Walter Stanley Keane (October 7, 1915 – December 27, 2000) was an American plagiarist who became famous in the 1960s[1] as the claimed painter of a series of widely reproduced paintings depicting vulnerable subjects with enormous eyes.

When she told her side of the story, Walter Keane retaliated with a USA Today article that again claimed he had done the work.

When they returned to their home in Berkeley, they began an educational toy business, "Susie Keane's Puppeteens", teaching children French through the use of handmade puppets, phonograph records and a book.

The "ballroom" of their large home became an assembly line of hand-painted wooden puppets, with various intricately made costumes.

[citation needed] Walter Keane subsequently closed both his real estate firm and the toy company in order to work full-time on his painting.

[citation needed] At a fairground in 1953, Walter met an artist making charcoal sketches, Margaret (Doris Hawkins) Ulbrich.

During their marriage, and for a time afterward, Walter sold his wife's highly stylized "big eyes" paintings as his own.

[13] Keane first displayed Margaret's paintings as his own work in 1957, at an outdoor art show in Washington Square in Manhattan.

In an interview with LIFE magazine in 1965, Keane claimed his inspiration for the big-eyed children came when he was in Europe as an art student: My psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents.

The Keanes continued to dispute the paintings' origin, and after Walter suggested that Margaret claimed she was the painter only because she believed he was dead, she sued him in federal court for slander.

[24] Tim Burton directed and produced the 2014 film Big Eyes based on Margaret Keane's life.