“Corot made 3,000 paintings, 10,000 of which have been sold in America.” That one-liner about the 19th-century French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, was old in 1936 when Louvre curator René Huyghe quoted it in an article for a monthly French art journal. There, he unspooled the tale of an extraordinary sucker: Dr. F. Jousseaume, who, by the time he died in 1923 had amassed 2,414 Corots—not one of which was real.

Jousseaume was an eccentric par excellence. Huyghe cited passages from the man’s 1910 book, “Les Vandales du Louvre,” in which he advocated installing a permanent veterinary station at the Arc d’Triomphe to tend to any animals that might be injured by masonry falling from the arch. Elsewhere in the book, Jousseaume bragged about how he would not pay more than 100 francs for a Corot painting, stating, “If I said how many I have been able to obtain without spending that sum, you would not believe me.” (A first-rate Corot then fetched as much as 100,000 francs.) Also, Jousseaume lacked a connoisseur’s eye. He once praised a J. M. W. Turner painting that later proved bogus as “one of the most beautiful masterworks of this inimitable artist.”

Jousseaume was well aware of how widely faked Corot was, saying, “Corot had during his lifetime so many skillful imitators that of 100 pictures bearing his signature, barely 50 are genuine.” Yet he seems never to have considered that his own collection could be false.

Huyghe claimed that “of the 2,414, with six or seven possible exceptions, they are all from the same hand,” and proceeded to demolish the labors of the unknown faker. Huyghe dwells on a group portrait titled “Memories of Friends,” because the images Huyghe claimed that “of the 2,414, with six or seven possible exceptions, they are all from the same hand,” and proceeded to demolish the labors of the unknown faker. Huyghe dwells on a group portrait titled “Memories of Friends,” because the images of the artists in it were copied from photographs, some of which were taken 20 years apart. He called the Jousseaume affair “one of the most astonishing buffooneries of the era” and likened it to a missing scene from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play “Ubu Roi.”

Why did Huyghe bother to stomp such an amusing gnat? Unlike most collections of fakes, Jousseaume’s remained intact after his death. It fell into the hands of one Victor Rienaecker, who attempted to sell it in 1928 in New York and London. The catalogue that he produced for the occasion, titled “The Paintings & Drawings of J.B.C. Corot in the Artist’s Own Collection,” includes all 2,414 works. Rienaecker must have made some headway with collectors, because Huyghe felt the need to sound the alarm eight years later. His warning came too late for Samuel Courtauld, who acquired three of Jousseaume’s “Corots” and narrowly averted a posthumous public humiliation in 1948 when they were removed from a Tate Gallery exhibit of French artworks from his collection.