Shaun Greenhalgh
Encyclopedia
Shaun Greenhalgh is a British art forger. Over a seventeen-year period, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a phenomenal range of forgeries. Teaming up with his brother and elderly parents, who fronted the sales side of the operation, he successfully sold his fakes internationally to museums, auction houses, and private buyers, accruing nearly a million pounds.
The family have been described by Scotland Yard
as "possibly the most diverse forgery team in the world, ever." However, when they attempted to sell three Assyria
n reliefs using the same provenance
as they had previously, suspicions were raised. Apprehended, Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to prison for four years and eight months in November 2007.
The Victoria and Albert Museum
in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's "works" from 23 January to 7 February 2010. The Metropolitan Police
’s art and antiques unit built a replica model of the shed where the "works" were created and labelled Greenhalgh “the most diverse art forger known in history”. Many of his fakes, including the Amarna Princess
, Risley Park Lanx
, Barbara Hepworth Goose and Thomas Moran
paintings were displayed.
, South Turton
, which is about 3.5 miles (6 km) north of Bolton
town centre. His parents, George and Olive, approached clients, while his older brother, George jnr, managed the money. Other members of the family were invoked to help establish the legitimacy of the various items. These included Olive's father who owned an art gallery, a great-grandfather who it seemed had had the foresight to buy well at auctions, and an ancestor who had apparently worked for the Mayor of Bolton as a cleaner and was gifted a Moran painting.
Shaun Greenhalgh left school at 16 with no qualifications. A self-taught artist, undoubtedly influenced by his job as an antiques
dealer, he worked up his forgeries from sketches, photographs, art books and catalogues. He attempted a wide range of crafts, from painting in pastels and watercolours, to sketches, and sculpture, both modern and ancient, busts and statues, to bas-relief and metalwork. He invested in a vast range of different materials - silver, stone, marble, rare stone, replica metal, and glass. He also did meticulous research to authenticate his items with histories and provenance (for instance, faking letters from the supposed artists) in order to demonstrate his ownership. Completed items were then stored about the house and garden shed. The latter probably served as a workshop as well.
A quote from an amazed Scotland Yard detective who searched the house gives a sense of Greenhalgh's industry:
A next-door neighbour recalled: "I was finding bits of pottery and coins around the edges of the garden over 20 years back - [things like] bits of metal with old kings on." While this sounds like materials were openly displayed, it was perhaps not quite that obvious. Angela Thomas, a curator from the Bolton Museum, actually visited the family at home prior to the purchase of the Amarna Princess and reported nothing untoward.
Yet for all his daring – he once boasted that he could knock up a Moran
watercolour in half an hour and claimed to have completed an Amarna
statue in three weeks – Shaun Greenhalgh needed the help of his parents. At the trial it was said by the lawyer, Brian McKenna, that his mother, Olive (b.1925), made the phonecalls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."
Olive may have been a peripheral figure, but Shaun's father, George (b.1923), was more involved. He was the frontman who met face-to-face with potential buyers. "He looks honest, he's elderly and he shows up in a wheelchair." George clearly embraced his role. On one occasion, trying to interest the Bolton Museum
in an Amarna princess, an ancient Egypt
ian statuette about the size of a gnome, he told them he was "thinking about using it as a garden ornament".
The parents were perhaps most important because they helped establish a logical explanation for why the Greenhalghs had possession of such items in the first place, namely as family heirlooms. It even allowed them to offload items when they were discovered as fakes, such as the "Eadred Reliquary
", and an L. S. Lowry
painting The Meeting House.
Park, Devon
, the home of the 4th Earl of Egremont
. Among the items listed were "eight Egyptian figures." Using the leeway this vague description allowed, Greenhalgh manufactured what became called the "Amarna Princess," a 20-inch statue, apparently made of a "stunning translucent alabaster, it later emerged within a Panorama documentary
that he had bought the tools to produce this 'masterpiece' from B&Q." Done in the Egyptian "Amarna period" style
of 1350 BC, the statue represents one of the daughters of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti
, mother of Prince Tutankhamun
. At the time, as Greenhalgh had researched, only two other similar statuettes were known to exist in the world. He "knocked up" his copy in his shed in three weeks out of calcite, "using basic DIY tools and making it look old by coating it in a mixture of tea and clay".
