representing Stunt. Descharnes was sur-
prised to nd his own email—which he says
had been “altered” to completely misrepre-
sent his conclusion. “I am pleased to con-
irm that in my professional opinion...the
two pieces of art you asked me to see are
in fact original Dalí,” read the email. “I am
very happy to give you this conclusion, that
the two pieces are beautiful work and a great
discovery.” Adds Hunter, “When I saw the
name Stunt in the email, I thought it was just
that: a stunt. I was quite shocked to learn that
Prince Charles was involved.”
Other experts say they were also app-
roached by middlemen for Stunt, who was
looking to take out millions of pounds in
loans using the Dumfries House paintings as
collateral. “They came to me with the paint-
ings for a loan,” says one Europe-based art
dealer. “There was an early Picasso, which
would have been worth around 30 million,
and there were some Monets. They were tell-
ing me about Dumfries House. They said it
was under the patrimony of Prince Charles,
and James Stunt was very good friends with
Prince Charles. Prince Charles is a painter
himself and he has very good taste—the royal
family has a very good collection. So we were
thinking: Okay, how can this go wrong?”
The dealer requested full documentation,
provenance, and catalog entries, which any
100 - year-old Picasso would have in abun-
dance. Instead, he was sent only a single,
sketchy invoice that read: “Nahmad Gallery,
1 Picasso, $ 30 million.” “It was obviously a
fake,” the dealer says. He rejected the loan.
Stunt points to other paintings in his col-
lection as evidence that the work he loaned
to Prince Charles is not a fraud. “This is a
Monet!” he told me during my visit to his town
house, pointing to a landscape near the stair-
well: Village de Roche-Blond au Soleil Couch-
ant, 1889. “That painting has never been
down to Dumfries House. I have lots of art! I
am one of the biggest collectors in the world!
Did Tony Tetro knock out everything else?”
But in London, another witness came
forward with a story about Village de Roche-
Blond that seems straight out of a spy
novel. One afternoon last October, London
antiques dealer Ian Towning, the amboy-
ant, mop-topped star of the British show Posh
Pawn, was approached by several mysterious
individuals. They identi ed themselves as
“middlemen” for an extremely affluent,
unnamed individual who was looking to
sell a Monet valued at 20 million pounds.
Towning, who goes to his Chelsea antiques
emporium each day bedecked in diamonds
and gold and is usually sipping his rst ute
of Champagne by 11 a.m., was intrigued. A
meeting was set for October 29.
At the appointed hour, the middlemen
arrived in an SUV with dark windows to fer-
ry Towning in high secrecy to the collector’s
home. Accompanied by a valuation expert
he brought along to help him examine the
Monet, he was escorted into an elegant town
house in Belgravia. The collector was late, so
Towning had time to look around.
“I looked at the sofa; nobody would want
it for a dump,” he recalls. “His co¢ee table—
well, the man has a lot to learn.” And on
the wall, the Monet, Village de Roche-Blond.
Towning and the expert began examining it.
The sky, the signature—it was “all wrong,”
says Towning. Turning to the expert, he
mouthed a single word: “fake.”
Then Stunt appeared. “In he comes,”
Towning recalls, “dressed in this tracksuit.
He sat down very idgety. He had a ciga-
rette, just pu£ng away. Then he took the
cigarette and busted it out on the coffee
table. My God!”
The meeting was brief. A few days later,
Towning called Stunt to give him the bad news.
“They get it straight from the hip,” he says.
“People will say, ‘What do you think of this?’
And I’ll say, ‘Darling, it’s a piece of junk.’ ”
Then Towning spoke to an associate
about what happened, and his tale wound
up running in the Mail. Stunt exploded on
Instagram. “Peasants,” he said of Towning
and his team, accusing the antiquities dealer
of libeling his artwork. Matthew Steeples,
a friend of Stunt’s, insists that the Monet
has been certiied as genuine by “leading
experts.” He dismisses Towning as “a manwho appears on a TV show where desperate
people og their rubbish to get cash. If any-
one is a fake, it’s him.”
Spurred by the avalanche of negative
publicity, Stunt fell back on the instincts
that made him a fortune in gambling: He
bet everything on the supposed Monet in
his town house. Taking to Instagram once
again, he announced that he was putting
Village de Roche-Blond up for auction on his
website, with a minimum bid of 4. 5 million
pounds, 10 percent of which he would donate
to the Prince’s Foundation and a children’s
charity. If the painting is a fake, he pointed
out, he would go to prison for selling a forg-
ery—“Belmarsh,” he said, referring to the
brutal men’s lockup outside London. But if
the painting sells after being authenticated,
then Stunt will have the vindication he seeks.
“See,” he texts me after posting the video.
“Write about me saying, ‘Buy it or arrest me.’ ”
The painting appears to have received
four bids. But then, Stunt claimed on Insta-
gram, the auction was suddenly halted. He
has been barred by British prosecutors from
selling his assets until the myriad claims
against his holdings are adjudicated. So the
Monet—if it is a Monet—remains on the wall
of his town house.
The same can’t be said of the paintings
that Stunt loaned Prince Charles. All 17 of the
pictures—not just the 4 singled out as forger-
ies—have been taken down by the Prince’s
Foundation. “The artwork in question has
been removed from display at Dumfries
House,” a royal spokesperson tells Vanity
Fair. The foundation won’t say what it has
done with the paintings; Stunt says they have
not been returned to him. But while some
of the artworks may be forgeries, Stunt’s
distress over the incident appears to be
genuine. It pains him to even think he might
have brought dishonor to Prince Charles, a
man he venerates above all. Nothing could
be more painful to a royalist, after all, than
causing a royal scandal.
“I would rather fall on my sword than let
him have any embarrassment over this,”
Stunt says. “He’s my future king.” QVANITY FAIR IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISH ERS INC. IN BOTH THE U.S. AND THE U.K.
THE U.K. EDITION IS PUBLISHED BY THE CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS LTD. UNDER LICENSE.
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