Between roughly 1946 and 1967, the Hungarian-born painter Elmyr de Hory — born Elemér Albert Hoffmann in Budapest in 1906 — flooded the international art market with what he claimed were more than a thousand forged drawings and paintings in the manner of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir, Derain and Dufy. He did not copy existing works; he invented new ones in each master’s hand, producing them at extraordinary speed and selling them to reputable galleries and dealers across Europe and the United States. His Modigliani drawings were so numerous and so convincing that they continue to complicate efforts to catalogue that artist’s genuine output.
De Hory’s method married fluent imitation to a sympathetic backstory and, eventually, a professional sales machine. He presented himself as a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat quietly selling off a family collection scattered by war — a narrative that explained both the steady supply of “old” works and his own genteel poverty. From 1959 he worked with the dealers Fernand Legros and Réal Lessard, who moved his output across five continents, co-opted authenticating experts, and forged the certificates and stamps that turned a convincing sketch into a saleable asset. The forgeries flourished because the supporting paperwork and the salesmen’s theatre supplied everything the eye alone could not.
The exposure, when it came, ran through the buyers rather than the pictures. In 1967 the Texas oil millionaire Algur H. Meadows discovered that a large group of modern paintings he had bought through Legros were fakes; experts examining the collection condemned dozens of them, and the scandal pulled the thread that led back through Legros to de Hory. The forger was never convicted of forgery: he had created no fakes on Spanish soil, where he lived, and in 1968 an Ibiza court jailed him only briefly on unrelated charges. His celebrity was sealed by Clifford Irving’s 1969 biography Fake! and Orson Welles’s 1973 film F for Fake.
De Hory’s end was as ambiguous as his attributions. On 11 December 1976, told that Spain had agreed to extradite him to France to face fraud charges, he took an overdose of sleeping pills at his home on Ibiza and died. He left behind an unknowable number of pictures still hanging as genuine and a permanent uncertainty in the modern-art market — the rare forger whose greatest legacy is doubt itself.
For about 17 years, from 1989 until 2006, Shaun Greenhalgh — born in Bromley Cross near Bolton in 1961 — produced an extraordinary range of forgeries from a garden shed at the family home, while his elderly parents, George and Olive, fronted the sales. Working alone and self-taught, he faked objects across millennia and media: an “ancient Egyptian” statuette, “Roman” silver, an “Assyrian” relief, a “Gauguin” ceramic, watercolours attributed to Thomas Moran, sculptures in the manner of Barbara Hepworth, and more. Scotland Yard later called the operation possibly the most diverse forgery team ever encountered. Estimates of the family’s earnings range from around £850,000 to well over a million pounds; had everything they offered sold, the figure could have reached the millions.
The most celebrated fake was the Amarna Princess, a 52-centimetre calcite statuette Shaun carved in about three weeks in 1999 and aged with a wash of tea and clay. Marketed as a 3,300-year-old likeness of a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, it was endorsed by the British Museum and valued by Christie’s at around £500,000, and in 2003 Bolton Museum bought it for £439,767. The deception turned almost entirely on provenance: George Greenhalgh claimed the piece had descended through the family from a documented 1892 country-house auction at Silverton Park. A plausible Victorian paper trail, not the carving, persuaded the institutions to fund the purchase.
The family’s downfall was a small scholarly slip on an over-ambitious fake. In 2005 they offered the British Museum three “Assyrian” stone reliefs, purportedly from the palace of Sennacherib. Experts there, among them the curator John Curtis, noticed details that did not fit — anomalous detailing in the carving and, decisively, an error in the cuneiform inscription, the kind of spelling mistake unthinkable in a work made for an Assyrian king. The British Museum alerted Scotland Yard, whose Art and Antiquities Unit traced a string of suspect objects back to the Greenhalghs.
A police raid uncovered tools, half-finished fakes, research materials and further copies of the Amarna Princess. In November 2007, at Bolton Crown Court, the three defendants were dealt with for conspiracy to defraud and money laundering: Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison; his father George received a suspended term in light of his age and infirmity, and his mother Olive a suspended sentence. The case remains the definitive demonstration that, against a credible provenance, even national museums can be persuaded to authenticate an object made with hardware-store tools in a suburban shed.