George then approached Bolton Museum
in 2002, claiming the Amarna was from his grandfather’s "forgotten collection", bought at the Silverton Park auction. He pretended to be ignorant about its true worth or value, but was careful to provide the letters Shaun had also faked, showing how the artefact had been in the family for "a hundred years".
In 2003, after consulting experts at the British Museum
and Christie's
, the Bolton Museum bought the Amarna Princess for £439,767. It remained on display until February 2006.
in 600 BC.
The British Museum examined them in November 2005, concluded that they were genuine, and expressed an interest in buying one of them, which seemed to match a drawing by A. H. Layard
in its collection. However, when two of the reliefs were submitted to Bonhams
auction house, its antiquities consultant Richard Falkiner spotted "an obvious fake". Bonhams consulted with the British Museum about various suspicious aspects, and the Museum then spotted several unlikely anomalies. The horses' reins were "not consistent" or "atypical" with respect to other Assyrian reliefs; and the cuneiform
inscription contained a spelling mistake, an absent diacritical mark, which was considered extremely unlikely in a piece "destined for the eyes of the king". These concerns became full blown suspicion when George seemed too willing to part with the items at a low price. The Museum contacted the Arts and Antiquities Unit of Scotland Yard, and eighteen months later the family was arrested.
In the event the Greenhalghs did not manage to offload most of their works. Many they did sell, like the Eadred Reliquary, received only minimal amounts. Others, like the Lowry painting ,The Meeting House only gained in value from their repeated resale, which was not a reflection of the Greenhalghs, and of course would not have benefited them. As time went on, more ambitious, expensive pieces of work were produced, some of which did sell, like the Risley Park Lanx. However, these were subject to more scrutiny and indeed it was one of these, the Assyrian reliefs, which led to their being exposed and caught. This suggests the longevity of their scam was concentrated on the passing off of lower level items.
Balanced against this must be the success of sales to private individuals. They are unlikely to have had the same level of expertise at their disposal as institutions, and are probably less willing to advertise their losses once the forgeries were detected. Certainly they have not had the same exposure as the debacle surrounding the Bolton Museum, for example. Two individual buyers, "wealthy Americans" have been noticed, but only after they donated their purchase to the British Museum. Another piece sold to an un-named private buyer came to light when the Art Institute of Chicago
announced that The Faun
, a ceramic sculpture on display since 1997 as the work of the 19th-century French master Paul Gauguin
, was also a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh. The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer in London, who had bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1994.
In addition, the bank records of the Greenhalghs only went back six years, so in the final analysis the exact amount of monies involved over the seventeen year scam has not been determined. What is known is that "two Halifax accounts... one containing £55,173 and the other £303,646" were frozen, pending a confiscation hearing in January 2008, and Shaun Greenhalgh was convicted for "conspiracy to conceal and transfer £410,392." Estimates of the amount of money the Greenhalghs actually made vary from £850,000 to £1.5 million.
The impact of their remaining forgeries on the market, however many there might be, cannot now be considered of immediate pertinence to the Greenhalghs. These items' worth may fall when they are exposed as forgeries, yet they may gain some cachet from their notoriety.
Olive claimed that she had "not even travelled outside of Bolton."
Because they did not show their wealth, explanations other than desire for money have been proposed. Police suggested that Shaun Greenhalgh was motivated less by profit than by resentment at his own lack of recognition as an artist. This "general hatred" became a need to "shame the art world" and "show them up".
On the other hand, defence lawyer Andrew Nutall characterized Shaun Greenhalgh as a shy, introverted person, obsessed with "one outlook and that was his garden shed". The forgeries were an attempt to "perfect the love he had for such arts". By implication, the forgeries were a mere unintended, if unfortunate, consequence.
