Shaun Greenhalgh — the garden-shed forger who fooled the British Museum

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.