The Art Forger Who Fooled The World

Even as a child, Shaun Greenhalgh was a prodigiously talented artist. But instead of developing his own style, he made a fortune from forgeries – and ended up in jail. He told Simon Parkin about the perils of faking it

In 2010, shortly after his release from prison, Shaun Greenhalgh walked into his parents’ house in Bromley Cross to find a fat package waiting for him on the dresser, containing an art book. Greenhalgh recognised the cover, a Renaissance-style painting of a girl, seen in profile. Snub-nosed, proud-eyed and with the hint of a double chin, she was not a handsome princess, as the book’s title, La Bella Principessa, suggested. Greenhalgh knew her as Sally, a girl with whom he’d worked in the late 1970s at the Co-op butchery. The book, by the respected art historian Martin Kemp, argued that the painting was a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. But Greenhalgh believed it to be one of his own: painted when he was 18, on a piece of 16th century vellum bought from an antique shop close to his family’s council house in Bolton.

Greenhalgh, who is now 56, tells me he remembers the process clearly. After practising the drawing on cartridge paper, he had mounted the vellum on an oak board from an old Victorian school desk lid. He had used just three colours, black, white and red, gum arabic earth pigments that he then went over in oak gall ink. Leonardo was left-handed. Fearing a betrayal by his own dominant right hand, Greenhalgh had turned the painting clockwise, and hatched strokes from the profile outwards, suggesting the work of a left-handed artist.