Forty-four forgeries were discussed during the trial, and 120 were known to have been presented to various institutions. However, given the family's bank records only extended back for a third of the period they were operating, and Shaun Greenhalgh's high level of productivity, there are probably many more. On raiding the Greenhalgh home police discovered many raw materials and "scores of sculptures, paintings and artefacts, hidden in wardrobes, under their bed and in the garden shed." In fact, "there can be little doubt that there are a number of forgeries still circulating within the art market."
A description of known forgeries includes the following:
Arts and Antiquities Unit said "Looking at them now I'm not sure the items would fool anyone, it was the credibility of the provenances that went with them." Despite this claim the list of experts and institutions who were fooled is long, and includes the Tate Modern
, the British Museum
, the Henry Moore Institute
, and auction houses Bonhams
, Christies, Sothebys and other experts from "Leeds to Vienna." The Faun was displayed at the van Gogh Museum
in Amsterdam; while the Amarna Princess went on display at the South Bank Hayward Art Gallery, in an exhibition opened by the Queen
.
Other unnamed galleries, and various private collectors were fooled as well.
In fact, institutions proclaimed the works and their achievement in obtaining them. The Art Institute of Chicago described The Faun sculpture as a "major rediscovery" and included it in their "definitive" exhibition on Gauguin. Bolton Museum
hailed their purchase of the Amarna Princess as "a coup," calling George Greenhalgh "a nice old man who had no idea of the significance of what he owned."
After the trial, Bolton Museum scrambled to distance itself and described itself as "blameless" insisting that it had followed established procedure. The presiding judge, William Morris, exonerated the institution and any Council staff involved, preferring to focus on what he saw as "misapplied" talent and an "ambitious conspiracy;" while the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiquities Unit would only admit that Greenhalgh had succeeded "to a degree". However, the general public was notably more cynical in its reaction, being unimpressed by what they perceived as the experts' incompetence, and the law's heavy-handedness. Richard Falkiner, the antiquities expert from Bonhams said, "I took one look at the relief and said 'don't make me laugh'...It was an obvious fake. It was far too freshly cut, was made of the wrong stone and was stylistically wrong for the period."
Also included in the BBC article:
See as well:
The family have been described by Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
as "possibly the most diverse forgery team in the world, ever." However, when they attempted to sell three Assyria
Assyria
Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...
n reliefs using the same provenance
Provenance
Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...
as they had previously, suspicions were raised. Apprehended, Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to prison for four years and eight months in November 2007.
The Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's "works" from 23 January to 7 February 2010. The Metropolitan Police
Metropolitan Police Service
The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial police force responsible for Greater London, excluding the "square mile" of the City of London which is the responsibility of the City of London Police...
’s art and antiques unit built a replica model of the shed where the "works" were created and labelled Greenhalgh “the most diverse art forger known in history”. Many of his fakes, including the Amarna Princess
Amarna Princess
The Amarna Princess, sometimes referred to as the "Bolton Amarna Princess", is a statue forged by British art forger Shaun Greenhalgh and sold by his father to Bolton Museum for £440,000 in 2003. Based on the Amarna art-style of ancient Egypt, the purchase of the Amarna Princess was feted as a...
, Risley Park Lanx
Risley Park Lanx
The Risley Park Lanx is a large Roman silver dish that was discovered in 1729 in Risley Park, Derbyshire. Among the Romans a lanx was generally a large serving platter in size about 15 by 20 inches. Particularly ornamented ones were used to make offerings or sacrifices...
, Barbara Hepworth Goose and Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...
paintings were displayed.
Family roles
Shaun Greenhalgh was the artist, but the whole family was involved in "the garden shed gang". They established an elaborate cottage industry at his parents' house in The Crescent, Bromley CrossBromley Cross
Bromley Cross is a suburb of the unparished area of South Turton in the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, Greater Manchester, England. Historically a part of Lancashire, it lies on the southern edge of the West Pennine Moors....
, South Turton
South Turton
South Turton is an unparished area of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, in Greater Manchester, England. Historically a part of Lancashire, it lies on the southern slopes of the West Pennine Moors, and has a population of 25,067....
