"This one really shook me, how close it was to the real thing," said Mary Landa, collections manager at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, where most of the Wyeth records are kept. "At first glance, it looked real."
Art and antiquity crime is a $6 billion annual business globally, according to the FBI Art Crime Team, which this week also announced the recovery in California of two dozen Mesopotamian-era artifacts looted from Iraq.
Art forgery is as old as art.
"It's been with us forever - the Romans faked Greek art," said Nina Burleigh, author of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land. "Museums around the world are filled with forgeries."
Wherever there's a market for art, there's a market for forgeries, Burleigh said.
Museum and antiquity thefts often draw headlines, the most recent being the $50 million Van Gogh theft in Cairo. But forgery is an equally confounding problem, said Doylestown lawyer Robert Goldman, a former national art-crime prosecutor.
"It's easier to commit fraud than to steal from a museum," Goldman said.
The latest Wyeth caper began in April, when Christie's advertised the sale of Snow Birds at an auction planned for May 20.
The 1970 painting, a watercolor and pencil on paper, was offered as Lot 59. The listing said it had been acquired by a Connecticut collector in 1972, was sold to an unidentified dealer in the early 1980s, and later was acquired by the present owner.
The offering caught the eye of a dealer in Seattle, who knew the listed provenance was incomplete. He knew that because he had recently sold the painting to someone in Washington state.
Suspicious, the Seattle dealer called Christie's, which contacted Landa in Chadds Ford.
