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### Two dealers and a pair of invented twins

Snelle and Golding met in Cambridge, where Snelle was studying philosophy, and both went on to deal art in London: Snelle founded Black Rat Projects in Shoreditch, and Golding co-founded the gallery Pertwee, Anderson & Gold. They began altering old paperbacks for fun in the early 2010s, at a time when both were struggling: Golding had recently come through heroin addiction, and Snelle, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has called it the lowest point of his life.

They released the results as the work of Franklyn and Brendan Connor, twins supposedly raised in a Christian cult called The Family in California who had escaped to New York, while the two dealers presented themselves as the twins' agents. The story held until 2014, when they told The Telegraph who they really were. The reveal did the work no harm, and they have exhibited under their own names ever since.

### New words for old covers

The pulp works begin with real covers from mid-century paperbacks and Mills & Boon romances, repainted and given a new title, a caption or a speech bubble that undercuts the image. Penguin's paperback designs became a second source, and Other Fiction (2025) is a shelf of Penguin-style spines, each carrying an invented title.

The invention went beyond the twins. In 2014 they showed Curiosities from The Hanbury Collection, in which genuine specimens such as a wholphin skeleton and a lump of ambergris sat beside fakes, among them a gold-plated hippo skull said to have belonged to Pablo Escobar.

### Lockdown, dinosaurs and the Western paintings

During the pandemic the pair took part in art-therapy sessions, and a new kind of painting came out of them. Alongside the cover pastiches came bright, deliberately naive pictures with blunt captions, the Regression paintings, some of them populated by dinosaurs. In 2022 Mythomania at Maddox Gallery in London turned hostile readers' comments on the 2014 hoax story into new work. Recent canvases are painted in acrylic, oil stick and spray paint, and since 2025 they have been painting a Western series in oil on canvas.

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Old Behaviour, 2022 | Phillips, London

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The Truth Is Like Poetry, 2018 (with its study) | Phillips, London

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Past Mistakes, 2023 | Phillips, London

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Every Saint Has A Past And Every Sinner A Future, 2019 | Bonhams, Knightsbridge

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Next Big Thing, 2022 | Phillips, London

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The Connor Brothers are London-based British artists Mike Snelle and James Golding, known for recreating the covers of 1950s and 1960s pulp-fiction and romance paperbacks and giving them new titles and captions. Glamorous cover figures deliver deadpan lines about drink, love, truth and bad behaviour, across giclée editions finished with screenprint varnish, hand-painted vintage paperbacks and large canvases. Until 2014 the work was credited to Franklyn and Brendan Connor, invented twins said to have escaped a Californian cult.

Among the highest recorded auction results for The Connor Brothers is Old Behaviour (2022), a 115 x 185 cm canvas in acrylic, oil stick and spray paint, which sold at Phillips in London on 29 June 2022 for £47,880 including premium, against an estimate of £6,000 to £8,000. The Truth Is Like Poetry (2018), an oil on canvas sold together with its collage study, made £40,320 at Phillips London in December 2020.

A canvas's title says little about its price. Paintings called Past Mistakes have sold at Phillips London for very different sums: the 2023 canvas, 155 x 110 cm, made £29,210 in October 2023, while a larger 2022 canvas made £10,160 in June 2024.

Hand-painted vintage paperbacks sit well below the canvases. An artist's proof of I Drink to Make Other People More Interesting (2019) sold for £4,788 at Phillips London in September 2022, and A Load of Fuss (2018), from an edition of two, made $1,524 at Phillips New York in September 2023.

Because one image can exist in several sizes, colourways and formats, compare like with like: the same title, sheet size, colourway and edition for prints, and size and date for canvases.


The Connor Brothers|All SeriesAll Artwork Series