, which is about 3.5 miles (6 km) north of Bolton
Bolton
Bolton is a town in Greater Manchester, in the North West of England. Close to the West Pennine Moors, it is north west of the city of Manchester. Bolton is surrounded by several smaller towns and villages which together form the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, of which Bolton is the...
town centre. His parents, George and Olive, approached clients, while his older brother, George jnr, managed the money. Other members of the family were invoked to help establish the legitimacy of the various items. These included Olive's father who owned an art gallery, a great-grandfather who it seemed had had the foresight to buy well at auctions, and an ancestor who had apparently worked for the Mayor of Bolton as a cleaner and was gifted a Moran painting.
Shaun Greenhalgh left school at 16 with no qualifications. A self-taught artist, undoubtedly influenced by his job as an antiques
Antiques
An antique is an old collectible item. It is collected or desirable because of its age , beauty, rarity, condition, utility, personal emotional connection, and/or other unique features...
dealer, he worked up his forgeries from sketches, photographs, art books and catalogues. He attempted a wide range of crafts, from painting in pastels and watercolours, to sketches, and sculpture, both modern and ancient, busts and statues, to bas-relief and metalwork. He invested in a vast range of different materials - silver, stone, marble, rare stone, replica metal, and glass. He also did meticulous research to authenticate his items with histories and provenance (for instance, faking letters from the supposed artists) in order to demonstrate his ownership. Completed items were then stored about the house and garden shed. The latter probably served as a workshop as well.
A quote from an amazed Scotland Yard detective who searched the house gives a sense of Greenhalgh's industry:
A next-door neighbour recalled: "I was finding bits of pottery and coins around the edges of the garden over 20 years back - [things like] bits of metal with old kings on." While this sounds like materials were openly displayed, it was perhaps not quite that obvious. Angela Thomas, a curator from the Bolton Museum, actually visited the family at home prior to the purchase of the Amarna Princess and reported nothing untoward.
Yet for all his daring – he once boasted that he could knock up a Moran
Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...
watercolour in half an hour and claimed to have completed an Amarna
Amarna
Amarna is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city newly–established and built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten of the late Eighteenth Dynasty , and abandoned shortly afterwards...
statue in three weeks – Shaun Greenhalgh needed the help of his parents. At the trial it was said by the lawyer, Brian McKenna, that his mother, Olive (b.1925), made the phonecalls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."
Olive may have been a peripheral figure, but Shaun's father, George (b.1923), was more involved. He was the frontman who met face-to-face with potential buyers. "He looks honest, he's elderly and he shows up in a wheelchair." George clearly embraced his role. On one occasion, trying to interest the Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum is a public museum and art gallery in the town of Bolton, Greater Manchester, northern England, owned by Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council....
in an Amarna princess, an ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian statuette about the size of a gnome, he told them he was "thinking about using it as a garden ornament".
The parents were perhaps most important because they helped establish a logical explanation for why the Greenhalghs had possession of such items in the first place, namely as family heirlooms. It even allowed them to offload items when they were discovered as fakes, such as the "Eadred Reliquary
Eadred Reliquary
The so-called "Eadred Reliquary" was one of the wide-ranging art forgeries produced by Shaun Greenhalgh and his family, of Bolton, Greater Manchester...
", and an L. S. Lowry
L. S. Lowry
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist born in Barrett Street, Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years at 117 Station Road , opposite St...
painting The Meeting House.
The "Amarna Princess"
In 1999 the Greenhalghs began their most ambitious project yet. They bought an 1892 catalogue which listed the contents of an auction in SilvertonSilverton
Silverton has many uses:*Places:** United States*** Silverton, Colorado*** Silverton, New Jersey*** Silverton, Oregon*** Silverton, Ohio*** Silverton, Texas*** Silverton, Washington*** Silverton, Wyoming*** Silverton Township, Minnesota** Elsewhere...
Park, Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
, the home of the 4th Earl of Egremont
Earl of Egremont
Earls of Egremont was a title in the Peerage of Great Britain. It was created in 1749, along with the subsidiary title of Baron Cockermouth, for Algernon Seymour, 7th Duke of Somerset, with remainder to his nephews Sir Charles Wyndham, 4th Baronet, of Orchard Wyndham, and Percy Wyndham-O’Brien...