Tom Keating was an English picture restorer who, working out of London and Suffolk from roughly the early 1950s until his exposure in 1976, claimed to have produced some 2,000 forgeries in the manner of more than a hundred different artists — pictures he nicknamed “Sexton Blakes,” Cockney rhyming slang for “fakes.” Unlike forgers who chased a single lucrative master, Keating ranged across Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Renoir, Constable and many more, and he insisted he had built into many of them deliberate “time bombs”: flaws meant to betray the work as false once anyone looked closely enough. He never produced an accounting, and the true number remains his own unverifiable estimate, but enough genuine fakes surfaced to confirm a career of industrial scale.
The deception came apart not in a laboratory but in a newspaper office. In July 1976 Geraldine Norman, the sale-room correspondent of The Times, published the first of a series of articles questioning a cluster of recently surfaced works attributed to the early-nineteenth-century visionary Samuel Palmer. Thirteen previously unknown “Palmers” had reached the market over the preceding decade, and several — including a drawing of Sepham Barn — traced back to a single seller, Jane Kelly, Keating’s former partner and apprentice. Rather than fight the allegation, Keating wrote to The Times and admitted that he was the author of the fakes, recasting the confession as a political act against a corrupt art trade.
Keating and Kelly were charged with conspiracy to defraud, and in 1979 they stood trial at the Old Bailey — the first art-fraud case ever heard there. Kelly pleaded guilty and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence; Keating, his health already broken by years of breathing solvent fumes and by heavy smoking, collapsed in the witness box, and the prosecution was abandoned on medical grounds. He never served a day. He died of a heart attack on 12 February 1984, aged 66, having spent his final years as an unlikely television celebrity teaching the techniques of the Old Masters to a national audience.
The case endures less as a story of technical wizardry than as a study in how a sympathetic narrative can disarm scrutiny. Keating’s “time bombs” — messages in lead white legible only under X-ray, anachronistic modern pigments, a layer of glycerine that would dissolve the picture the moment a restorer cleaned it — were offered as proof that he had never truly meant to deceive. In practice they were rarely found until he confessed, because no one in the chain of dealers and buyers was looking. The deception worked not because the fakes were undetectable but because the market had no incentive to detect them.
Eric Hebborn was an English painter and draughtsman who, from the early 1960s until his death in 1996, produced what he claimed were more than a thousand forged old-master drawings — sheets in the manner of Mantegna, Van Dyck, Piranesi, Castiglione, Corot and many others — good enough to be bought and sold by the most respected dealers and museums in the world. Trained at the Royal Academy Schools and the recipient of the British Prix de Rome in engraving in 1959, Hebborn possessed exactly the skills a forger of master drawings needs: a deep technical command of line and an intimate knowledge, gained as a restorer, of how old paper, ink and chalk behave. He sold many of his drawings through the venerable London dealer P. & D. Colnaghi, from where they passed into distinguished collections, including a “Van Dyck” preparatory study bought by the British Museum.
The first crack appeared in 1978, when Konrad Oberhuber, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, examined two drawings he had acquired through Colnaghi — one attributed to Francesco del Cossa, the other to Sperandio — and noticed they had been drawn on the same paper. Two artists of different generations could not have used a single identical sheet; the match meant at least one, and probably both, were modern fakes. Oberhuber alerted colleagues, a related “Cossa” surfaced at the Morgan Library having passed through several experts, and the trail led back through Colnaghi to Hebborn as the common source. Colnaghi, fearing libel, did not publicly name him.
Hebborn was not formally unmasked so much as he stepped forward. From 1984 he began publicly admitting his forgeries, using the attention to attack an art establishment he held in contempt for valuing names and labels over the quality of the work itself. He elaborated the boast in his 1991 autobiography Drawn to Trouble and, most provocatively, in The Art Forger’s Handbook, a how-to manual for deceiving experts. He was never convicted of any forgery offence. On 8 January 1996, days after the Italian edition of the Handbook appeared, he was found in a street in Rome with severe head injuries, apparently from a blunt instrument; he died three days later, on 11 January, aged 61. The killing has never been solved.
The Hebborn case is the purest demonstration of a forger exploiting the gap between an attribution and the object. His drawings were judged less on their own merits than on the names attached to them and the prestige of the dealer offering them, and because old-master drawings are sparsely documented and stylistically various, a skilled new “discovery” could slot into the canon without contradicting anything. The discipline of connoisseurship, which prides itself on the trained eye, was defeated for years by a man who knew exactly what that eye wanted to see.
