Bogus Bacon dealer avoids the joint

A conman who tried to sell a fake Lucian Freud masterpiece stolen three decades ago for just £3,000 has been spared jail. Vincent Dyer, 66, advertised a counterfeit of Freud’s Portrait of Francis Bacon on eBay, three times, twice in September 2017 and once in February 2018. Dyer claimed the famous oil painting, worth millions of pounds, was a gift to his father from Freud and ‘kept in secure storage for many years’. Isleworth Crown Court heard Dyer had bought…