Geraldine Norman

Born Geraldine Lucia Keen to Harold Hugh Keen and Catherine Eleanor Lyle Cummins. She was educated in St. Anne's College, Oxford. She graduated in 1961 with a Masters of Arts in Mathematics which she followed up by attending the University of California, Los Angeles from 1961 to 62.[1][2]

Norman got a job as a statistician for The Times Newspaper in 1962. In 1967 she was the statistician who launched the Times-Sotheby index of art prices which ran from the 1967-71. She progressed in 1969 to become the Sale Room Correspondent of The Times.[1][3] Norman gained a name during that time as Christie's disliked her. She asked awkward questions about secret practices within the industry.[4] She continued her inquisitive nature when she uncovered that 13 drawings by the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer were forgeries. On 16 July 1976 she published a sensational article in The Times claiming they were modern forgeries and later identified that they had been created by an artist called Tom Keating.[5] She has also investigated authenticity of Van Goghs.[6]

In 1987 she left The Times as she had objected to the Murdoch takeover. Norman joined The Independent newspaper as Art Market Correspondent eventually leaving in 1995 to focus on writing.[7] Roles which she took on after leaving the Independent were as director of The Hermitage Development Trust, editor of the Magazine and chief executive of the Hermitage Foundation UK.

She married playwright and novelist John Frank Norman on 16 July 1971. They co-wrote 'The Fake's Progress'. He died in 1980.

• The Sale of Works of Art (as Geraldine Keen, 1971)
• Nineteenth Century Painters and Painting, A Dictionary (1977)
• The Fake's Progress (with Tom Keating & Frank Norman, 1977)
• Mrs. Harper’ Niece (as Florence Place, 1982)
• Biedermeier Painting (1987)
• Top Collectors of the World (with Natsuo Miyashita, 1993)
• The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (1997)
• Bob Hecht by Bob Hecht (ed. 2014)
• Dynastic Rule: Mikhail Piotrovsky and the Hermitage (2016)