A Forger's Tale

Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of one of the greatest living art forgers, who fooled the world's art experts whilst working from a shed in the garden of his parents' house in Bolton, England. In 2007, Bolton Crown Court in the United Kingdom sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in prison for the crime of producing artistic forgeries. Working out of a shed in his parents' garden, Greenhalgh had successfully fooled some of the world's greatest museums. During the court case, the breadth of his forgeries shocked the art world and tantalised the media. What no one realised was how much more of the story there was to tell. Written in prison, A Forger's Tale details Shaun's notorious career and the extraordinary circumstances that led to it. From Leonardo drawings to L.S. Lowry paintings, from busts of American presidents to Anglo-Saxon brooches, from cutting-edge Modernism to the ancient art of the Stone Age, Greenhalgh could--and did--copy it all. Told with great wit and charm, this is the definitive account of Britain's most successful and infamous forger, a man whose love for art saturates every page of this extraordinary memoir.