The Greenhalgh 'Garden Shed' Forgeries
A family that faked 5,000 years of art history from a council house
From a garden shed behind a Bolton council house, Shaun Greenhalgh and his elderly parents forged artworks spanning 5,000 years — most famously the 'Amarna Princess', which Bolton Museum bought for £440,000 as a 3,300-year-old Egyptian masterpiece.
It was one of the most audacious and improbable frauds in British history. For nearly two decades, Shaun Greenhalgh produced an astonishing range of fakes — Egyptian statues, Roman silver, Assyrian reliefs, Impressionist paintings, and modern sculpture — in a garden shed behind the family's council house in Bolton.
His parents, George and Olive Greenhalgh, both in their eighties, handled the business: inventing provenance, approaching museums and auction houses, and playing the part of unassuming pensioners who had inherited curiosities.
Their masterpiece was the 'Amarna Princess', an alabaster figure they passed off as a 3,300-year-old Egyptian sculpture. Bolton Museum, advised by experts and with public funds, bought it in 2003 for £440,000. The family's undoing came from a set of fake Assyrian reliefs riddled with spelling errors in the cuneiform.
Shaun was jailed in 2007. The case stunned the art world: not because of the money, but because of the sheer range and quality of work produced by a self-taught forger with library books and a shed — raising uncomfortable questions about how museums authenticate what they buy.