. A contractor hired to repair the laundry room said the Toyes frequently refused to admit workers to the house or cursed at them and told them to leave when they arrived to do the work. The suit had not been settled as of early December 2009.

Discussing the FBI raid, Toye accused Robert Lucky of forging the Hunter paintings. "He was probably taking photographs of them and duplicating them," Toye said. He also accused the FBI of bringing fakes to the raid on his house. "They had a painting, supposedly a Clementine, that I had never seen before," he said. "They had to have brought it with them. We didn't even know it was there."

Those who bought from the Toyes said their modus operandi is to accuse the accuser. "[William Toye] turns it around and accuses the person he sold the art to of copying it," said Delerno. "It's ludicrous, the whole thing."

Foley said, "It's like they're scripting their own reality."

Fuson expressed anger about possible damage to Hunter's reputation. "Clementine was a poor Black woman who painted for pennies and nickels," he said. "These people copy her work and sign her name to get thousands of dollars for something she'd have gotten thirty dollars for. She is the person most violated by this."

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