On 29 July 2025, a landmark lawsuit ended concerning a living British artist. The principal claimant was Robert Fletcher, who was a correctional officer at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre (TBCC) in Ontario, Canada, in the 1970s. Over months in 1976, Fletcher watched a prisoner create a painting in TBCC’s art classes: a desert landscape with a pond. On the prisoner’s release, he sold the painting to Fletcher for CAD$100: it was signed on its face ‘1976 Pete Doige’. Fletcher kept the painting at his home for the next thirty-odd years.
In 2011, a visitor to Fletcher’s home suggested the painting was by the then renowned artist, Peter Doig. (Born in Scotland in 1959, Doig and his family moved to Canada in 1966; in 2007, he became ‘the most expensive living painter in Europe’ in 2007 when his painting, White Canoe, 1990/91, fetched £5.7m at Sotheby’s in London). Fletcher contacted Sotheby’s with a view to selling his painting at auction. Sotheby’s response acknowledged the rarity of such an early painting by Doig, and requested provenance and authenticity information.
Fletcher decided against auction sale, he instead consigned the painting to a Chicago-based art dealer, Peter Bartlow, who sought to authenticate the painting by directly emailing Doig, whose associate responded that Doig had never lived or attended art classes in Thunder Bay and did not believe he knew Fletcher.
Bartlow then contacted Gordon VeneKlasen, co-owner of the Michael Werner Gallery, Doig’s then longstanding gallery dealership. Bartlow relayed: Fletcher’s belief that he had purchased the painting directly from Doig; said he could not find any record of Doig’s life between 1976 and 1978; suggested that Doig might wish to keep his imprisonment at TBCC private; and proposed that Doig admit authorship of the work so that ‘the circumstances shall remain forgotten’. When VeneKlasen replied that the painting was not authored by Doig, Bartlow responded by accusing Doig of falsifying records to obscure facts about his past.
In 2013 Fletcher and Bartlow jointly filed a lawsuit in the US Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Chicago: against Doig, VeneKlasen, and Matthew Dontzin (Doig’s attorney). The suit alleged that the defendants had interfered with the plaintiffs’ prospective economic advantage, and requested judgment declaring their right to attribute the painting to Doig.
Dontzin responded by sending to the plaintiffs’ attorney, William Zieske, a letter demanding withdrawal of the claim because it was legally ‘frivolous’, supplying exhibits including: correspondence from Lakehead University at Thunder Bay, indicating that no one by the name of Peter Doig had ever been enrolled there; search results from a police database stating that Peter Doig did not have a criminal record; records from Doig’s secondary school, and correspondence with family members, showing that he was not incarcerated in 1975 or 1976; and internet searches for ‘Peter Doige’ showing there were several people with that name living in Canada. The plaintiffs did not withdraw their suit.
Dontzin then sent Zieske a sworn declaration by Marilyn Doige Bovard, stating she was the sister of Peter Edward Doige (ie the artist prisoner) who had attended Lakehead University in the 1970s; and recalling that her brother had indeed been incarcerated at TBCC in the 1970s, where he had taken art classes and created several paintings and drawings. Bovard also stated that the desert scene depicted in the painting in question resembled a location in Arizona, where she and her brother had once lived for six months. Attached to her declaration were copies of Doige’s Lakehead University student ID, driver’s licence, and death certificate.
In 2013, the court invited Zieske to consider temporarily suspending his suit, in order to consider whether the painting had in fact been created by Doige, rather than Doig, given the preponderance of evidence submitted by the defendants. Zieske declined the invitation, and declared his intention to continue pursuing the case. Several months later, Zieske submitted his own affidavit retelling his conversation with Peter Edward Doige’s mother, who believed her son had never spent any time in Ontario or Thunder Bay. Zieske never introduced any testimony from Doige’s mother to substantiate this claim and, at a 2014 court hearing, explained that he could not do so because Doige’s mother had refused to give sworn witness evidence.
Dontzin produced further documents. The Seafarers Union in Thunder Bay confirmed Peter Edward Doige’s membership of the union. Two sworn declarations attested that Peter Doige had created the painting: one from an inmate at TBCC in the late 1970s who had taken art classes there; another from the TBCC art teacher from 1975 to 1977.
In 2016, after an eight-day trial, the court ruled that the evidence ‘conclusively demonstrated’ Peter Doig ‘absolutely did not paint the disputed work’ and ‘Peter Edward Doige did author the work.’ The defendants applied for financial sanctions to be imposed by the court on Fletcher, Bartlow, and their lawyer Zieske. The application submitted that the lawsuit lacked ‘any objectively reasonable basis’, and that the plaintiffs and their lawyer had pursued the action on ‘frivolous’ grounds.
In December 2022 the court decided that by at least May 2014, when Zieske reported to the court that Peter Edward Doige’s mother would not give sworn witness evidence, ‘it should have become indisputably clear to Plaintiffs and Zieske that their claims stood no chance of success and, in fact, that the claims were factually meritless’. Accordingly, the court concluded that financial sanctions were ‘unfortunately appropriate’ against Fletcher, Bartlow, and Zieske for their continued pursuit of the action from May 2014.
The court imposed an overall sanction of US$2,525,958.35 payable jointly and/or individually by Fletcher, Bartlow, and Zieske, whose appeal against the sanction was recently rejected by the US Court of Appeals, affirming the judgment and award of the district court of trial.
Had Fletcher and Bartlow chosen not to pursue Doig, but instead to publicly exhibit and market the fake painting with their attribution of his authorship, would Doig have any legal right to prevent them? Intellectual property laws of many countries, including the US, give artists moral rights not to have their names publicly attributed as authors of works (or parts of works) they did not create. In the UK, this moral right of ‘false attribution of work’ originated in the Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, and is currently one of an artist’s moral rights given by the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988. Fletcher and Bartlow may have thought they had discovered a winning lottery ticket, but their insistence on pursuing this fantasy, even as it unravelled under scrutiny with no consideration for the stresses of their legal claims put on the artist, could never end well for them.
© Henry Lydiate 2025