AP News, January 28th, 2008
A man whose family forged statues and paintings and then passed them off as priceless pieces of art to museums including the Art Institute of Chicago received a two-year suspended sentence Monday.
George Greenhalgh, 84, his 83-year-old wife, Olive, and their 46-year-old son, Shaun, pleaded guilty in 2002 to charges of laundering money from the sale of forged artworks.
The son, who authorities said created the fakes, was sentenced to more than four years in jail in November. His mother received a 12-month sentence. Police said the parents handled most of the sales.
Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley said the family has been "operating for nearly 20 years, producing and introducing a diverse range of art works into the U.K. market."
Rapley, the chief of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques unit, said there was little doubt that some of their forgeries were still circulating in the art world.
In December, the Art Institute of Chicago said a ceramic figure supposedly sculpted by 19th century French artist Paul Gauguin, which graced the museum for 10 years, was among the Greenhalgh forgeries.
Police say the Greenhalghs used a genuine 19th century sales document to get ideas on what items to fake, and once the items were fabricated they used the catalog as proof of provenance when presenting their knockoffs for sale.
The scheme unraveled when experts spotted misspellings in the Cuneiform script on three bogus Assyrian stone reliefs the family was trying to pass on to the British Museum. Scotland Yard launched an investigation in February 2006 and raided the Greenhalgh home the next month.
Authorities said the house was packed with raw materials — stone, silver, and glass — along with tools used to create the fakes and documentation to back their provenance.
Police eventually determined that the family made about 1.5 million pounds, which would be worth about $2.98 million today, although police said the family did not live lavishly.
The Greenhalghs forged a wide range of objects, including sculptures attributed to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, paintings purportedly by American artist Thomas Moran, and gold and silver items dated to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times.
Their biggest sale was the Amarna Princess, a statuette depicting one of the daughters of Queen Nefertiti, the mother of King Tutankhamun. After being authenticated by experts at Christie's and the British Museum, it was sold for 440,000 pounds — now worth about $870,000 — to the Bolton Museum in 2003.
Authorities are now weighing how best to divide the family's assets among those they defrauded. As for the fabricated items, the judge in the north England city of Bolton said some should be saved and used to teach experts how to detect high-quality fakes.
