The world of art is not always what we think it is. We know today’s technology has made it extremely hard to detect altered photos, but what many of us don’t realize is, it is becoming very hard to detect forged paintings. Even experts are getting fooled with some of the really high end forgeries. There seems to be at least two types of forgeries which involve paintings. The first type is the traditional one where an artist is able to reproduce a famous painting and do it so well it fools the experts. The second type uses a computer controlled machine to copy a painting and is so accurate they have to note on the back of the painting it is a reproduction. Sometimes the best way to tell a forgery is by the signature of the artist. You would think a forger capable of creating a masterful work which can fool experts would be able to copy a simple signature, thankfully this is not always the case. Forgeries are not always copies of other works, they can also be paintings which pretend to be undiscovered works of a particular artist. These types of forgeries use the same techniques as the famous artist they are pretending to be from.

Some ancient paintings were made on wooden panels. One painting which was created this way was found to be a forgery from the 1920s. It had fooled some experts, because the panels had wormholes which were caused by age, or so they thought. Closer examination proved the holes had been drilled. When experts examine a painting they usually take everything into account, which means they examine a frame if it exists, the type of material a painting is on, the type of paint which is used, the backing of the painting and many other things. Even with all this examination sometimes the forger comes out ahead. I am certainly not an art expert, or even a collector, but I would imagine one of the hardest forgeries to detect is a painting which seems to have been painted by famous artist. It would seem to me if it was expertly painted it could cause quite a bit of dissent in the art world with both sides claiming they are right. There is also another problem. When we talk about ancient artists some of them had pupils and these pupils painted using the same techniques as their masters. An extremely talented pupil might have painted a picture which was accredited to the master in later years.

Sometimes forgers became more famous than many of the artists. One case in point was Thomas Patrick Keating. He was known as an art restorer, but it turned out Mr. Keating confessed to having forged over 2000 paintings. He said these paintings were copies of works of over 100 artists. Keating worked for an art restorer early in his career and this restorer challenged him to copy a particular painting which he did flawlessly, but put his own name on it. The unscrupulous boss saw the painting and immediately saw dollar signs. He changed the signature to that of the original artist and sold it to a gallery without Keating’s knowledge. Keating let it pass when he found out. Some of Keating’s copies had clues left in them to show they were forgeries. These clues would come up in x-rays. Keating claims to have flooded the market with certain artists’ works. It is ironic to think Keating the forger became more famous than some of the artists who’s work he forged.

Art forgery is something which has been going on for a very long time. It is said Roman forgers copied famous Greek statues and sold them as originals to unsuspecting buyers. Almost everywhere art collectors exist there are forgers. The practice of forging statues probably continues to this day. It was very big in the fourteenth century when Italian stone carvers copied many of the famous Greek and Roman statues. Some artists of the time felt by using elements of other famous artists they were complementing them, which made it hard to accuse them of forgery. When we talk about Michelangelo we are talking about one of the greatest artists of all time and yet we are talking about someone who is believed to have forged an antique marble Cupid when he was a student and sold it to his patron Lorenzo de Medici. Sometimes relatives of famous artists had enough talent to copy the famous artist’s work. One such person was Pieter Brueghel the Younger who lived from 1564 to 1627. His father was Pieter Breugel the Elder. He reproduced his father’s paintings many times. It doesn’t seem he was a forger, because the art world knew what he was doing and he also did original paintings of his own. His copies were more of a tribute to his father’s work and sometimes they varied in some ways such as tone. One example of a difference in one of his copies is in the painting “The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist”. The painting is full of spectators, but in the copy one of them has been left out. Clearly this was not an attempt to sell a forged painting.

When I talked about machines which create exact copies of paintings I was talking about 3D printers. Some of them are able to do large-format copy. Special cameras and a fringe projector scan the original artwork in high-resolution. The typography of the painting is copied in every minute detail so even spots in the original which had more paint than others are replicated. This means the copy bears the same stylistic approaches as the master artist. Even the motion of brushstrokes are copied. The technique while allows for cheap reproductions of famous artwork, but also opened the door to incredibly accurate forgeries.

It seems amazing to me people actually buy artwork from places like eBay where they are only looking at photographs of what they are buying. It’s risky enough buying artwork which has provenance. Let me tell you why I say this. The famous painting, “A City on a Rock” was attributed to the famous artist Goya, so even the owners were fooled. Recently it has been established this painting was created by the 19th century forger Eugenic Lucas, because of this getting proof even from a museum that they once owned it means nothing. Even the best experts in the world can get fooled.