One of the world’s leading Leonardo da Vinci scholars published a book called La Bella Principessa in 2010 that heralded a rare event: The discovery of a new drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The book is packed with scientific testing and expert connoisseurship attesting to the authenticity of the artwork. You can see the new da Vinci drawing in the title image above. Another da Vinci expert wrote a forward to the book claiming that the drawing was created during da Vinci’s lifetime “beyond all reasonable doubt.”
Please allow me to introduce you to reasonable doubt.
His name is Shaun Greenhalgh. He lives in Bolton, England and has enough artistic talent and cheek to fool Art experts around the world. Did he fool these experts?
That is our mystery.
A FORGER’S TALE
While in the gift shop at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., I noticed a book called A Forger’s Tale. It looked intriguing. I wanted to read it, so I bought it as a gift for my Sister. The narrative was spellbinding, as it detailed Shaun Greenhalgh’s life and many art forgeries.
Unlike most art forgers who find a tiny niche to exploit—perhaps mimicking paintings by one artist or artistic school—Greenhalgh was able to sculpt stone statues, cast antique silver jewelry and plates, paint watercolors and oils on canvas with enough expertise (and trickery) to fool the expert connoisseurs, the very best auction houses and prestigious museums.
One of his works was called the Amarna Princess, and experts in antiquities at Christie’s and the British Museum determined that it was a genuine alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian princess. The Greenhalghs sold it to the Bolton Museum for £439,767. The piece has its own Wikipedia page, and when it was finally and triumphantly exhibited, the Queen of England went to see it.
Another audacious work by Greenhalgh was Paul Gauguin’s Faun. Experts in the Gauguin oeuvre knew that the artist had sculpted a decadent faun but nobody had seen the piece for decades.
Until it surfaced mysteriously.
At a Sotheby’s auction in 1994. The Greenhalgh family made £20,700 less a commission. Three years later, the Art Institute of Chicago purchased the piece for an undisclosed amount and called it, “one of its most important acquisitions in the last twenty years.”
This forgery also has a Wikipedia page.
Greenhalgh had read up on Gauguin and knew that he had produced a “Faun Ceramic” which appeared in an exhibit of Gauguin’s works back in 1906. It was described in the exhibition’s brochure. The artist had also drawn a picture of a faun sculpture in one of his workbooks. Coincidentally, it looked quite a lot like the faun sculpture created by Greenhalgh.
When the forged piece was exhibited with other sculptures and ceramics created by Gauguin, it fit right in. It was what you might expect to find in a Gauguin exhibition.
A MILANESE PRINCESS OR A CASHIER FROM BOLTON
The title drawing made its first public appearance at an auction in 1998, selling for $22,000 as the product of “an early 19th-century German artist imitating the style of the Italian Renaissance.” That attribution was eventually challenged by experts who believed that it might be a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Oxford Professor Martin Kemp wrote his book La Bella Principessa in 2010 detailing all of the scientific analyses and connoisseurship examinations his team undertook to authenticate the piece.
His arguments are very convincing.
Professor Kemp even identified the particular girl in the drawing as Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan and the person who commissioned da Vinci’s The Last Supper. After hearing all of this great attribution news, the owner of La Bella Principessa declined an offer of eighty million dollars for it. Various newspaper accounts at the time placed a value for the piece of up to one hundred and sixty million dollars.
Then, in 2015, forger Shaun Greenhalgh contended in his just-released book, A Forger’s Tale, that he created the drawing in the late 1970s based on a cashier named “Sally” who worked the till at the Bolton Co-op.
Of course, the artwork has its own Wikipedia page.
Greenhalgh claims that he was working on his craft like many artists do by mimicking the style of Renaissance artists. He decided to do a period piece depicting a young woman in the dress and hair netting associated with that time:
I drew this picture in 1978 when I worked at the Co-op. The ‘sitter’ was based on a girl called Sally who worked on the check-outs in the retail store bolted onto the front of the warehouse where I also worked. Despite her humble position, she was a bossy little bugger and very self-important. If you believe in reincarnation, she may well once have been a Renaissance princess – she certainly had the attitude and self-belief of such a person.
