There are many examples in the history of art forgery that confirm the genius of forgers, whose craftsmanship could rival that of the authors of the originals. Copies of paintings by famous masters of the Renaissance and Baroque are especially often found in museums or private collections as authentic works. In many cases, art historians and specialists must conduct painstaking research to establish a work’s authenticity.
For understandable reasons, most famous forgers are anonymous geniuses who created works to collectors’ commissions. Bolesławiec also had such a forger—C. W. Ceram, the author of the famous book “Gods, Graves and Scholars,” describes the following event in the chapter “Robbers in the Valley of the Kings”:
“In the 1920s, even such an expert on ancient works of art as Julius Meier-Graefe was taken in. Somewhere in the sand /in Egypt/, unaware that a guide who was as cunning as they come had deliberately led him there, he found a small statuette. The fact that he had found it himself did not allow him to doubt the authenticity of this ‘antique.’ He therefore bribed the guide to ensure his discretion and, hiding the figurine under his jacket, returned to the hotel. Wanting to buy a suitable pedestal for the statuette, he went to a certain dealer in antiquities and on that occasion asked him what he thought of it. The dealer smiled and led me,” Julius Meier-Graefe recounted, “to the back room of his shop, opened a cabinet and showed me four or five authentic figurines, identical in every detail, each covered with ‘a thousand-year-old patina.’ They had been delivered from Bolesławiec in Silesia, but my dealer had bought them from a certain Greek agent in Cairo.” That is all Ceram says about this fact. So there was a Bolesławiec ceramicist who ingeniously forged Egyptian figurines supposedly two thousand years old, which travelled through Greece to Egypt, where tourists bought them at the market in Cairo as authentic pieces. Perhaps they still adorn the private collections of wealthy collectors today. It would be worthwhile to find out whether there is any trace of the ingenious forger from Bolesławiec, where he had his workshop, and whether any traces of him have been preserved. I fear that most ingenious forgers will remain unknown. Or perhaps someone will try to find his traces?