Talk about a case of mistaken identity. A French museum solely dedicated to painter Étienne Terrus recently discovered that more than half of its entire collection was fake. The eighty two fraudulent works had cost over $193,000, reports BBC, and staff at the museum were unaware that the art wasn’t authentic until a visiting historian alerted them to it.
The council in Elne, which is Terrus’ birthplace, had bought the paintings, drawings and watercolors for the museum over a 20-year period. Several months ago, Eric Forcada, an art historian, contacted the museum to express his doubts about the authenticity of many of the items. So the museum gathered a committee of experts from the cultural world. The group examined each piece and concluded that 82 of them had not been painted by Terrus.
During a recent interview, the mayor of the town, Yves Barniol, said the situation was “a disaster” and apologized to those who had visited the museum in good faith.
Terrus was born in 1857 in Elne and died there in 1922. He spent most of his life in Roussillion. One clue to the forgeries: some of the paintings depict buildings that were not built until after Terrus’ death. The town has officially filed a complaint against those who ordered, painted or sold the fake paintings.
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