John Myatt (born 1945) is a British painter who painted forgeries for art dealer John Drewe.

John Myatt lived in a Staffordshire village of Sugnall . He also wrote music and had a hit single Silly Games in the UK Top 40 in 1979.

In the 1980s Myatt began to paint. When his wife left him and the children in 1985, he decided he must be able to work at home to be with his children. So he placed an ad to Private Eye magazine - "19th- and 20th-century fakes for £240". He was contacted by John Drewe, who said he was a nuclear physicist and wanted the paintings for his own home. When Drewe later told Myatt that Christie's had accepted his Albert Gleizes painting as genuine and paid £25.000, he begun to paint forgeries for real.

According to later police reports, Myatt painted about 200 forgeries in a regular schedule of every six weeks and delivered them to Drewe in London. Police later recovered only 80 of them. Drewe sold them to the auction houses of Christie's, Phillips and Sotheby's and to dealers in London, Paris and New York. Myatt painted in the style of masters like Roger Bissiere , Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Matisse, Ben Nicholson, Nicholas de Stael and Graham Sutherland.

In September 1995, Scotland Yard detectives arrived to arrest him — he came quietly and confessed. Myatt told the police that he had created the paintings using emulsion paint and K-Y Jelly, mixture that dried quickly but was hardly reminiscent of the original pigments. He estimated that he had earned equal to $165.000, offered to return $30.000 and help to convict Drewe. He had come to dislike the deception and Drewe.

In April 16 1996 Police raided Drewe's gallery in the Reigate suburb of London and found materials he had used to forge certificates of authenticity. Drewe had also altered provenances of genuine paintings to link them to Myatt's forgeries and added bogus documents to archives of various institutions to "prove" their authenticity.

The trial against Myatt and Drewe begun September 1998. On February 13 1999, John Myatt was sentenced for one year in prison for a conspiracy to defraud and was released the following June after serving four months of his sentence. Drewe was sentenced for six years for conspiracy and served two.

After his release, Myatt has continued to paint commissioned portraits and clear copies and even held exhibitions of his work.