Art forger: My fakes are still fooling experts
Shaun Greenhalgh, who was jailed in 2007, pulled off an extraordinary string of art forgeries. Working from a shed at his parents’ home in Bolton, the talented amateur artist fooled the world’s leading museums by knocking up fake paintings and sculptures. But his audacious tale of trickery and deceit is not yet over, it seems. In a newly published memoir, Greenhalgh claims that some of his work slipped through the police net and continues to fool leading auction houses.
WHEN Shaun Greenhalgh was jailed in 2007, it appeared that one of the most astonishing forgery tales of modern times had come to a close.
Working from a garden shed at his parents’ home in Bolton, the talented amateur artist fooled the world’s leading museums by knocking up fake paintings and sculptures – sometimes using tools bought from B&Q.
But in a newly published memoir, Greenhalgh claims that some of his work slipped through the police net and continues to fool prestigious auction houses.
It appears that a sculpture offered for sale in 2012 as a previously unknown “masterpiece” – and excitedly touted as an 18th century treasure that could set a new auction record of £250,000 for early English porcelain – may have been one of Greenhalgh’s fakes.
He also reveals details of how he created other works, including a “Gauguin” sculpture of a faun made out of clay and the contents of an ashtray, which sold for a reported $125,000.
His new claim relates to a porcelain sculpture of a child’s head. According to Greenhalgh, it was copied from photographs of a similar work in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum that was made by the great sculptor Louis Francois Roubiliac.
The genuine article in the Ashmolean is enamelled, but Greenhalgh claims he left his version white because he couldn’t work out how to get the colours right.
Writing in his autobiography, A Forger’s Tale, he said: “A few years ago, a supposed piece of Chelsea porcelain made the news as a rare and valuable discovery by a leading London auction house. People were saying it was going to break the world record for a piece of English porcelain at auction. It was something I did in the early Eighties – a head of a child in early ‘triangle’ period paste.”
He said that the piece was sold to a London dealer in 1984 and that he had no idea how it reached the auction house.
But the piece was quietly withdrawn shortly before the sale.
Greenhalgh said: “I can only assume better-seeing eyes prevailed.”
The forger was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison in 2007.
His other notorious fakes include the Gauguin Faun, said to be by the lauded French post-impressionist. The Art Institute of Chicago paid a reported $125,000 for it in 1997.
Greenhalgh said he had achieved its pitted surface – a trademark of Gauguin’s clay work – by adding cigarette ash to the mix.
“I’d seen similar effects on ware coming out of the kiln at school – a result of cigarette ash in the clay,” he said. “The ‘fag ash kids’, as we called the smokers, used our clay bins as ashtrays.”
Perhaps his most audacious fake was The Amarna Princess, a headless statue supposedly over 3,000 years old, which was sold to Bolton Council for £440,000 as a rare Egyptian treasure depicting Tutankhamun’s granddaughter.
Greenhalgh said he carved it using “a B&Q wood saw and a bit of elbow grease”.
He said: “The next time you visit a gallery, look at the artwork before you read the label and don’t believe either – just enjoy the sight.”