In 1985 the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, bought a 2.06-metre marble statue of a standing nude youth — a kouros, in the rigid frontal pose of Archaic Greek sculpture — for a sum reported at roughly $9.5 million, and put it on view in October 1986 labelled as Greek work of about 530 B.C. The statue had been offered to the museum’s antiquities curator, Jiří Frel, by the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina in September 1983, accompanied by letters tracing it to a Swiss collection assembled decades earlier. From the moment it surfaced, the object divided the people paid to know: some saw an extraordinarily rare, intact early masterpiece, and others saw a forgery good enough to embarrass the discipline.
Unlike most cases in this archive, the Getty kouros has no confession, no conviction, and no single decisive test. What it has instead is a documentary collapse and a scientific stalemate. The provenance letters that vouched for the statue’s history were exposed as fakes — one cited a postal code that did not exist until 1972 and a bank account not opened until 1963, anachronisms in papers supposedly written in the 1950s. Yet the marble itself resisted a verdict. A surface phenomenon that geologists first believed could only form over centuries, de-dolomitization, was later shown to be reproducible artificially in a laboratory, which removed the strongest argument for authenticity without proving the statue false.
The case became the field’s most honest monument to uncertainty. In May 1992 the Getty shipped the kouros to Athens for an international colloquium where nineteen invited experts — scientists and connoisseurs — examined it together and failed to reach consensus. For years the museum displayed it under a label that stated the impasse outright: “Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.” In 2018, during a reinstallation of the Getty Villa galleries, the statue was taken off public view and moved to storage, viewable only by appointment, where it has remained. The Getty has never formally declared it genuine or fake.
The Getty kouros earns its place here not as a deception that was caught but as one that exposed the limits of catching. The forged paperwork showed that someone had lied about where the object came from; the inconclusive science showed that lying about the paper does not, by itself, settle what the object is. It is the rare entry whose verdict is permanent doubt — a reminder that “we proved it real” and “we proved it fake” are not the only two outcomes a careful inquiry can produce.
Between 1915 and 1918 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired three monumental terracotta statues said to be ancient Etruscan warriors, and from 1933 it exhibited them as treasures of its antiquities collection. They were forgeries, made in the Italian countryside in the early twentieth century by a family of skilled potters and sold into the antiquities trade. The deception held for roughly a quarter-century of public display and was settled in 1961 by two converging proofs: a chemical analysis of the glaze that no ancient maker could have produced, and a signed confession from the last surviving forger, who handed over a thumb he had kept as a souvenir.
The three pieces were a so-called “Old Warrior,” acquired around 1915–16 and missing its left thumb and right arm; a “Colossal Head,” acquired in 1916, so large that scholars imagined it belonged to a statue some seven metres tall; and a “Big Warrior,” standing over two metres, acquired by 1918. They were purchased through the Met’s Rome-based agent John Marshall and championed inside the museum by the eminent classical curator Gisela Richter, who published them in a 1937 monograph and described them as still resplendent in their original colours. Their scale and apparent state of preservation, rather than triggering suspicion, were read as marks of an extraordinary find.
Doubts circulated for years, but the case broke in 1960–61. The Met’s operating administrator and ceramics specialist Joseph V. Noble, reconstructing how Etruscan black glaze was actually fired, had the statues’ glaze analysed and found it contained manganese — a colourant the ancient Etruscans did not use. The technical evidence pointed unmistakably to modern manufacture. In Rome, the dealer-investigator Harold Parsons tracked down Alfredo Fioravanti, who on 5 January 1961 signed a deposition before the American consul admitting he had helped make the warriors, and produced the Old Warrior’s missing left thumb, which fit the hand exactly. The Met publicly announced the forgeries in February 1961 and removed the statues from view.
The warriors are a case study in how scale and beauty can suppress scrutiny. The forgers solved a hard physical problem — kilns too small to fire a giant figure — by building each statue in sections, deliberately breaking it, firing the fragments, and reassembling it as a “restored” antiquity, turning the very brokenness that should have raised questions into a credential of age. For decades the museum’s confidence, its curator’s investment, and the public’s wonder all reinforced a conclusion that a single glaze test and one honest confession finally overturned.
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.