Shaun Greenhalgh

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Shaun Greenhalgh (born June 21, 1960 in Bolton ) is a British painter, sculptor and art forger.

Over a period of 17 years, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of counterfeit sculptures, paintings and drawings, allegedly including a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci . He sold his counterfeits to art museums, auction houses and private individuals. The "flawless" provenance was provided by his parents George and Olive Greenhalgh, who were involved in the fraud. In 2007 Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to 4 years and 8 months in prison and his parents were released on probation because of their old age. In prison he wrote the book "A Forger's Tale" in which he a. a. claims to be the author of the drawing " La Bella Principessa ", which was examined by individual international Leonardo specialists, including Martin Kemp of Oxford University, as Leonardo's handwritten work. "La Bella Principessa" was auctioned at Christie's in New York in 1998 for $ 19,000.

Greenhalgh was extremely versatile as a forger. He forged paintings, drawings, watercolors and porcelain, was a sculptor, made sculptures from clay and cast antique objects and handicrafts from metal. The period of the forgeries extends from Egyptian (1350-1334 BC) and Assyrian art (approx. 700 BC) through the Renaissance to classical modernism with forgeries by Brancusi , Degas , Otto Dix , Barbara Hepworth , Paul Gauguin , Thomas Moran , Samuel Peploe , Man Ray and contemporary art in the case of LS Lowrey . With a few exceptions, Greenhalgh did not forge any signatures , and attributions were made by experts.

From January 23 to February 7, 2012 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London showed a selection of his forgeries in an exhibition. The exhibition was presented by the Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Unit .

Life

Shaun Greenhalgh was born in 1960 as the sixth of seven children to George and Olive Greenhalgh. The family lived in Bolton in a communal apartment and in modest circumstances. He attended Eagley Junior School in Bolton and the Turton Comprehensive School in Bromley Cross, Greater Manchester , which he left at the age of 16. As he writes in his book, he has been a remarkably good draftsman since childhood, and according to his statements, his drawing skills have not improved since he was 11 years old. Except in school, he never had any art lessons. He is self-taught . He gained his knowledge of art and art history from books, auction catalogs and on his regular visits to the Bolton Museum, the Museum Library and the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. As a teenager he made his first trip to Rome, where, in addition to St. Peter's Basilica, he mainly visited frescoes and pictures by Renaissance artists, Raphael's rooms and saw sculptures by Giambologna and Bernini in their original size for the first time . The year he left school, he exhibited some work at a local art exhibition. The Mayor of Bolton bought a watercolor for £ 20 and asked him to copy his Ruskin paintings as he wanted to keep the originals in the safe. The copies made him £ 400. Encouraged by his success, he drew six Degas- style sketches , signed them and sent photographs to Christie's in London. Christie's invited him to appraise the drawings and then put them up for auction, where they sold for £ 10,000.

At the John Rylands Library, Greenhalgh had made friends with a young library worker. Financed by the proceeds from the Degas forgeries, he took her on an extensive art trip to Italy and visited Florence, Borgo San Lorenzo and Carrara. Shortly after her return from Italy, his girlfriend died of a tumor. After her death, he used the remaining money to travel to Greece, Egypt and Spain and made seven trips to Rome. He earned his living in a Bolton supermarket. He later took a job with a restorer . On the weekends he was allowed to use the workshop himself, began to produce artifacts, later also to order from a dealer, and found that his work was available as “originals”, with provenance , signatures, stamps, etc., in the open art trade arrived. The workshop he worked in also accepted restoration work from London museums. Here he learned, as he writes in his book, "what the experts pay attention to".

After having worked for the dealer for a long time, he produced an oil painting in the manner of the Scottish painter Samuel Peploe . The father offered it to London gallerist Peter Nahum along with a coherent story of origin and was able to sell it for around £ 20,000. Since Nahum had doubts about the authenticity of the picture, he informed the Art and Antiques department of Scotland Yard , but the clue was nowhere. With the active support of his father, who procured the appropriate provenances, he worked professionally as an art forger from that point on.

