Shaun Greenhalgh: Failed Artist, Successful Forger

by Read Listen Learn

A con man is a specialist criminal and an art forger is a specialist con man. Instead of using charm and psychological tricks, he uses brushes and palettes. Almost all art forgers are men.

The forging of art takes two main forms. The first is that a painter  of high technical ability makes a perfect copy of a well-known work of art and sells it to an unsuspecting customer. Even the original artist’s  signature will be forged and different techniques are used to  make the recent forgery look much older. These exact copies of a known work of art are sometimes used in a fraud  known as the ‘bait and switch’, in which a genuine work of  art is offered for sale. The expert examines it and finds  it to be absolutely authentic but, at the very last moment, as the painting  and the money are changing hands, the sellers switch the genuine  work for the exact copy. Now, the criminals can make another copy and play the same trick again in another city.

The other common form of forgery  is a painting or sculpture in the style of a famous artist  and seeming to date from his time. The trick is to have the experts  think that this is a lost or previously unknown work by that artist. These types of forgeries are usually left unsigned because this means a lesser criminal  charge if it becomes a police matter and, also, the absence of a signature  may help to explain to the experts why the work has remained  undiscovered all these years.

Normally, forgers work alone with  perhaps just a con man business partner to handle sales. But, in recent years, in England, the home of a modest, even poor,  family became a workshop for forged art and antiquities which fooled all the experts. The whole family took part,  performing different roles but it was the younger son, Shaun Greenhalgh, who was the artist and master copyist.

Born in 1961 near Bolton, Shaun was quite a talented artist who, despite his poor family  background, went to art college. But, recognition never came and it may have been his resentment  of this rejection by the critics that led him to start his expert  forging business around 1989. He did much of his work in the garden shed so he and his family got the  nickname the ‘Garden Shed Gang’.

While Shaun quickly turned out  water colours by English artist, Thomas Moran, and antiquities from Ancient Egypt, his family took care of the business side. His mother made all the phone calls and his father would often be  the one to meet the clients, or perhaps victims, in person. George Junior, Shaun’s brother, handled the money. But the family involvement didn’t stop there. Uncles and grandparents provided cover stories to go with paintings and other works. One relative of Shaun’s might claim to  have picked up an undiscovered painting or antique at an auction in  1962 and kept it ever since. Another might say he had received  an antiquity as a personal gift from a rich local businessman years ago. The businessman would already be dead. This establishing of credible  stories for the forgeries was a key element in the operation and  was largely handled by Shaun’s parents, George Senior and Olive.

For more than ten years, they  continued undiscovered until, in 2005, they went a little too far. Shaun had produced an ancient  Egyptian statuette, about 20cm high, and his parents had produced a series  of forged letters and documents designed to show that it had  been in the family for years. All went smoothly and the piece  was bought by a Bolton museum for the tidy sum of four hundred  and forty thousand pounds.

Now bolder and more ambitious, Shaun went on to forge a much  larger and more complex antiquity; or three, to be exact. These were three Assyrian  reliefs, large and detailed. And, it was the detail that was Shaun’s undoing.

At first, the reliefs got past  the experts at the British Museum who even expressed an interest  in buying one of them. However, at a large private auction house, the expert quickly detected some serious problems with the reported Assyrian reliefs. The reins on the horses were wrong for the period and the ancient inscriptions in cuneiform had a couple of somewhat  unlikely spelling mistakes.

The police were alerted and began  to investigate the Greenhalghs. Eighteen months later, the family was arrested and charged with various crimes. Shaun received a prison sentence of just  under five years for his activities; other family members received shorter sentences according to their involvement in the crimes. Shaun was released in 2010. He now sells ‘forgeries’ that  everyone knows are forged and a few of his own original  works which now, ironically, are popular and expensive.

The family were still living in  poor conditions in rented housing when they were arrested. Money really doesn’t seem to have  been the Greenhalghs’ main motivation. Rather, they resented the  art world and the critics who had failed to recognise  Shaun’s artistic genius. Much of what he and the rest of the family did was to make the experts look and feel stupid.

Annoyed by admiration for Shaun’s  talent as a forger among artists and the wider public, the police  decided to spread the idea that the works were amateurish. This only served to deepen the  embarrassment of the experts who had declared them genuine.