Shaun Greenhalgh has turned his hand to everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Lowry. He’s been to prison, but has never revealed the whole picture. Until now

In 2010, shortly after his release from prison, Shaun Greenhalgh walked into his parents’ house in Bromley Cross to find yet another fat package waiting for him on the dresser. Unsolicited parcels arrived often. They always bore a London postmark, but never a sender’s name; they always contained an art book.

On this occasion, 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 thought he knew her as an old acquaintance: Sally, a girl with whom he had worked in the late 70s 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 to a piece of 16th-century vellum; he remembered buying the vellum 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, pilfered from the storeroom of Bolton Industrial Tech, where his father, George, worked as a cleaner. 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.

When it was finished, Greenhalgh tells me, he took the picture to an art dealer in Harrogate, where he offered it for sale – not as a forgery, but as a homage. The dealer disparaged its quality and paid just £80, an amount that barely covered the materials, let alone the labour. Still, Greenhalgh took the money. Two decades later, at a New York auction, the same painting sold for $21,850.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Is it La Bella Principessa by Leonardo da Vinci… or Sally, a girl Greenhalgh worked with at the Co-op? Photograph: VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

In 2007, while Greenhalgh was serving the first stretch of a four-year-and-eight-month prison sentence for art forgery, the painting changed hands again for a similar amount, this time attracting the attention of a number of art historians, who suspected that the painting could, in fact, be the work of a master. Among them was Kemp, who in 2010 wrote that he had not “the slightest doubt” that the painting was “the rarest of rare things… a major new work by Leonardo”. Subsequent carbon dating of the vellum, and evidence of the hint of a fingerprint that appeared to match Leonardo’s, provided the almost-clinchers.

Kemp was not alone in his belief. “Who else in late-15th-century Milan drew so beautifully with his left hand?” wrote the art critic Martin Gayford. One New York dealer estimated the painting to be worth $150m.

Looking at the cover of Kemp’s book, Greenhalgh couldn’t be certain La Bella Principessa was his. Five years later, in 2015, he spied a chance: an exhibition in Milan, where the painting was due to be exhibited at the Villa Reale di Monza. Greenhalgh travelled to Italy. Up close, he could see that someone with “a better hand than mine” had gone over the painting’s lines; but he was in no doubt that the piece was his. The butterfly braces on the rear, which he’d put there not to fix a crack in the panel but simply to make the work appear older, were the giveaway. “There’s no need for them,” he told me. “They’re purely cosmetic. And they’re mine.”

***

On a warm May afternoon, Greenhalgh fiddles with the lock on his new 500 sq ft workshop in an industrial estate just north of Bolton. The shed at the bottom of his late parents’ garden, where Greenhalgh made most of his forgeries between 1978 and 2006 (the “northern annexe of the British Museum”, as a police officer once put it, drolly), was demolished after his arrest, on 15 March 2006. For two years following his release from prison, Greenhalgh made nothing, afraid a return to art might inexorably lead to a return to criminality. Finally, he was persuaded to make a copy of an Anglo-Saxon brooch for a TV documentary, by the Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak. (In 2002, Greenhalgh had fooled him with a sculpture of a faun attributed to Gauguin, which sold at auction for a reputed $125,000. The pair subsequently struck up an unlikely friendship.) Other commissions soon followed and the BBC have part-funded Greenhalgh’s new workshop. In February he sold three paintings in the style of LS Lowry for £15,800 at auction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before Kick Off, Greenhalgh’s take on Lowry. Photograph: Bolton Auction Rooms/BNPS

“It’s not finished yet,” he says, apologetically, as he shows me around the tidy workshop. In one corner is a tray filled with sand for metalwork. In another, a portable kiln for firing pottery. An easel stands in front of an area the size of a confessional booth, cordoned off with a heavy curtain to catch sawdust. “The only thing I can’t do here is sculpt stone. It’s the noise. It’s very monotonous. Like Chinese water torture for the neighbours.”

Between 1978 and 2006, this softly-spoken artist created several hundred exquisite forgeries. Some sold to English royalty (he claims a silver gilt Christ in the 12th-century English style is still part of the Royal Collection), others to presidents (a terracotta bust of Thomas Jefferson, owned by Bill Clinton) and many more to museums. Greenhalgh’s talent was broad: one month he was an Egyptian granite carver, the next an impressionistic sculptor, the next an American watercolourist. Januszczak once described his trickster friend as a one-man Renaissance. But Greenhalgh shrugs off the compliment: “I don’t have delusions of grandeur.” He says his versatility is a function of what he describes as his low threshold for boredom. Tonight he will do his night shift at a local bakery, one of the few places he has been able to find work, thanks to his criminal record. “I view my life as a failure. I went the wrong way. I could have done something useful. If I could have my time again, I’d like to be a teacher at an art college.”