In early 2006, however, suspicions among the relevant police authorities had piled up, and museum staff had doubts about the amount of valuable works of art that were coming from the Bolton area. The decisive factor in uncovering the forgery workshop was ultimately an “Assyrian” relief that Greenhalgh had presented to the British Museum for inspection. The curator in charge noticed errors in the cuneiform script and informed Scotland Yard . On March 15, 2006, officers from the Serious Organized Crime Unit at Scotland Yard searched the house and garden in anticipation of a highly armed gang of counterfeiters, packed papers and documents in a police van and, as Greenhalgh describes it, left a mess. He then decided not to make any statements. The raids were repeated and valuable tools that were never found disappeared during the search. In November 2007, he and his parents were brought before the examining magistrate.

Pipe bowl with the portrait of Gladstone , 1850/1900 (The Portable Antiquities Scheme)

Works for the antique market and the art trade

Greenhalgh was already producing objects for the local antique market during his school days. " Victorian " pipe bowls , e.g. B. were shaped as portraits of politicians and glazed pot lids made of ceramic, also "Victorian", which he subjected to an artificial aging process, and for which there was a collector's market at the time, helped him to earn a good income, with which he spent his trips to the museum, was able to finance the purchase of art books, materials and tools.

Shaun Greenhalgh: The Faun

In 1994 his sculpture The Faun was sold as an autograph work by Paul Gauguin at Sotheby’s to art dealers Howie & Pillar for £ 20,700. In 1997 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the Faun for an undisclosed sum, with speculation about the price of $ 125,000. The Art Institute described it as “one of the most important acquisitions of the last 20 years”. The Faun was shown in the museum for 10 years, and it was one of the attractions of the Gauguin exhibition in 2002 at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam . It was only during the trial against Greenhalgh that it emerged that the Faun was a fake. In October 2007 the museum removed the figure from the exhibition and filed a claim for damages, both with Sotheby's and with the seller who put the figure up for auction.

One of his most spectacular fakes was a torso of alabaster , which he modeled after a character in the 1999 Amarna period , which is in the collection of the Louvre, anfertigte. Experts identified her as a portrait of Tutankhamun's granddaughter . In 2003, the Bolton Museum bought the statue for £ 440,000 after both Christie's and the British Museums confirmed the figure's age (3,300 years) and authenticity.

In the course of the process, 44 forgeries were identified and discussed, and the location of 120 other objects is known. How many forgeries are also in private hands or in public collections or in the art trade remains unknown to date.

Workshop and sales

A shed in the garden of the house served as a workshop, while the garden itself developed into a material store. Greenhalgh deposited promising material from demolition villas there, such as B. rare white and red marble, porphyry, limestone and sandstone, metals and all kinds of woods that he intended to use for his work. In addition to bookshelves and stacks of books, the shed itself contained his tools, including stonemasonry tools that had long been in the family's possession, as well as modern tools from the hardware store. He also deposited all sorts of materials there that he had found at the second-hand dealer, such as parchment, old papers, frames or other useful items that came from local auctions. He had constructed equipment for making paper because he was gradually running out of original paper for old master drawings or watercolors from the 19th century. He melted metal for smaller objects in an old-fashioned little furnace. He did larger stone carving work in demolished houses, to which he had access through his sporadic work for a building contractor.

At what point in time the father became aware of the fact and the extent of the falsifications of his son, was also unclear during the process. At the latest, however, with the successful sale of the Peploe fake to the London gallery, George Greenhalgh took over the distribution and was instrumental in creating legends that fit the objects. One of his main sources was an auction directory taken from an 1892 Silverton Park auction that his grandfather was said to have been a buyer. The fuzzy, summary descriptions in the directory were used, among other things. a. as evidence of the authenticity of the Amara princess. Another source of provenance was the estate of a relative of Olive Greenhalgh who was an antique dealer. In principle, all works of art that emerged from Greenhalgh's workshop and were shown to experts had credible provenances. For example, only after a photograph of a goose figure by Barbara Hepworth , which is considered lost, he made a clay goose that was certified as genuine by the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and purchased for £ 3,000. George Greenhalgh Jr. has been involved in financial transactions.

Art market

The Amarna Princess, valued at £ 1,000,000 as a fake prior to its discovery, was sold at a local auction in November 2014 for £ 500, which the auctioneer believed was well below value. A majolica piece fetched £ 190 and another ceramic object £ 800.

On November 22nd, 2017, three pictures of Greenhalgh in the style of LS Lowry were auctioned by the Schlosser art auction house in Bolton. The pictures are dated, signed “SG” and “Shaun Greenhalgh after LS Lowry” on the back. The hammer price for the three works was between £ 5,100 and £ 5,700. In 2016 the comparable painting “The Beer Seller” by Shaun Greenhalgh after LS Lowry reached a price of £ 1,300 with an estimate of £ 500–800.

Movie

  • In 2009, the BBC broadcast a film about the Greenhalghs' counterfeiting factory called "The Antiques Rogue Show".
  • The Artful Codgers . Documentary. Director: Nick Hornby , Producer: Amy Flanagan. Aired on BBC Four on June 11, 2015

literature

  • together with Waldemar Januszczak: A Forger's Tale . Limited first edition. ZCZ 2015. ISBN 978-0-99346480-5
  • Shaun Greenhalgh: A Forger's Tale. Confessions of the Bolton Forger . London: Atlantic Books 2017. ISBN 978-1-76029-527-1
This edition contains a postscript in which Greenhalgh describes in detail and meticulous the production process of the drawing La Bella Principessa , which he created in 1978 and sold to a dealer in Harrowgate for little money that same year.
  • Noah Charney: The Art of Forgery. The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers . London: Phaidon 2015. ISBN 978-0-7148-6745-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Shaun Greenhalgh: A Forger's Tale. Confessions of the Bolton Forger . Atlantic Books, London 2017. Foreword by S. Greenhalgh p. 9.
  2. ↑ 5 Things to Know About Britain's Most Notorious Art Forger artnet news, 1. Retrieved November 20, 2017
  3. ↑ Stefan Simons: Dispute over Leonardo artwork Der 100-Million-Euro-Code Spiegel Online, October 22, 2011, accessed on November 18, 2017
  4. ↑ BBC news , accessed November 26, 2017.
  5. ↑ Shaun Greenhalgh: A Forger's Tale. London 2017. p. 83.
  6. ↑ The Bolton News July 24, 2017, accessed November 22, 2017
  7. ↑ I wasn't cock-a-hoop that I'd fooled the experts': Britain's master forger tells all The Guardian, May 27, 2017, accessed November 23, 2017
  8. ↑ Tom Hundley: A Masterpiece of Deception Chicago Tribune, February 11, 2008, accessed November 24, 2017
  9. ↑ David Pallister: The Antiques Rogue Show The Guardian, January 28, 2008, accessed November 24, 2017
  10. ↑ Shaun Greenhalgh: A Forger's Tale. 2017. pp. 15–21.
  11. ↑ Shaun Greenhalgh: A Forger's Tale. 2017. p. 28.
  12. ↑ Greenhalgh: A Forgers's Tale. 2017. p. 91, accessed December 8, 2017
  13. ↑ Marik Brown: Made in a Bolton shed - the fake Gauguin sold for $ 125,000 The Guardian, December 13, 2007, accessed December 6, 2017
  14. ↑ . "Revealed: Art Institute of Chicago Gauguin sculpture is fake" . The Art Newspaper . December 12, 2007, accessed December 8, 2017.
  15. ^ The Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute's Statement regarding Paul Gauguin's The Faun. 2007.
  16. ↑ Fake statue Amarna Princess returns to Bolton Museum BBC, accessed November 24, 2017
  17. ↑ Cahal Milmo: Family of forgers fooled art world with array of finely crafted fakes.Retrieved December 8, 2017
  18. ^ Neil Robertson: Amarna Princess replica sells for just £ 500, The Westmoreland Gazette, November 25, 2014, accessed December 10, 2017
  19. ↑ Master forger Shaun Greenhalgh who conned council out of £ 400,000 sells 'Lowry' artworks - this time legally! The Bolton News, November 22, 2017, accessed November 23, 2017
  20. ^ Antiques Trades Gazette February 10, 2017, accessed November 22, 2017
  21. ↑ IMDb
  22. ↑ BBC Four , accessed April 4, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Greenhalgh, Shaun
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter, sculptor and art forger
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Bolton