Voces del Prado

Counterfeits

Inmaculada Echeverría Elvira, Head of the Technical Documentation and Laboratory Section, 1985-2024

They would bring in paintings, possible counterfeits, which had been found in different collections or which they had tried to sell to Arab sheiks. I remember one special lot with a huge number of works. For some of those works you didn't even have to bother preparing the technical documentation, in some cases it was utterly impossible that they be originals. There were counterfeit El Grecos, Flemish tables... In police raids and by other means they had come across beautiful triptychs that were falser than any counterfeit work could ever be.
We could discover things by taking samples, analysing pigments, aside from the X-rays and infrared analyses. It is strange not to find a preparatory drawing below on the board used for a triptych, or we took samples and found that all the pigments were of types that were first used starting in the 19th century.
We have often come across counterfeit El Grecos. There was a time when they loved to imitate his work, they probably thought he was easier to forge because of the alleged deformities. There was nothing deformed, of course, it was just the way he painted, something wonderful and different.
What they did was reuse a canvas, a popular religious painting of no value from the 17th century, the canvas being from that century, and on that canvas they would paint an alleged El Greco. That was their trick, when they assured that the canvas was old. We would analyse the pigments and the X-rays generally showed that the canvas had been reused. In fact here we have a work donated by a man from Toledo, an Adoration of the Magi, which is supposed to be by El Greco, but was probably painted by a regular artist. Below it I recall there was a very well painted St. Anthony. What they had done was reuse the canvas for a fake Greco. We analysed it at the study many years ago. At the Prado Museum, as a donation, it has its own catalogue number and it is very helpful for teaching students about counterfeits, in this case reusing an oil painting that was of no value.