Shaun Greenhalgh

The Metropolitan Police’s art and antiques unit built a replica model of the shed where the works were created and labelled Greenhalgh "the most diverse art forger known in history". Many of his fakes, including the Amarna Princess, Risley Park Lanx, and works by Barbara Hepworth and Thomas Moran, were displayed.

In October 2019 he appeared in Handmade in Bolton on BBC2, a short documentary series fronted by Janina Ramirez, directed and narrated by Waldemar Januszczak, in which he remade four objects from the past using traditional materials and methods.

His autobiography A Forger's Tale: Confessions of the Bolton Forger was originally published in a limited edition in 2015 by ZCZ Editions. The first full edition was published on 1 June 2017 with an Introduction by Waldemar Januszczak. It won the Observer's Best Art Book of the Year, 2018.

Greenhalgh repeated his claim to be the creator in a May 2017 interview with Simon Parkin in the Guardian, noting that he had studied the work again when it was exhibited at the Villa Reale di Monza in 2015.

The Postscript chapter in Greenhalgh's 2017 autobiography provided further details about his claim, identifying the sitter as "Bossy Sally from the Co-Op" (p. 356).

In November 2015 as part of the publicity for the upcoming A Forger's Tale, an article in The Sunday Times put forward Greenhalgh's claim that he was the creator of La Bella Principessa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

A December 2015 article in The New York Times also promoted Greenhalgh's claimed authorship of the work, which it said he had made in the late 1970s, around the age of 20, using vellum recycled from a 16th-century land deed and the face of a supermarket check-out girl named "Alison" who worked in Bolton.

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." 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 knock up a 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 his mother, Olive (b. 1925), made the phonecalls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."

Shaun Greenhalgh appears in and is credited as "Craftsman" in the 2012 BBC documentary The Dark Ages: An Age of Light.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's works from 23 January to 7 February 2010.

Following Shaun Greenhalgh's release early in 2010, he launched a website selling his artworks. These comprise works the website describes as "examples of my old style of work...'fakes'," signed and sold as works by him, as well as sculptures in his own style. A member of the Metropolitan Police Art and Antique Squad stated "If a work is not copyrighted, it is not illegal to copy that work and sell that copy, as long as it is made very clear the work is not an original."

On 4 January 2009, BBC2 broadcast a dramatisation of the Greenhalgh story called The Antiques Rogue Show, a play on the title of the popular BBC series Antiques Road Show, already used by headline writers. In a letter from prison to the Bolton News, Shaun Greenhalgh made a number of complaints about the depiction of himself and his family, calling the drama "character assassination".

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.

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 raised. Apprehended, Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to prison for four years and eight months in November 2007.

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".

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 artifacts in the 'Obsessions' section .

George then approached Bolton Museum in 2002, claiming the Amarna 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 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." Using the leeway this vague description allowed, Greenhalgh manufactured what became called the "Amarna Princess," a 20-inch statue, apparently made of a "stunning translucent alabaster, it later emerged within a Panorama documentary that he had bought the tools to produce this "masterpiece" from B&Q."

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.

There were blocks of stone, a furnace for melting silver on top of the fridge, half-finished and rejected sculptures, a watercolour under the bed, a cheque for £20,000 dated 1993, and a bust of an American president in the loft. I’d never seen anything like it.

Shaun Greenhalgh (born 1960) is a British artist and former art forger. Over a seventeen-year period, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of forgeries. Teaming up with 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.

Dear George, Thank you very much for your recent letter and cheque for the paintings. I have about finished the [illegible] but I will hold onto it untill I am(?) ready. I will slip round to the yard on Wed. L S Lowry. Received 45.0.0 for paintings

Olive may have been a peripheral figure, but Shaun's father, George (born 1923), 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." On one occasion, trying to interest the Bolton Museum in an Amarna princess, an ancient Egyptian statuette about the size of a gnome, George Sr. told them he was "thinking about using it as a garden ornament".