The Matthiesen Gallery has filed a lawsuit against a convicted con man, an artist, another Old Masters art gallery and a top art collector alleging fraud, breach of contract, and four other counts over the Gustave Courbet painting Mother and Child on a Hammock.
In court documents filed in the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York, the London-based gallery alleges that Thomas Austin Doyle ““embarked on a multi-year project to defraud Patrick Matthiesen,” the director of the gallery, over the sale of the painting.
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According to those documents, last year Doyle told Matthiesen he found a buyer willing to pay $550,000 for the painting, and would broker the sale without taking any commission. Doyle delivered the work by the 19th century French painter to artist, art dealer, and business partner Shalva Sarukhanishvili. Sarukhanishvili then sold Mother and Child on a Hammock to Jill Newhouse Gallery in New York for $115,000. Jill Newhouse Gallery then sold it to ARTnews Top 200 Collector Jon Landau for $125,000 in September 2024.
The painting actually retailed for $650,000, and had been offered by Matthiesen Gallery at that price for several years, including at TEFAF New York in 2019.
“Ultimately, after years of deception, Doyle confessed in an e-mail dated March 4, 2025 that he had betrayed Plaintiff. He recommended that Plaintiff work with Sarukhanishvili to resolve the matter. Accordingly, Plaintiff began e-mailing Sarukhanishvili to retrieve the money owed, or the Painting. Sarukhanishvili shrugged off any requests for assistance and then cut off communications.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Landau previously viewed the painting “multiples times at multiple locations”, including at TEFAF Maastricht in 2023 where it was on consignment with Nicholas Hall Gallery, and “each time he was aware that its retail price was $650,000 or more” but that he currently had possession of Mother and Child on a Hammock but refused to return it to Matthiesen.
When ARTnews contacted Jill Newhouse Gallery for comment, attorney Amelia K. Brankov wrote in an email, “The claims asserted against Jill Newhouse LLC are meritless and we will vigorously defend against them in court.”
Landau’s attorney, Jonathan D. Kraut, told ARTnews in an email, “With respect to our client Jon Landau, we view the lawsuit as wholly without merit and we will address it accordingly in court.”
Sarukhanishvili could not be reached for comment at press time.
Notably, a previous lawsuit filed against Doyle in September 2010 over Portrait of a Girl, a painting by Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot, led to the discovery he “spent more than two years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2007 to stealing from an art collector a bronze Degas statue of a nude dancer,” reported the New York Times in 2010.
Only a few days later, Doyle was arrested by the Manhattan District Attorney Preet Bharara’s office in September 2010 on the charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud for orchestrating the fraudulent purchase of the painting for $800,000. It had been valued as high as $1.35 million.
Doyle pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. During the sentencing hearing in Manhattan Federal Court, Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court recounted that Doyle had been convicted 11 times over the previous 34 years, reported the New York Times.
“You are a career criminal by any definition of the term,” Judge McMahon told Doyle, before sentencing him to six years in prison. “Society needs to be protected from you; you are a predator.”