Professor of a state university selling forgeries to public museum (Versailles) should go straight to jail.
I would think a museum would be better at spotting forgeries.
A museum would rely on the expert opinion of a professor of art history from Paris.
This choad abused a position of trust in order to pull off his con.
Not that it's not a shitty thing to do, but it also seems like the last person you would rely on for the value of an object is the person selling it to you.
He had an accomplice make the furniture, presumably acting as a broker/authenticator.
Depending on how much they sold the stuff for, aged repros probably don't net nearly as much as the forgeries did. ancient chairs still in pristine condition, I could see going for a million or so. Reproductions? probably in the tens of thousands. figuring a 20k repo, you'd have to sell 50 of just to break a million, and that's ignoring costs of production, which is 50x more, give or take.
a quick google suggests something between 750k and 1.25 mil...
"And what is your evidence?"
(submits photo)
"Guilty."
You're telling me the photo isn't of a wax figure?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A leading French art expert is to face trial on charges of forgery for building furniture that he falsely claimed to be from the 18th century and that was sold at high prices to buyers who included the Palace of Versailles.
Bill Pallot, an expert on 18th-century French furniture, is charged with implementing the scam between 2008 and 2015, in one of the biggest forgery scandals to rock the art world in recent years.
Pallot, 59, with his distinctive long hair and three-piece suits, is a familiar figure in France due to his regular publications and media appearances.
He was nicknamed “Père la chaise” – a play on Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery and the phrase “father of the chair”.
He is accused along with his fellow defendant Bruno Desnoues, a prominent woodcarver, of producing and selling chairs from 2007 to 2008 that were claimed to be historic pieces that had adorned the rooms of the likes of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, and Marie Antoinette.
A former director of the Louvre museum, Jean-Luc Martinez, was charged last year with conspiring to hide the origin of archaeological treasures that investigators suspect were smuggled out of Egypt in the chaos of the Arab spring.
The original article contains 297 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 31%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is that the new Doctor Who?
This was a plot in New Amsterdam starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau where he was an immortal
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