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- Multiple times, throughout history, paintings have sold to eager buyers only for them to later discovered they'd purchased a fake.
- In fact, a museum in France found out that nearly half of its collection was fake and an art dealer in New York admitted to selling 60 forged artworks.
- A famous portrait of William Shakespeare titled the "Flower portrait" turned out to be a fake.
A rare work of art can rack up a hefty price tag. But when some experts estimate that about 20% of paintings owned by major museums may not be authentic, it can be tough to know if what you're paying for is the real deal.
Below we've listed some of the most notorious art scams in history where the owners thought they had something authentic but found out their work was forged.
A museum in France found out that nearly half of its collection was fake.
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In 2018, a guest curator working on a grand re-opening at the Terrus museum in Elne, France, noticed that a work claiming to be by artist Etienne Terrus depicted buildings constructed after his death in 1922.
The museum launched an investigation and subsequently confirmed, according to The Telegraph, that that painting was not the only apparent fake. In fact, they found that 82 of the 140 works in the museum were not by Terrus.
The state-owned museum had apparently bought many of the paintings for £140,000, or about $183,000, over the years (NPR put the number at $200,000), while others were given as gifts. The city's mayor Yves Barniol called it "a catastrophe," according to The Telegraph.
The city launched formal complaints and police attempted to track down the source of the forgery, but never solved the mystery.
An entire New York art gallery was closed over allegations of selling fraudulent paintings.
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Knoedler & Company art gallery, which had been around for 165 years, closed after allegations of selling fraudulent paintings surfaced. Investigators discovered that paintings supposedly done by classical artists were actually made by one person in Queens, New York, according to The Washington Post.
Art dealer Glafira Rosales pleaded guilty to knowingly selling 60 forged art works to New York galleries for $80 million.
The Washington Post identified Pei Shen Qian as the alleged artist of the forged painting, though he told them he knew nothing about the frauds.
The frauds resulted in various lawsuits, including one from Domenico De Sole, chairman of the board at Sotheby's Auction House, after he and his family spent $8.3 million on a painting claiming to be by the artist Mark Rothko.
An artist named Han van Meegeren sold his paintings passed off as 17th-century works.
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Han van Meegeren was a Dutch artist who fooled the art world in the 1940s by selling paintings claiming to be newly discovered works by the artist Jan Vermeer, according to NPR.
Van Meegeran produced works which he then aged in a pizza oven to make them appear authentic, according to NPR. His work fooled many people, including Nazi top brass Hermann Goering. He made the equivalent of $30 million off of these paintings, according to NPR.
He was caught in 1945 and sentenced to a year in prison in 1947, but he died two months after his sentencing, having never served a day.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider