Shaun Greenhalgh (born 19 September 1961) is a British artist and former art forger. Over seventeen years, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of forgeries. With the assistance of his brother and elderly parents, who fronted the sales side of the operation, he successfully sold his fakes internationally to museums, auction houses, and private buyers, accruing nearly £1 million. The Guardian "How garden shed fakers fooled the art world", 16 November 2007.
The family have been described by Scotland Yard as "possibly the most diverse forgery team in the world, ever". However, when they attempted to sell three Assyrian reliefs using the same provenance as they had previously, suspicions were finally raised.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's works from 23 January to 7 February 2010.
The Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Unit built a replica model of the shed where the works were created. Many of Greenhalgh's fakes, including the Amarna Princess, a version of the Roman Risley Park Lanx, and works supposedly by Barbara Hepworth and Thomas Moran, were displayed.
Family roles Greenhalgh's family was involved in "the garden shed gang". They established an elaborate cottage industry at his parents' house in The Crescent, Bromley Cross, South Turton, which is about north of Bolton town centre. His parents, George and Olive, approached clients, while his older brother, George Jr., managed the money.
Other members of the family were invoked to help establish the legitimacy of the fake items. These included Olive's father who owned an art gallery, a great-grandfather who it seemed had had the foresight to buy well at auctions, and an ancestor who had apparently worked for the Mayor of Bolton as a cleaner and was given a Thomas Moran painting.
Shaun Greenhalgh left school at 16 with no qualifications. A self-taught artist, undoubtedly influenced by his job as an antiques dealer, he worked up his forgeries from sketches, photographs, art books and catalogues. He attempted a wide range of crafts, from painting in pastels and watercolours, to sketches, and sculpture, both modern and ancient, busts and statues, to bas-relief and metalwork. He invested in a large range of different materials – silver, stone, marble, rare stone, replica metal, and glass. He also did meticulous research to authenticate his items with histories and provenance (for instance, faking letters from the supposed artists) in order to demonstrate his ownership. Completed items were then stored about the house and garden shed. The latter probably served as a workshop as well.
Detective Constable Ian Lawson of Scotland Yard, who searched the house, gave an indication of Greenhalgh's activities:
A next-door neighbour recalled: "I was finding bits of pottery and coins around the edges of the garden over 20 years back – [things like] bits of metal with old kings on."Grove, Sophie. "Fake It Till You Make It", Newsweek, 15 December 2007. While this sounds as though materials were openly displayed, it was perhaps not quite that obvious. Angela Thomas, a curator from the Bolton Museum, actually visited the family at home prior to the purchase of the Amarna Princess and reported nothing untoward.
Yet for all his daring – he once boasted that he could create a Thomas Moran watercolour in half an hour and claimed to have completed an "Amarna" statue in three weeks – Shaun Greenhalgh needed the help of his parents. At the trial it was said by the lawyer, Brian McKenna, that Greenhalgh's mother, Olive (1925–2016), made the telephone calls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."
Olive may have been a peripheral figure, but Shaun's father, George (1923–2014), was more involved. He was the frontman, who met face-to-face with potential buyers. "He looks honest, he's elderly and he shows up in a wheelchair." For example, George Sr. told the Bolton Museum that he was "thinking about using [the Amarna Princess statue] as a garden ornament".
Greenhalgh's parents helped establish a logical explanation for why the Greenhalghs had possession of such items in the first place, namely as family heirlooms. It allowed them to offload items when they were discovered as fakes, such as the "Eadred Reliquary", and an L.S. Lowry painting, The Meeting House.See also discussion of this in Reactions section.
The Amarna Princess
In 1999, the Greenhalghs began their most ambitious project. They bought an 1892 catalogue which listed the contents of an auction in Silverton Park, Devon, the home of the 4th Earl of Egremont. Among the items listed were "eight Egyptian figures."Malvern, Jack. "The ancient Egypt statue from Bolton (circa 2003)", Times Online, 27 March 2006. Using the leeway this vague description allowed, Greenhalgh manufactured what became known as the Amarna Princess, a 20-inch statue, apparently made of a translucent alabaster. It later emerged within a Panorama documentary that he had bought the tools to produce the work from hardware store B&Q.
Done in the Egyptian "Amarna period" style of 1350 BC, the statue represents one of the daughters of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. At the time, as Greenhalgh had researched, only two other similar statuettes were known to exist in the world. He "knocked up" his copy in his shed in three weeks out of calcite, "using basic DIY tools and making it look old by coating it in a mixture of tea and clay".
George then approached Bolton Museum in 2002,Chadwick, Edward. "Antiques rogues show update", The Bolton News, 17 November 2007. claiming the Amarna Princess was from his grandfather's "forgotten collection", bought at the Silverton Park auction. He pretended to be ignorant about its true worth or value, but was careful to provide the letters Shaun had also faked, showing how the artefact had been in the family for "a hundred years".
