An expert guide to copying artwork.

Whether it’s How To Steal A Million starring Ms Audrey Hepburn and Mr Peter O’ Toole, or The Thomas Crown Affair starring Mr Steve McQueen and Ms Faye Dunaway, Hollywood shows us that crimes involving art are often thought of as the most glamorous and romantic of all.

But the true story of the world’s most prolific art forger begins not in Florence, Paris, Rome or London, but Bolton, a former industrial town in the north of England. It doesn’t star handsome playboys and charming heiresses but Mr Shaun Greenhalgh, an unassuming man who fooled major museums and collectors while working out of his mum and dad’s garden shed, using tools and materials bought from local high-street shops such as Argos. With his octogenarian parents helping him sell the fakes, the “gang” dubbed the “Artful Codgers” by UK tabloids were more like something from an Ealing comedy than anything dreamed up by Hollywood.

Written while Mr Greenhalgh was serving a four-year prison sentence, new book A Forger’s Tale: Confessions Of The Bolton Forger reveals how without any formal art education to speak of, the author was able to make great institutions such as The British Museum and The Chicago Institute of Art believe that his Egyptian figures, Roman silver, Renaissance drawings, Gauguin figurines, Lalique glass, Hepworth sculptures and Lowry paintings were the real deal.

While this tale doesn’t have the heady glamour of Hollywood fantasy, it does offer us a different kind of romance: that of working-class ingenuity and impish brilliance, from a man totally and utterly besotted by the art he so so skilfully and artfully forged. As Mr Waldemar Januszczak writes in the foreword, “This is not a book about art as a hobby… it’s a book about art as a motor force. The only thing.”

It is also full of advice and detail, including a handy glossary of technical terms. Did you know, for instance, that a “pug mill” is a machine for mixing clay? Such detail is helpful not only for wannabe master forgers (though let’s be clear, we at MR PORTER in no way condone such pursuits) but artists of all stripes and, indeed, art lovers everywhere. Scroll down for some of the key insights from the book.

Upon his arrest in 2006, Mr Greenhalgh was asked by police officers how long it took him to forge “Cliffs of Green River” by Mr Thomas Moran, to which he replied, “10-15 minutes”. He was subsequently accused by one of the DCs for boasting during his interviews, when in actual fact, any artist will know, “a watercolour is a spontaneous thing”. Later on in the book, he elaborates: “Whenever I start a copy... I feel it best to run through the salient points in my head, get the stages prioritised, then blast away at it without much further thought. In this way, I hope to capture the spontaneity of the original.”

The police do not come off well in this memoir: “One especially strange notion they had was that the Risley Lanx [a Roman plate] had been made by melting down genuine Roman silver coins. This, coming from detectives of the Art & Antiques Squad of no less a place than Scotland Yard, beggared belief. If they had stopped for a minute to consider the most readily available Roman silver coin, the late antique silique, a coin of no more than 3g... costs over £50 each, and that the Risley Lanx weighed in at approximately 4.5kg…”

On drawing, Mr Greenhalgh gives this advice: “Most people say that they are useless at drawing. I think the main reason for this is that when confronted with a subject and a blank page they try to see the whole page at once. What I like to do, instead is to pick a point in the subject… and draw that bit, then another bit radiating out from it… Then when all the bits are done, stand back and there it is – or not.”

Using this simple approach, he claims to have a forged a masterpiece which is still in dispute today. Currently held in a private collection, “La Principessa” is still believed by many experts to be a 15th-century portrait by Mr Leonardo da Vinci, but Mr Greenhalgh says: “I drew this picture in 1978 when I worked at the Co-op [a UK supermarket]. The ‘sitter’ was based on a girl called Sally who worked on the checkouts.”

**A Forger’s Tale: Confessions of the Bolton Forger (Allen & Unwin) by Mr Shaun Greenhalgh is out 1 June **