The Faun - Background To The Forgery

Background To The Forgery

In the early to mid 1990s, Shaun Greenhalgh was predominately involved with paintings. He sold a Samuel Peploe, but in particular he was successful with his Thomas Morans. He sold one to Bolton Museum in 1994 and at New York auctions in 1995 he sold seven, and is reckoned to have produced as many as 40. Yet at the same time, he must have been researching the possibility of at least one Gauguin work. As well as The Faun, he is known to have also forged a Gauguin vase, possibly at a later date.

Gauguin is significantly less well regarded for his sculptures than for his paintings. It is likely that Greenhalgh was aware of that, and saw it as an opportunity. Forgers typically focus on the lower priced artworks of major artists, for though they offer fewer returns, they are subject to much less scrutiny. Moreover, Gauguin himself had left just enough of a record to indicate he may have been interested in producing such an item, a drawing of a faun sculpture in a sketchbook from 1887. This was backed up by suggestive historical events: at a Gauguin exhibition in 1906, a "faun ceramic" was displayed, and another listing for a work entitled "Faun" was found for a 1917 Nunes and Fiquet gallery exhibition. Scholars in the 1960s dutifully recorded these possibilities. Even in 2007, experts were still uncertain about how many ceramic sculptures Gauguin had actually produced. Estimates range from 55 to 80. Of these, between 30 and 60 are thought to be lost or destroyed.

Greenhalgh was adept at obtaining and working in a wide variety of materials, and not only used a stoneware that fitted in well with what Gauguin demonstrably used, he managed to produce something "which had no obvious features to reveal it as a modern fake". At 47 cm, it was modest, yet typically sized for a Gauguin. The gallery caption of The Faun read "unglazed stoneware with touches of gold gilding". Use of the gold gilding was deft; it was similar to investments Greenhalgh had made on previous forgeries. In 1991, for example, he is thought to have melted down genuine Roman silver coins when reconstructing the Risley Park Lanx. Any anomalies in The Faun that were detected were explained away.