. Among the items listed were "eight Egyptian figures." Using the leeway this vague description allowed, Greenhalgh manufactured what became called the "Amarna Princess," a 20-inch statue, apparently made of a "stunning translucent alabaster, it later emerged within a Panorama documentary
Panorama (TV series)
Panorama is a BBC Television current affairs documentary programme, which was first broadcast in 1953, and is the longest-running public affairs television programme in the world. Panorama has been presented by many well known BBC presenters, including Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day, David Dimbleby...
that he had bought the tools to produce this 'masterpiece' from B&Q." Done in the Egyptian "Amarna period" style
Amarna art
The Ancient Egyptian art style known as Amarna Art was a style of art that was adopted in the Amarna Period , and is noticeably different from more conventional Egyptian art styles.It is characterized by a sense of movement and activity in images, with figures having raised heads, many figures...
of 1350 BC, the statue represents one of the daughters of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti
Nefertiti
Nefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for a religious revolution, in which they started to worship one god only...
, mother of Prince Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun , Egyptian , ; approx. 1341 BC – 1323 BC) was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...
. At the time, as Greenhalgh had researched, only two other similar statuettes were known to exist in the world. He "knocked up" his copy in his shed in three weeks out of calcite, "using basic DIY tools and making it look old by coating it in a mixture of tea and clay".
George then approached Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum is a public museum and art gallery in the town of Bolton, Greater Manchester, northern England, owned by Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council....
in 2002, claiming the Amarna was from his grandfather’s "forgotten collection", bought at the Silverton Park auction. He pretended to be ignorant about its true worth or value, but was careful to provide the letters Shaun had also faked, showing how the artefact had been in the family for "a hundred years".
In 2003, after consulting experts at the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
and Christie's
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
, the Bolton Museum bought the Amarna Princess for £439,767. It remained on display until February 2006.
How they were caught
Perhaps buoyed up by the fact that they had so successfully duped the experts the Greenhalghs tried again, using the same Silverton Park provenance. They produced what were purportedly three Assyrian reliefs of soldier and horses, from the Palace of SennacheribSennacherib
Sennacherib |Sîn]] has replaced brothers for me"; Aramaic: ) was the son of Sargon II, whom he succeeded on the throne of Assyria .-Rise to power:...
in 600 BC.
The British Museum examined them in November 2005, concluded that they were genuine, and expressed an interest in buying one of them, which seemed to match a drawing by A. H. Layard
Austen Henry Layard
Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB, PC was a British traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat, best known as the excavator of Nimrud.-Family:...
in its collection. However, when two of the reliefs were submitted to Bonhams
Bonhams
Bonhams is a privately owned British auction house founded in 1793. It is the third largest auctioneer after Sotheby's and Christie's, and conducts around 700 auctions per year. It has 700 employees....
auction house, its antiquities consultant Richard Falkiner spotted "an obvious fake". Bonhams consulted with the British Museum about various suspicious aspects, and the Museum then spotted several unlikely anomalies. The horses' reins were "not consistent" or "atypical" with respect to other Assyrian reliefs; and the cuneiform
Cuneiform
Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot*Cuneiform Records, a music record label...
inscription contained a spelling mistake, an absent diacritical mark, which was considered extremely unlikely in a piece "destined for the eyes of the king". These concerns became full blown suspicion when George seemed too willing to part with the items at a low price. The Museum contacted the Arts and Antiquities Unit of Scotland Yard, and eighteen months later the family was arrested.
Monies involved
Had the Greenhalghs managed to sell all 120 artworks they had offered it is estimated that they could have earned as much as £10m. This would have made the average value of each piece over £83,000, though in fact monies received varied between £100 (for the Eadred Reliquary) and £440,000 (for the Amarna Princess). However, this grand total figure is highly speculative, and a number of factors underlie its uncertainty.In the event the Greenhalghs did not manage to offload most of their works. Many they did sell, like the Eadred Reliquary, received only minimal amounts. Others, like the Lowry painting ,The Meeting House only gained in value from their repeated resale, which was not a reflection of the Greenhalghs, and of course would not have benefited them. As time went on, more ambitious, expensive pieces of work were produced, some of which did sell, like the Risley Park Lanx. However, these were subject to more scrutiny and indeed it was one of these, the Assyrian reliefs, which led to their being exposed and caught. This suggests the longevity of their scam was concentrated on the passing off of lower level items.
Balanced against this must be the success of sales to private individuals. They are unlikely to have had the same level of expertise at their disposal as institutions, and are probably less willing to advertise their losses once the forgeries were detected. Certainly they have not had the same exposure as the debacle surrounding the Bolton Museum, for example. Two individual buyers, "wealthy Americans" have been noticed, but only after they donated their purchase to the British Museum. Another piece sold to an un-named private buyer came to light when the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
announced that The Faun
The Faun
The Faun is a sculpture by British forger Shaun Greenhalgh. He successfully passed it off as a work by Paul Gauguin, selling it at Sotheby's for £20,700 in 1994. Three years later in 1997 it was bought by the Art Institute of Chicago for an undisclosed sum, thought to be about $125,000...
, a ceramic sculpture on display since 1997 as the work of the 19th-century French master Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
, was also a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh. The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer in London, who had bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1994.
In addition, the bank records of the Greenhalghs only went back six years, so in the final analysis the exact amount of monies involved over the seventeen year scam has not been determined. What is known is that "two Halifax accounts... one containing £55,173 and the other £303,646" were frozen, pending a confiscation hearing in January 2008, and Shaun Greenhalgh was convicted for "conspiracy to conceal and transfer £410,392." Estimates of the amount of money the Greenhalghs actually made vary from £850,000 to £1.5 million.
The impact of their remaining forgeries on the market, however many there might be, cannot now be considered of immediate pertinence to the Greenhalghs. These items' worth may fall when they are exposed as forgeries, yet they may gain some cachet from their notoriety.
Motivations
The Greenhalgh family did not appear to make much use of the money they gained. They lived a "far from lavish life" in a "shabby" council house; among their possessions were "an old TV, battered sofa, and a Ford Focus", but not a computer. According to Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, from the Met's Art and Antiques Unit, the conditions were "relatively frugal" even "abject poverty".Olive claimed that she had "not even travelled outside of Bolton."
Because they did not show their wealth, explanations other than desire for money have been proposed. Police suggested that Shaun Greenhalgh was motivated less by profit than by resentment at his own lack of recognition as an artist. This "general hatred" became a need to "shame the art world" and "show them up".
On the other hand, defence lawyer Andrew Nutall characterized Shaun Greenhalgh as a shy, introverted person, obsessed with "one outlook and that was his garden shed". The forgeries were an attempt to "perfect the love he had for such arts". By implication, the forgeries were a mere unintended, if unfortunate, consequence.
Known forgeries
A description of known forgeries includes the following:
- 1989. Eadred Reliquery. A small 10th century silver vessel, containing a relic of the true crossTrue CrossThe True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a Christian tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Jesus was crucified.According to post-Nicene historians, Socrates Scholasticus and others, the Empress Helena The True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a...
of Jerusalem. George Greenhalgh turned up "dripping wet" at Manchester UniversityUniversity of ManchesterThe University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...
, claiming he'd found it in a river terrace, at Preston. University determined vessel was a fake; but unsure about the wood. Purchased it for a £100. The subject of an academic thesis.
- 1990. Samuel PeploeSamuel PeploeSamuel John Peploe was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists...
still life painting, purportedly inherited from Olive's grandfather, sold for £20,000. However, paint began to flake off and buyer cancelled cheque. Scotland Yard failed to make an arrest at the time due to "organisational restraints."
- 1992. The Risley Park LanxRisley Park LanxThe Risley Park Lanx is a large Roman silver dish that was discovered in 1729 in Risley Park, Derbyshire. Among the Romans a lanx was generally a large serving platter in size about 15 by 20 inches. Particularly ornamented ones were used to make offerings or sacrifices...
A Roman silver plate bought for £100,000 by private buyers and donated to the British Museum, who displayed it as genuine replica.
- 1993 and 1994. Thomas MoranThomas MoranThomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...
sketch and watercolour acquired by Bolton Museum. "The former was a gift given by the Greenhalghs; the latter was purchased for £10,000."
- 1994. The FaunThe FaunThe Faun is a sculpture by British forger Shaun Greenhalgh. He successfully passed it off as a work by Paul Gauguin, selling it at Sotheby's for £20,700 in 1994. Three years later in 1997 it was bought by the Art Institute of Chicago for an undisclosed sum, thought to be about $125,000...
. A ceramic sculpture by Paul GauguinPaul GauguinEugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
. Authenticated by the Wildenstein InstituteDaniel WildensteinDaniel Leopold Wildenstein was a French art dealer and scholar, as well as a leading thoroughbred race horse owner and breeder....
, sold at Sothebys auction in 1994 for £20,700 to private London dealers, Howie & Pillar. Bought by the Art Institute of ChicagoArt Institute of ChicagoThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
in 1997 for $125,000. On display until October 2007.
- 1995. Anglo-Saxon ring. Tried to sell it through Phillips Auctioneers; determined by British Museum to be a fake.
- 1995. Twenty-four Thomas Moran sketches sold in New York. Possibly of landscapes of Yellowstone Park in the United States. Police believe up to 40, worth up to £10,000, were created by Greenhalgh, six or seven of which are unaccounted for. He claimed each one only took him thirty minutes to forge, and that a former mayor of Bolton had given them to an ancestor of his who worked for the mayor as a cleaner.
- L S Lowry. The Meeting House. A pastel, one of a "clutch of paintings" by Lowry. The Greenhalghs claimed it was a 21st birthday present by Olive's gallery owner father, and even that some were gifted by Lowry himself. They had copied letters from the artist, inserting their names in to make it look like they were great friends. For example, this letter dated 16 June 1946:
Dear George, Thank you very much for your recent letter and cheque for the paintings. I have about finished the [illegible] but I will hold onto it I am(?) ready. I will slip round to the yard on Wed. L S Lowry. Received 45.0.0 for paintings
One of the Lowrys, perhaps the one mentioned above, sold as a replica, for somewhere between "several hundred pounds" and £5,000. Eventually, put up for auction by new owners in Kent as genuine item, for £70,000.
- 1999. Two gold Roman ornaments. George Greenhalgh withdrew them from Christies when the auction house wanted to do a scientific analysis on them.
- Barbara HepworthBarbara HepworthDame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
goose sculpture. Only a photograph known to exist, before item lost in the late 1920s. The Greehalghs claimed it was gifted to the family "by the curator of a museum in Leeds" in the 1950s. Worth approximately £200,000 it was later sold to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for £3,000.
- Work by Otto DixOtto DixWilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
. Stolen from DresdenDresdenDresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
in 1939. Apparently recovered by the Greenhalghs then presented to the Tate GalleryTate GalleryThe Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
.
- Work by Brancusi.
- Work by Man RayMan RayMan Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
.
- Another Paul GauguinPaul GauguinEugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
, a vase.
- Ancient Celtic Fibula
- Horatio GreenoughHoratio GreenoughHoratio Greenough was an American sculptor best known for his United States government commissions The Rescue and George Washington .-Biography:...
. Bust of Thomas Jefferson, sold at Sotheby's for £48,000. And/or Thomas Chatterton Another bust of John Adam. Sold together at Sothebys for 160,000.
- Henry MooreHenry MooreHenry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
. A carved stone head by Henry Moore, which Greenhalgh Snr tried to convince the Tate Modern, London to buy, claiming to have got it via his grandmother.
- 2003 Amarna PrincessAmarna PrincessThe Amarna Princess, sometimes referred to as the "Bolton Amarna Princess", is a statue forged by British art forger Shaun Greenhalgh and sold by his father to Bolton Museum for £440,000 in 2003. Based on the Amarna art-style of ancient Egypt, the purchase of the Amarna Princess was feted as a...