At school, though, Greenhalgh had little interest in pursuing art qualifications, perhaps because, by 13, he was already earning a substantial living selling reproduction pot lids and miniature clay pipe busts, fired in the school kiln, at local junk shops and fairs, pretending he’d dug them up from disused Victorian tips. His father liked to sketch birds, but Greenhalgh describes his family (he is the youngest of five boys and has two sisters) as handy rather than arty. He was an anomaly: “Even as a child, I drew like an adult.”

His only artistic tuition was two years of art classes at Turton comprehensive, which he quit because, “I thought I could do better on my own.” Greenhalgh thought art school was just for learning how to draw and paint. “I didn’t understand that it’s really about the contacts you make.”

Outside school, he continued to develop his technique, spurred on by a family holiday to Rome where he spent hours gazing at the frescoes of Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli and, in particular, Raphael’s Stanzas, work that triggered in him both a sense of inadequacy and a realisation of what, with effort, could be achieved. “I felt so insignificant,” he says. Still, his passion was kindled. In 1976, the year he left school, Greenhalgh entered a few paintings under his own name into an art exhibition held at Bolton’s Octagon theatre. The former mayor of Bolton, Charles Lucas, an art collector, bought one of the watercolours for £20. It was a small victory, but not enough to promise a living, especially for a teenager who’d had a taste of self-made wealth.

I was dead nervous. I figured I had no chance among all those great experts in London

Shortly after the sale, Lucas got in touch and offered Greenhalgh £400 to create copies of some John Ruskin paintings he owned: he needed to put the originals into safekeeping, but wanted reproductions to hang on the wall. “It was a perfect fit,” Greenhalgh says. “My natural style of painting is, like Ruskin, Turner-esque. Luminous. You could hardly tell them from the originals.”

Inspired by this success, Greenhalgh decided to see how far he might be able to push a true forgery. He claims to have drawn six sketches in the style of Degas, picked the most convincing, signed it in the artist’s hand, photographed it and sent a letter of inquiry to Christie’s in London. A few weeks later, a letter arrived requesting that Greenhalgh, then 17, take the sketch to the auction house’s north-west office. He packed it in a black bin liner and travelled to Chester the following day. His naive plan, he says, was to see how much one of his sketches might be worth if he had the benefit of a famous name.

At the auction house, the appraiser surveyed the sketch in silence, while Greenhalgh considered his escape options should the police be called. “I was dead nervous,” he recalls. “I’d never been anywhere like that.” When asked where he had found the picture, he fabricated a story on the spot about a house clearance in Manchester. After removing the picture from its frame to check the rear, which Greenhalgh had fixed with a seal in imitation of the atelier stamps found on genuine works, the appraiser asked if he could send the picture to London for further investigation. “I figured I had no chance then, among all those great experts in London.”

He was wrong: at auction, Greenhalgh’s Degas fetched more than £10,000. It was a life-changing sum of money for a teenager, but any sense of elation was tempered by remorse. “I wasn’t cock-a-hoop that I’d fooled them,” he says. “I’ve always had a tinge of guilt – I probably get that from my mother. Something within me knew it wasn’t right.”

For a moment, Greenhalgh hesitated to enter the world of forgery. While reading art history books at the John Rylands Library at Manchester University, he struck up a friendship with an undergraduate library assistant, Janey. The two began dating and he spent his “happiest year” with her, travelling using proceeds from the Degas sale. They visited Florence, San Lorenzo and Carrara, stopping at the house where Donatello is said to have chosen the stone for his sculptures. But soon after they returned home, Janey began having fits and was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. A few months later, she died.

The trauma is old, but Greenhalgh falters when talking about Janey. He cannot bring himself to say her name (“Mad, isn’t it?”). We sit in silence for a moment. Finally he says, “I’m absolutely sure that had she lived, I would have taken a different path.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greenhalgh with the tools of his trade. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

After a two-year depression, during which Greenhalgh spent the remainder of his money travelling to the places he and Janey had dreamed of visiting together – Egypt, Greece, Spain and no fewer than seven trips to Rome – he took a job working for an antique restorer. The restorer gave Greenhalgh a key to the yard that allowed him to work on personal projects at the weekend. There, on the cobbled quadrangle, he carved a limestone Egyptian scribe. A visiting West End art dealer saw the piece and offered £200 for it on the spot. Two years later, Greenhalgh discovered that the dealer had sold it on as a genuine artefact.

The dealer invited Greenhalgh to London and shortly afterwards began commissioning copies. The man, whom Greenhalgh refers to only as Tom, became a Fagin-like character in his life. While Greenhalgh created works to order, Tom produced fake provenance from “a laboratory” above a West End shop. The lab was well known to the London museums, who would hire it to restore acquisitions. “As a result, we knew what the experts looked for. It was there until at least the late 1980s.”

Throughout that decade, Greenhalgh produced scores of forgeries for Tom and his cohorts, until the pair fell out over two carved tusks the dealer claimed had been stolen during a break-in. Greenhalgh suspected the work had been sold on privately. It was a dispute that fuelled his growing sense of resentment at seeing work he produced for a relative pittance sold on for a tremendous mark-up. “After that, I didn’t speak to any of them again.” The dealer, as far as he knows, retired, emigrated to Portugal and died in 1993.

Dad took the art to the dealers. He was bored with retirement: he liked the excitement

After years of being, as Greenhalgh saw it, exploited, he struck out on his own. “I thought, I’ve been selling stuff for living prices, but not proper money. They are all doing it. I have the ability, they don’t. They profit. I don’t. I was bitter. And now I knew how to do the provenances.”

One of his first independent works was an oil canvas painting in the style of Peploe, a Scottish colourist whose paintings commanded high prices at the time. Greenhalgh “cobbled together” a provenance story about how the piece had come to the family through an aunt who was an art dealer in Edinburgh and, with his father in tow, travelled to London to present it to a number of art dealers. By now, his pangs of guilt had largely subsided. “I never actually told dealers, ‘This is a painting by so-and-so and I want this much for it,’” he tells me. “I’d always ask: ‘What is this and do you want to buy it?’” Implying ignorance may have lowered the offers that dealers would make; but the sense of romance around the discovery of a lost treasure brought in by a pair of seemingly clueless northerners may also have had a guard-lowering effect. “It’s skating on a fine line, but the people I was dealing with should have known more than I did. I’m not trying to vindicate myself. But that’s how I saw it at the time. If they gave the nod, that’s on them.”

Greenhalgh says he’d always put a “tell” in his forgeries, a fault that should, to a trained eye, give the game away. “The police said I was taking the piss, but that wasn’t my intention. I was testing them, I suppose. I started putting more and more faults in. But no matter how many mistakes, they were always blown away by the provenance. Often they hardly looked at the work.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greenhalgh and his father arriving at court in 2007. Photograph: PA

The dealer at the first shop Greenhalgh and his father visited, in 1989, dilly-dallied over the Peploe, so they went to another outlet near Fortnum & Mason. “My dad asked if he could take it in,” Greenhalgh recalls. “I think he liked the excitement. He was bored with retirement. He came out with a cheque for £20,000 – peanuts for a Peploe.”

Greenhalgh’s father’s role in the forgery operation was, police claim, to handle the money side of things. He brokered many of the deals. Brian McKenna, who defended Greenhalgh’s mother, Olive, said at trial that her involvement extended only to making phone calls on behalf of her son, because he was shy. “She was on the periphery, but it would be wrong of me to suggest that she did not know what was going on,” McKenna said. Only Greenhalgh went to prison; his parents’ shorter sentences, for aiding with the sale of the forgeries, were suspended. His father died in 2014; his mother last May.

In 1989, the day after the Peploe sale, Greenhalgh received a call from Scotland Yard’s art squad. The dealer who bought the painting had taken it to an expert who had identified it as a fake. He waited for the knock on the door but, overwhelmed with cases and understaffed, the police never followed up.

Emboldened by his escape, Greenhalgh became more prolific. In 1995, the British Museum contacted police after a member of staff, Leslie Webster, noticed that a collection of items scattered across the museum’s various departments had been bought from the Greenhalgh family, a coincidence that, for the first time, aroused suspicion. Dick Ellis, the police officer who led the art squad between 1989 and 1999, later said that twice the officer in charge of the case was on the verge of making an arrest, only to be called away by a more pressing issue.

Greenhalgh’s success in fooling experts was matched by financial rewards. In 1999, in the garden shed, he crafted an alabaster torso of an Egyptian princess in the short-lived, experimental Amarna period style, inspired by a red sandstone version held in the Louvre. He finished the piece using “a B&Q woodsaw and some elbow grease”, then took the figure to the Stockport offices of a London auctioneer, which offered him £500. Greenhalgh declined. The offer rose to £1,500. He declined again and asked for the statuette to be returned. It then sat in a cupboard for two years until his father showed it to an expert from the Bolton Museum. She immediately suggested it could be worth as much as half a million dollars.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greenhalgh’s Amarna princess, bought by Bolton council for £440,000. Photograph: Bolton Evening News

A British Museum report authenticating the figurine as 3,300 years old stated that the “size and quality” of the statuette made it “one of the most important Egyptian antiquities to come to light for many years”. Bolton council bought the piece for £440,000 (a reported £370,000 of which was public money drawn from the heritage memorial fund). “What you have to appreciate about this piece is the quality of carving and perhaps try to understand that it is a masterpiece,” said Angela Thomas, the museum’s Egyptian curator in 2003.

It was a success that weighed heavily on Greenhalgh’s conscience (most of the money was left untouched and eventually returned following his conviction). “I’ve always loved that museum,” he says. “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated by the Egyptian room. After it sold, I didn’t make anything for a couple of years.”

For all the money he made from his forgeries, Greenhalgh claims he led a modest lifestyle. “I ate well. I had good clothes. Most of it went on travel. I’ve been to most places. But flash houses and cars never appealed. We loved my parents’ house. My mum and dad didn’t want to leave.”

Greenhalgh’s next project, a trio of Assyrian reliefs offered to the British Museum, was the work that finally gave him away. He claimed the artefacts had been bought by his grandfather at auction in 1892. It is work he now eagerly pours scorn on, criticising the proportions, style and finish. These errors were not unintentional. “I wonder if something subconsciously wanted me to be caught, to put an end to it. I was sick of it all. But I knew that I couldn’t end it myself.”

When the knock on the door finally came, any sense of relief was overwhelmed by anger at the manner in which the police acted, which Greenhalgh still believes was disproportionate. “If they had just come for a chat, like we’re doing now, I’d have told them everything they wanted, maybe even dropped a few names to them, but the scale of the sting... I could have expected it if there were bodies in the garden. It was absolutely over the top.” When the officers found a deactivated revolver and a toy rifle left at the house by his six-year-old nephew, the firearms unit, “all blue lights and wire grills”, was called.

“I responded badly,” Greenhalgh says. He held out for more than 30 hours of interrogation before, finally, he cooled enough to admit wrongdoing. He cooperated with the police, answering all the charges put before him, though he did not tell them about other artworks that might be in the market. Only with the publication of his autobiography, A Forger’s Tale, is he revealing the extent of his handiwork. La Bella Principessa remains a contested work: a few art historians maintain their belief it is Leonardo’s, others, including the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, have declared it an “obvious fake” (but too old to be Greenhalgh’s).

Greenhalgh wrote the book in prison, as a way to avoid having to draw pictures of other inmates’ wives and children (“I thought, if I start that, I’ll be absolutely snowed under”). It was not intended for publication, merely as a way to set the record straight, undoing the lies of those “shite-hawk” journalists who claimed he had never had a job, that the family lived in abject poverty and, most woundingly, that his father had been a deserter in the second world war. (In fact George lived on a war pension for most of his life, having been shot in Italy at the end of the conflict.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the Assyrian reliefs that gave Greenhalgh away. Photograph: PA

The idea that his book could be seen as an extended justification for what he did is anathema to Greenhalgh, who says he declined early release in order to serve his full term (“I’ve done the crime, I’ll do the time”). He also resists my suggestion that, in showing off his arcane knowledge of artistic technique and skill, he is giving us a glimpse of what might have been, had he pursued the artist’s life. “The problem is that I can’t find my own style,” he says. “Whenever I think of an idea for a piece, I know who it’s copying. I always see something of someone else in everything I do. I don’t have an original style.”

Isn’t that the way of all artistry: to replicate what came before, then add a spattering of individuality? “Absolutely,” he says. “But I can’t even seem to do that. I don’t seem to have anything inside me that is my own.”

• A Forger’s Tale is published next week by Allen & Unwin at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.