5 Famous Art Forgeries That Fooled the Experts

In the 1930s and ’40s, a bitter Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren decided that if the critics wouldn’t take his own work seriously, he’d beat them at their own game. He started producing “newly discovered” paintings by Johannes Vermeer — and the experts fell over themselves to authenticate them.

He was meticulous. He bought genuine 17th-century canvases, mixed his own period-correct pigments, and baked the paintings in an oven to harden them the way three centuries of age would. One of his fakes, The Supper at Emmaus, was hailed as one of Vermeer’s finest works.

Then came the twist that made him a folk hero. After the war, van Meegeren was arrested for selling a “Vermeer” to the Nazi official Hermann Göring — a charge of collaboration that could get him executed. His defense was extraordinary: the painting was a fake, and he could prove it, because he’d painted it himself. To convince a skeptical court, he was made to paint one more forged Vermeer under guard. He walked out convicted only of fraud.

Elmyr de Hory could knock out a convincing Modigliani, Matisse, or Picasso in an afternoon — and by his own count he sold well over a thousand of them across three decades. Dealers on two continents hung his work as the real thing, and a fair number of his fakes may still be sitting in respectable collections, quietly unlabeled.

What set him apart was that he didn’t copy existing paintings. He invented brand-new works “in the style of” the masters — pictures those artists never actually made — which meant there was no original to check his against. He’d draw a fresh Matisse and let the signature and the confidence do the rest.

He became so notorious that Orson Welles built a whole film around him, the 1973 essay-documentary F for Fake, a dizzying meditation on fakery, authorship, and trickery. It’s a fitting monument: even the movie about the great deceiver isn’t entirely sure when it’s telling you the truth.

Beltracchi may be the most ambitious forger on this list. Rather than copy known paintings, he invented “lost” works by early-20th-century artists — pictures that experts believed had once existed but had vanished — and then produced them, complete with faked gallery labels and a cooked-up provenance. He and his wife ran the scheme for decades and made millions.

He was undone by a shortcut. For a painting he was passing off as a 1914 Heinrich Campendonk, he grabbed a premixed tube of white paint instead of mixing his own from scratch. The manufacturer hadn’t mentioned that it contained titanium white — a pigment that didn’t come into use until the 1920s.

Lab analysis found the anachronistic pigment, and the whole edifice came down. A career built on flawless period detail was ended by one tube of paint he didn’t bother to check.

Not every case ends with a confession. In 1985 the J. Paul Getty Museum paid around $10 million for a marble statue of a nude youth — a kouros — supposedly Greek, from about 530 BC. Early scientific tests of the stone’s weathered surface seemed to back up its age, and the museum put it on display.

But something was off. Art historians looked at the statue and saw a jumble of styles that didn’t quite belong to any single time or place — the kind of thing that happens when a modern hand assembles an “ancient” look from many sources. The science said old; the trained eye said fake. Neither side could deliver the knockout blow.

So the Getty did something unusually honest. For years the label read: “Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.” It has since been taken off display, and the question is still genuinely unresolved. Nobody has proven it’s ancient, and nobody has proven it’s fake — which may be the most unsettling outcome of all.

You don’t need a grand Parisian studio to fool a museum. Shaun Greenhalgh worked out of a garden shed in Bolton, in the north of England, turning out fakes across a staggering range — ancient sculpture, watercolors, Roman silver — with his elderly parents handling the sales and the sob-story provenance.

His most famous piece was the “Amarna Princess,” an alabaster figure he passed off as a 3,300-year-old Egyptian sculpture linked to the family of Tutankhamun. In 2003 the Bolton Museum bought it for roughly £440,000, believing it was the real thing. It had been carved in the shed.

The family was finally caught when experts spotted errors in the fake paperwork behind some Assyrian reliefs. What lingers is the sheer nerve of it: not a criminal mastermind, but a self-taught craftsman in a backyard shed who fooled the professionals for years.