After LiveAuctioneers, now Invaluable.com: rubbish fakes

In a recent blog post, I ranted about Liveauctioneers which is swamped by (American) auction houses selling fake early modern works.

Less usual but equally problematic, they also appear on Invaluable.com. The one that caught my eye today was "Top Auction Items.com Inc" (yes, most of them don't have the most imaginative or reassuring names), selling works "by" Georges Braque and others, with certificate.

If you wonder where the above "Braque" comes from, it is a reverse and slightly modified copy of this one:

The harbour at Estaque, a finely coloured painting by Braque, has been changed into a rather psychedelic and way more simplific one. Too bad that the auction house was genuinely fooled by this of course...

And the above "Delaunay"? Well, the Eiffel Tower is a very straight copy from the below one, with then some Delaunay-like patterns added. It is at least a bit more convincing than the Braque.

I don't know why they value a weak copy of a Degas painting at $15,000 to 18,000, but at least they don't claim it is a Degas one. And so on, and so on...

Let's just finish with this ridiculous "Musée d'Orsay" label. The fakers behind this "auction house" are the same as the five houses I named in the LiveAuctioneers blog post; how hard can it be for these two sites to exclude such sellers of obvious and rather criminal fakes from their site? It should be obvious after five minutes that these are not genuine art dealers and that providing them a forum to sell their wares is not really in your or anyone elses benefit.

Oh, and you can add to Top Auction Items also the lookalike "Old School Auctions.com Inc.", the exact same company with yet another name (that's the seventh so far).

These jokers sell a very unconvincing "Henri Rousseau" from 1907, from a faker who can't even spell the name of the artist right.  This piece of criminal rubbish is estimated at $80,000 to $90,000!

They also sell the exact same Acrylic Paul Klee I posted about in my earlier blog post, and the exact same Georges Braque I showed above...


By the way, why have these sites all such a big stock of valuable "William Verdult" pieces? They have at the moment 211 Verdult paintings on this site (well, many recurring ones, as is their habit) with estimated values of up to $300,000. There doesn't seem to be much interest in him, but they are selling his works (or fakes of it) by the truckload. At least with the Braques and so on, real ones would be worth that kind of money. But these Verdult pieces? I wouldn't want them for free.

Note that Old School also tries to fake Old Masters: not just a ridiculous Rubens portrait drawing, but also an impressive number of works by "Abraham Mignon Fecit" (sic!). Yes, once one starts paying attention, it is unbelievable how many artists had the surname "fecit". Must have been one heck of a family! While the modern fakes sometimes need some familiarity with the artist to note the difference (certainly with abstract works), the older or more figurative work are much easier to spot and so far I haven't seen any that could fool any slightly discerning buyer. Doesn't make them less obnoxious or punishable of course.