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

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.