Hungarian painter and fraudster Elmyr de Hory was BOTD in 1906. Born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest, Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, and showed an early interest in art. At 16, he began his formal art training at the Nagybánya artists’ colony, followed by a course in classical painting at the Akademie Heinmann in Munich. In 1926, he moved to Paris, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Fernand Léger. His classical technique was quickly dismissed for being behind the times, in an artistic scene dominated by the Fauvist, Cubist and Modernist movements. Unable to sell his work, he lived hand-to-mouth, and was convicted ten times in five European cities for check fraud, counterfeiting documents and falsely claiming an aristocratic title. He returned to Hungary at the outbreak of World War Two, forming a relationship with an English journalist, which he claimed landed them both in a Hungarian prison for political dissidents. De Hory also claimed to have been sent to a Nazi concentration camp in Germany, on the grounds of his being Jewish and homosexual, though his surviving family members believe he may have spent the war in Spain. After the war, he returned to Paris and attempted to reignite his painting career. In 1946, he sold a pen-and-ink drawing to an English aristocrat who mistook it for a Picasso. With the assistance of his boyfriend Jacques Chamberlin, de Hory sold more fake Picassos in galleries around Europe, again claiming to be a Hungarian aristocrat. Their partnership ended acrimoniously after de Hory discovered Chamberlin pocketing most of the profits, and he returned to working solo. In 1947, he visited New York City, passing off an oil painting as a Modigliani which he sold to an art gallery. He remained in America for 12 years, moving between New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago and working under a series of pseudonyms, expanding his repertoire to include fake paintings by Henri Matisse and Jean Renoir. In 1955, a Chicago art dealer initiated a federal lawsuit against him for fraud, and he absconded to Mexico, returning to Los Angeles and abandoning forgery. In 1959, he made an agreement with a gay couple, Fernand Legros and Real Lessard, to sell his paintings, while he moved to Ibiza. The scheme unravelled in 1964 after Legros sold over 40 works to Texas oil millionaire Algur Meadows, who unmasked de Hory as the artist. Legros and Lessard were imprisoned for fraud, and de Hory was arrested. As none of his forgeries had been created in Spanish territory, he was charged only for homosexuality (at the time, a criminal offence in Spain), showing no visible means of support and consorting with criminals. He was imprisoned for two months and expelled from Ibiza for a year, moving to Andalucía. He returned to Ibiza in 1969 as a celebrity, giving multiple press interviews and appearing in Orson Welles’ film F for Fake. He also collaborated with his friend Clifford Irving on the biography, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Times, itself an act of creative non-fiction, containing de Hory’s fabrications about his aristocratic background and war record. After years of legal wrangling, the French government finally secured de Hory’s extradition to stand trial in France. Fearing he would be executed, he committed suicide in 1976 by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was 65. It is estimated that over 1,000 of de Hory’s artworks were acquired by museums and art galleries, many of which are now highly-priced collectors’ items.