A number of the generous obituaries to David Bowie made reference to the prominent role the rock star took in one of the most amusing hoaxes of recent years.

This was the gulling of the art world perpetrated by the best-selling novelist William Boyd in his spoof biography of a non-existent American Abstract Artist called Nat Tate.

The illegitimate son of a sailor, Tate was said to have been orphaned by the death of his mother and then brought up by the filthy rich philanthropist, Peter Barkasian, for whom she worked.

His developing skills as an artist were recognised by others but, following his visit to a ‘real’ artist in the shape of Georges Braque, Tate lost heart, decided he was a failure, and after collecting and destroying almost all his work, jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.

Bowie supplied a blurb for the book and later read from it at a launch in the New York studio of artist Jeff Koons, who was not in on the plot. Terrified of being thought ignorant, all the pseuds present claimed to have been dimly aware, or fully cognisant, of Tate’s work.

The hoax was rumbled by David Lister of the Independent, in part from overhearing hotel conversations by the plotters.

I re-read Boyd’s book last week, delighting in this skilful way he deceives, though always (as in an Agatha Christie thriller) playing fair. Are there not clues, for instance, at the statement that Tate “was both like and very unlike his contemporaries” or in his mum’s death being “a substantial stroke of good fortune”?

The detailed touches are brilliant, like moneybags Barkasian being given a Long Island mansion and a taste for Tiffany lamps.

That would have made him a near neighbour of their creator Louis Comfort Tiffany, depicted by Joaquin Sorolla in a brilliant 1911 portrait of the artist (see below) in the new show at the Royal Academy.