An Art World Mystery Worthy of Leonardo

Featured on nytimes.com

For people who buy, sell or collect old art, the hope of unearthing a new work by a big name is a motivating dream. And names don’t come much bigger than that of Leonardo da Vinci.

For eight years, the Canadian collector Peter Silverman, who lives in Paris, has been trying to convince the art world that a drawing of an aristocratic young woman he bought for around $20,000 is a long-lost masterpiece by Leonardo, potentially worth as much as $150 million. Now the controversy surrounding the drawing, “La Bella Principessa,” has taken a new turn. Shaun Greenhalgh, the notorious British art forger who is thought to have created fakes that spanned centuries of art history, has declared it to be his work.

Mr. Greenhalgh says the subject was not an Italian noblewoman, but a check-out girl named Alison who worked at a supermarket in Bolton outside Manchester in northwest England.

That sensational claim emerged on Nov. 29 in an article in The Sunday Times by the art critic Waldemar Januszczak, who is part of a consortium that has just published a memoir by Mr. Greenhalgh, “A Forger’s Tale.” Mr. Greenhalgh, who in 2007 was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison on forgery-related charges, was responsible for a number of well-documented fakes, including a Gauguin sculpture of a faun bought by the Art Institute of Chicago and an Egyptian alabaster sculpture of a princess purchased by the Bolton Museum. Now he has added “La Bella Principessa” to the list.

Mr. Januszczak says Mr. Greenhalgh was about 20 years old when he made “La Principessa,” while he was working at the supermarket in the late 1970s.

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