A Forger’s Tale, at p. 353. He claims to have sold his drawing “for less than the effort that went into it to a dealer in Harrogate in late 1978.” Id. Greenhalgh states that he sold it as his own work, although it lacked a signature or other identifying mark. He admitted in his book that he sometimes sold obvious replicas as his own work knowing that unscrupulous buyers would turn around and market them as work done by artists you read about in Art books.
THE ARGUMENTS BACK AND FORTH
Both Professor Martin Kemp and artist-forger Shaun Greenhalgh provide very convincing arguments. Without Greenhalgh’s claim coming out in 2015, it is almost certain that Professor Kemp’s authentication in 2010 would have won the day. Rather than provide a word-for-word copy of the arguments in both books, here is a summary of the main points:
THE FINGERPRINT DISPUTE
At the time that Professor Kemp was conducting tests on La Bella Principessa, a self-taught fingerprint specialist named Peter Paul Biro had caused a splash in the art world, having matched fingerprints on unknown art pieces to known samples from Jackson Pollock and other important artists.
When finger and palm prints were found on the purported da Vinci drawing, Professor Kemp understandably sought out Biro’s services.
The forensic specialist duly examined the drawing and concluded that the prints on it had characteristics similar to those of Leonardo da Vinci. This is the type of evidence that would convict a murderer.
Surely, it was enough to authenticate a drawing!
A problem came up when The New Yorker ran a piece on Biro about how he was finding fingerprints that matched famous artists on paintings that were later determined to have not been painted by those famous artists.
For example, Biro’s most famous find involved a supposed Pollock drip painting. This discovery became an integral part of the documentary Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? The story is that a lady bought a large painting for $5.00 at a thrift store because she liked the colors. A person who chanced by the work said it could be one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Enter Peter Paul Biro to find a fingerprint belonging to the artist on the five-dollar thrift store purchase.
Except that the painting was made with acrylic paint, which Pollock had not been known to use.
Other questions have been raised about Biro’s work, although he still is employed in this niche profession. When confronted about his conclusions with regard to the da Vinci drawing, Biro admitted that he could be wrong.
HOW TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY
How would you resolve the dispute? Shaun Greenhalgh suggests an answer in his book A Forger’s Tale. If you recall, he claims to have found a large piece of old vellum in an antique shop and scraped off the writing on it and drew on the “hair” side. It seems unlikely that Leonardo da Vinci would go to the trouble of drawing on the hair side of a piece of vellum to render a portrait of his patron’s daughter when he could simply flip over the vellum and use the side that would be perfect for his drawing. Moreover, it seems unlikely that da Vinci would have used a second-hand piece of vellum for such an important patron.
But the drawing is not within our reach.
Since we cannot examine the vellum, we have to find another way to solve the mystery. One possible solution is to find the “Sally” who worked in the Bolton Co-op in the late 1970s. Remember, Greenhalgh claimed to have based his drawing on a girl named Sally.
FINDING “SALLY”
That’s what we set out to do. If we could find a picture of the lady as she looked in the relevant time period, along with some proof that she worked at the Bolton Co-op, the mystery is basically solved. This is the front page of The Bolton News from Tuesday, April 2, 2019:
As you can see, the upper right corner of page one contains the very picture we have been discussing. That’s because we contacted The Bolton News about advertising a reward for information leading to the identity of this lady. Here is what that advertisement looked like on page five of that day’s issue:
This is a close-up of the actual advertisement:
A couple of brilliant artists agreed to provide “age progression” sketches to help with the project. They included my Sister and daily kos’ own GlastoSara. What a fantastic job! They have also become keen on solving this mystery.
Finally, the newspaper ad department must have contacted the news department because we were approached by a reporter. He wrote a story that appeared on page three of The Bolton News:
THE NEXT STEP
The advertisement ran its course today, and we’ve had two serious responses. Each has their own “angle” to find the identity of the mystery woman. We’ve already attempted contact with Mr. Greenhalgh himself.
Bolton’s population in 1980 was approximately 262,000. Only sixteen kilometers away, Manchester had a population of 460,000; Wigan, about fourteen kilometers from Bolton, had a population of 308,000 in 1980. We’re looking for a needle in a million-needle haystack.
So, what should we do next?