In 2003, after consulting experts at the British Museum and Christie's, the Bolton Museum bought the Amarna Princess for £439,767. It remained on display until February 2006. It has been subsequently re-displayed, since September 2018, as part of Bolton Museum's "Bolton's Egypt" Gallery as an example of fake Egyptian artefacts in the "Obsessions" section.
Revenue Had the Greenhalghs managed to sell all 120 artworks they had offered it is estimated that they could have earned as much as £10m. This would have made the average value of each piece more than £83,000, although money received varied between £100 (for the Eadred Reliquary) and £440,000 (for the Amarna Princess). The Greenhalghs did not manage to offload most of their works. Many which they did sell, such as the Eadred Reliquary, purportedly were undersold, garnering only minimal amounts. Others, such as the Lowry painting The Meeting House, only gained in value from their repeated resale, which would not have benefited the Greenhalghs.
As time went on, more ambitious, expensive pieces of work were produced, some of which did sell, like the Risley Park Lanx. However, these were subject to more scrutiny and indeed it was one of these, the Assyrian reliefs, which led to their exposure and arrests, which suggests that the longevity of their scam was concentrated on the passing-off of lower level items.Thompson, Clive. "How to make a fake", New York Magazine, 24 May 2004; accessed 26 December 2007.
Balanced against this must be the success of sales to private individuals. They are unlikely to have had the same level of expertise at their disposal as institutions, and are probably less willing to advertise their losses once the forgeries were detected. Certainly they have not had the same exposure as the debacle surrounding the Bolton Museum, for example.Linton, Deborah. "Family con that fooled the art world", Manchester Evening News, 16 November 2007. Two individual buyers, "wealthy Americans" have been identified, but only after they donated their purchase to the British Museum.
Another piece sold to an unnamed private buyer came to light when the Art Institute of Chicago announced that The Faun, a ceramic sculpture on display since 1997 as the work of the 19th-century French master Paul Gauguin, was also a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh. The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer in London, who had bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1994.Artner, Alan. "Art Institute of Chicago discloses Gauguin sculpture in fact a forgery", Chicago Tribune, 12 December 2007.
In addition, the bank records of the Greenhalghs only went back six years, so in the final analysis the exact amount of monies involved over the seventeen-year scam has not been determined. What is known is that "two Halifax accounts... one containing £55,173 and the other £303,646" were frozen, pending a confiscation hearing in January 2008, and Shaun Greenhalgh was convicted for "conspiracy to conceal and transfer £410,392." Estimates of the amount of money the Greenhalghs actually made vary from £850,000 to £1.5 million.
Exposure Possibly encouraged by their success in fooling experts, the Greenhalghs tried again using the same Silverton Park provenance. They produced what were purportedly three Assyrian reliefs of soldier and horses, from the Palace of Sennacherib in 600 BC.
The British Museum examined them in November 2005, concluded that they were genuine, and expressed an interest in buying one of them, which seemed to match a drawing by A. H. Layard in its collection. However, when two of the reliefs were submitted to Bonhams auction house, its antiquities consultant Richard Falkiner spotted "an obvious fake".Macquisten, Ivan. "It was Bonhams and ATG columnist who first raised alarm over Greenhalgh fakes", Antiques Trade Gazette, 3 December 2007.
Bonhams consulted with the British Museum about various suspicious aspects, and the museum then spotted several improbable anomalies. The horses' reins were "not consistent" or "atypical" with respect to other Assyrian reliefs; and the cuneiform inscription contained a spelling mistake, an absent diacritical mark, which was considered extremely unlikely in a piece "destined for the eyes of the king". These concerns became full blown suspicion when George seemed too willing to part with the items at a low price. The museum contacted the police, who investigated the Greenhalghs for the next 20 months.
Court case, convictions and sentencing At their trial at Bolton Crown Court in 2007, the three defendants pleaded guilty to creating the forgeries and laundering the money they received. On 16 November, Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to 4 years and eight months, while his mother received a 12-month suspended sentence. The parents were using wheelchairs at their appearance for sentencing. Judge William Morris, in sentencing Shaun Greenhalgh, stated: "This was an ambitious conspiracy of long duration based on your undoubted talent and based on the sophistication of the deceptions underpinning the sales and attempted sales. I speak of your talent but not in admiration. Your talent was misapplied to the ends of dishonest gain." George Greenhalgh's sentence was delayed for medical reports in 2007, eventually he received a suspended sentence of two years. If his age had not been grounds for mitigation, Judge William Morris said, he would have been sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. The prison service was unable to hold someone with his infirmities.