Amarna Princess statue forger ordered to pay back
Shaun Greenhalgh, the convicted master antiquities forger who deceived museum experts into buying an obviously fake Amarna statue has been sentenced to pay £363,000 to the Bolton Museum. His elderly parents, both in their eighties have also been charged and found guilty.
The statue was authenticated by experts at Christie’s and the British Museum as a 3,300 year old Egyptian piece in the so called Amarna style, during the reign of pharaoh Akhenaten. The Bolton Museum paid Greenbaugh £440,000 for the 52 centimeter high alabaster statue, apparently out of a desire to keep a valuable rare artefact in their collection, despite the clear anomalies in the figure, conveniently headless and also without hands and feet, portions of a figure which are very difficult to replicate exactly. The sinuosity of the posture renders it more like a badly proportioned Greek statuette. But because there are so few authentic sculptures of its kind for comparison 
(see Louvre Amarna sculpture on the left) and, aided by a genuine catalogue of antiquities from 1892 in which the Earl of Egremont was auctioning a headless figure, the master forger was able to convince the museum into acquiring the “priceless masterpiece” for a £60,000 less than the Christies Egyptology department experts had valued it.
Shaun Greenhalgh, currently serving four years and eight months in jail is a self taught artist and sculptor who used his skills to create copies of rare and sought-after masterpieces at the family’s home in The Crescent, Bromley Cross. His father George, aged 84, acted as a convincing salesman and provided carefully researched stories about the origins of every fake they passed off as real. His 83 year old mother Olive made phone calls to unwitting buyers to arrange meetings.
Ironically, the family lives in “abject poverty”, according to Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, which makes this another case of talented but unlucky artists who create well crafted artworks not for money or recognition but to fool and expose the expertise of professionals supposed to judge what’s genuine or great in the art world.
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