, a statuette. In the family for "a hundred years." Authenticated by the British Museum and Sothebys, bought by Bolton Museum for £440,000, it was on display for three years. A police raid on the Greenhalgh home discovered two more copies.
- 2005. Three Assyrian marble reliefs from NinevehNinevehNineveh was an ancient Assyrian city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and capital of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq....
, including one of an eagle-headed genieGenieJinn or genies are supernatural creatures in Arab folklore and Islamic teachings that occupy a parallel world to that of mankind. Together, jinn, humans and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah. Religious sources say barely anything about them; however, the Qur'an mentions that...
and another of soldiers and horses. They were dated by the British Museum at around 681BC, supposedly from the Palace of Sennacherib, and thought to be worth around £250,000 to £300,000. But alerted by Bonhams, their discrepancies were revealed, and the forgery exposed.
Reactions
In the end, Greenhalgh's artistic ability was downplayed. Detective Sgt Rapley of the Metropolitan PoliceMetropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
Arts and Antiquities Unit said "Looking at them now I'm not sure the items would fool anyone, it was the credibility of the provenances that went with them." Despite this claim the list of experts and institutions who were fooled is long, and includes the Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
, the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, the Henry Moore Institute
Henry Moore Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation is a registered charity in England, established for education and promotion of the fine arts — in particular, to advance understanding of the works of Henry Moore. The charity was set up with a gift from the artist in 1977...
, and auction houses Bonhams
Bonhams
Bonhams is a privately owned British auction house founded in 1793. It is the third largest auctioneer after Sotheby's and Christie's, and conducts around 700 auctions per year. It has 700 employees....
, Christies, Sothebys and other experts from "Leeds to Vienna." The Faun was displayed at the van Gogh Museum
Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum is an art museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, featuring the works of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. It has the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world.-Background:...
in Amsterdam; while the Amarna Princess went on display at the South Bank Hayward Art Gallery, in an exhibition opened by the Queen
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth II is the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize,...
.
Other unnamed galleries, and various private collectors were fooled as well.
In fact, institutions proclaimed the works and their achievement in obtaining them. The Art Institute of Chicago described The Faun sculpture as a "major rediscovery" and included it in their "definitive" exhibition on Gauguin. Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum
Bolton Museum is a public museum and art gallery in the town of Bolton, Greater Manchester, northern England, owned by Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council....
hailed their purchase of the Amarna Princess as "a coup," calling George Greenhalgh "a nice old man who had no idea of the significance of what he owned."
After the trial, Bolton Museum scrambled to distance itself and described itself as "blameless" insisting that it had followed established procedure. The presiding judge, William Morris, exonerated the institution and any Council staff involved, preferring to focus on what he saw as "misapplied" talent and an "ambitious conspiracy;" while the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiquities Unit would only admit that Greenhalgh had succeeded "to a degree". However, the general public was notably more cynical in its reaction, being unimpressed by what they perceived as the experts' incompetence, and the law's heavy-handedness. Richard Falkiner, the antiquities expert from Bonhams said, "I took one look at the relief and said 'don't make me laugh'...It was an obvious fake. It was far too freshly cut, was made of the wrong stone and was stylistically wrong for the period."
"The Antiques Rogues Show"
On January 4, 2009, BBC2 broadcast a dramatisation of the Greenhalgh story called The Antiques Rogues Show, a play on the title of the popular BBC series Antiques Road Show, already used by headline writers. In a letter from prison to the Bolton News, Shaun Greenhalgh made a number of complaints about the depiction of himself and his family, calling the drama a "character assassination".Gallery
Pictures of the family can be found attached with most articles cited. The best source of images of the forgeries themselves is the BBC article. Those available include:- the Amarna Princess
- unspecified head of a statue
- Assyrian relief
- Risley Park Lanx
- Hepworth goose
- Moran painting of Yellowstone
- faked letter
- detail of Lowry painting, 'The Meeting House.'
Also included in the BBC article:
- the 1892 catalogue
- Shaun's toolkit
See as well: