The Spanish Forger — a faker so prolific his fakes became collectible

Summary

In 1930 Belle da Costa Greene, the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, examined a panel painting being offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a fifteenth-century Spanish work by the painter Jorge Inglés, found it false, and in rejecting it gave its anonymous maker the name by which he is still known: the Spanish Forger. The label was a useful error. The forger was almost certainly not Spanish and not medieval; the evidence points instead to an artist working in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. But the name stuck, and the body of work Greene began to assemble under it grew into one of the largest and most successful forgery oeuvres ever identified — by later estimates several hundred panel paintings and manuscript miniatures, scattered through public and private collections across Europe and America.

The Spanish Forger's genius was material and psychological at once. He worked almost exclusively on genuine medieval supports — authentic parchment leaves and old wood panels — scraping away original text or paint and painting his own "medieval" scenes onto surfaces that were themselves centuries old. Because an illustrated leaf was worth far more than a plain one, he often "completed" real but unfinished medieval manuscripts, adding miniatures and figures that buyers were delighted to find. The carrier was real, the age of the material was real, and only the image was modern, which defeated the simplest test a buyer might apply.

What he could not fake was chemistry and taste. His pictures carried pigments that did not exist in the Middle Ages: scientific analysis of his works, including neutron activation study of the panel Greene rejected, found colourants such as copper-arsenite greens unavailable before the nineteenth century, and later spectroscopic work identified synthetic ultramarine and other modern compounds. His style betrayed him too. His charming, decorative scenes were full of tells no genuine medieval illuminator would have produced — women with pronounced décolletage, sweetly tilted heads, gold leaf laid over the colours rather than beneath them, and pretty images cheerfully mismatched to the religious texts around them.

Greene's identification did not end the forger's afterlife so much as transform it. She and later scholars, above all William Voelkle of the Morgan Library, spent decades cataloguing the oeuvre, which grew from a handful of suspect pieces to well over two hundred and, by recent counts, around three hundred and fifty images. The forger's true identity has never been established — his nationality, dates, and even gender remain unknown — yet his work is now so recognizable, and so admired as craft, that genuine "Spanish Forgers" are themselves collected and sold as a named category. He is the rare faker exposed so thoroughly that his fakes acquired a market of their own.

Timeline

The carrier was real; only the picture was a lie

Most forgers must fake everything at once — the support, the age, the image — and every faked element is a chance to be caught. The Spanish Forger removed the hardest part of the problem by starting with genuine antiquity. He acquired real medieval parchment leaves and old wood panels, sometimes scraping off original writing or images, sometimes exploiting blank margins and unfinished spaces, and painted his scenes directly onto material that was authentically four, five, or six centuries old. A collector who examined the leaf's parchment, its wear, its medieval neighbours in a manuscript, found nothing wrong, because nothing about the carrier was wrong.

He sharpened the trick by going where the money was. An illuminated medieval leaf commanded a far higher price than a plain text leaf, so the forger sought out real but unillustrated or partly finished manuscripts and supplied the missing pictures, turning modest genuine books into apparently lavish ones. The buyer was not handed an obvious novelty to be suspicious of; he was handed a real old manuscript that happened to contain delightful illuminations, and the delight did the persuading. This is the deception's core mechanism: by faking only the most desirable and least testable component, and attaching it to an unimpeachable host, the forger let the genuineness of the parchment vouch for the fraudulence of the paint.

What chemistry and taste could not hide

The forger could borrow medieval material, but he could not borrow medieval chemistry, and the pigments are where his work fails absolutely. The panel Greene rejected was later subjected to neutron activation analysis, which found copper-arsenite green — a colour not available before the early nineteenth century — in a picture purporting to be from the fifteenth. Subsequent spectroscopic studies of other attributed works identified further anachronisms, including synthetic ultramarine and other compounds manufactured only in the modern era. No amount of authentic parchment can survive a colour that was invented four centuries after the date claimed; the materials simply place the painting in its true century.

His style was the second betrayal, and it is the one that lets connoisseurs spot a Spanish Forger across a room. His scenes are too pretty, too uniform, too modern in their sense of charm. His women have rounded, doll-like faces and conspicuous décolletage that no genuine medieval illuminator would have painted; his figures incline their heads with a sentimental sweetness foreign to the period; he laid gold leaf on top of his pigments rather than underneath, reversing medieval workshop practice; and he cheerfully attached secular, decorative imagery to religious texts whose meaning he ignored, producing mismatches a real scribe-and-illuminator team would never have allowed. He had, it emerged, drawn his compositions from nineteenth-century picture-books of medieval life rather than from medieval art itself, which is why his Middle Ages look like a Victorian's fond idea of them.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Spanish Forger occupies a singular place in the literature of forgery: an anonymous faker so prolific and so consistent that his exposure created, rather than destroyed, a recognized category of object. Belle da Costa Greene's naming and the Morgan Library's long campaign of attribution — culminating in William Voelkle's catalogue — turned a diffuse contamination of the market into a documented oeuvre that curators and dealers can now identify and label with confidence. The case is a standard teaching example of how the same forger can be tracked across hundreds of works by combining stylistic analysis with materials science, and of how authenticating a support is not the same as authenticating an image painted on it.

The works themselves have undergone a strange rehabilitation. No longer passed as medieval, they are collected, exhibited, and sold openly as "Spanish Forgers," admired as accomplished craft and as historical artifacts of the early-twentieth-century medievalist market. Museums that were once deceived now hold them as named forgeries, and they change hands for substantial sums. The forger's identity, however, has never been recovered, leaving the field with the rare result of a thoroughly exposed deception whose author remains permanently unknown — caught entirely through his work, and never once through himself.

Lessons

References

• Spanish Forger WIKIPEDIA
• Manuscript Road Trip: The Spanish Forger MANUSCRIPT ROAD TRIP
• In Pursuit of the Elusive Spanish Forger LITERARY HUB
• Medieval Fakery: Two "Masterpieces" by the Spanish Forger, c. 1900 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY (STERN CENTER)