Forgery.

I am in the same room with Tullos, looking at the cause of all the fuss. It is a painting of three women sitting in a meadow and, to an untrained eye, it looks genuine. Then he turns off the lights and shines a “black light” on it – an ultraviolet lamp used to analyze paintings. Under the black light, parts of the painting glow white and there are bright marks.

“See those orange spots? They might not even be oil paint. It might have been done with a paint pen,” says Tullos, “Look at the signature, you can see it is embossed as if it’s been done with pen rather than a brush, and there are scratches on the grass. He probably downloaded a digital image of the painting, glued it to this board, sanded it down and distressed it, and painted over the top.”

It quickly transpired that the Curran was not the only fake. After examining the painting, Penn looked on an online message board for museum registrars and found that “Father Arthur Scott” did not exist, and neither did his rich mother nor his sister Emily in Paris. They had just played host to Mark Augustus Landis, the man responsible for the longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.

Read the rest here.