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A gallery has admitted ripping out pages from a Lucian Freud exhibition catalogue and selling them as original works of art on eBay.
The Rockingham Gallery, which boasts it has hundreds of authentic works by some of the world’s greatest artists, was last week selling ‘Amazing Lucian Freud Etchings’ for up to £150 each.
It was also offering what it describes as ‘original works by David Hockney, Henry Moore and Sir Peter Blake’.
But a Mail on Sunday investigation has established that the Freuds are actually pages from an exhibition catalogue printed in 1991.
Lawyers acting for the artist’s estate have now ordered the gallery to remove all of the images from both its eBay ‘shop’ and its own website.
The gallery, which is based in Market Harborough in Leicestershire, had been inviting customers to bid for what it called ‘Vintage Freud Etchings’, with asking prices of between £50 and £150.
The gallery described the ‘works’, which included Girl Sitting, Man Posing, Naked Man On A Bed and Ill In Paris, as ‘vintage etchings’ and ‘outstanding prints’ at ‘unbelievable prices’.
It assured customers they could be confident they were buying from a genuine gallery.
But experts last night said the descriptions were grossly misleading and insisted that a genuine etching by Freud, whose sitters included the Queen and Kate Moss, would sell for between £10,000 and £145,000.
Frankie Rossi, director of Marlborough Fine Art, the country’s leading dealer in Freud etchings, said: ‘I think it’s outrageous what this gallery has done. I take exception to the description of the works as vintage etchings because they are neither vintage nor etchings.
All Lucian’s etchings, unlike these images, were numbered, signed and registered. If this gallery wants to sell pages from an exhibition catalogue, it should label them honestly.’
Art dealer Philip Mould, who co-presents BBC1’s Fake Or Fortune? with Fiona Bruce, said: ‘I think the gallery was clearly trying to pass the works off as original by implication. Unfortunately, this is becoming all too common because of the semi-anonymous nature of online sales. It is called trapping and people get very excited because they think they have found something special. It is like a virus sweeping through the art world.’
All of the Freud images were taken from the catalogue Lucian Freud: The Complete Etchings 1946-1991, which was produced for a retrospective of Freud’s work at the Thomas Gibson Fine Art gallery in London in 1991. The catalogue, originally priced at £25, has high-quality embossed pages.
Simon Hall, owner of the Rockingham Gallery, last night said he had never set out to deceive anyone and insisted the description of the works as vintage etchings was a mistake.
He said: ‘This should not have happened and we should have described the images as “after an etching”.
‘The images are from the 1991 exhibition catalogue. We sell the actual page. I still think it’s fair to describe it as a print because a print is anything that is reproduced on paper.’ Mr Hall said the Freud works had been fairly priced and some sold for as little as 99p. He also insisted all the other works on the gallery’s home page and in the eBay shop had been properly labelled.
Hugh Gibson, a director of Thomas Gibson Fine Art, said: ‘When we produced this rather fancy catalogue in 1991, we could never have foreseen something like this.’
Deborah Rider, a senior solicitor with the law firm Goodman Derrick, which represents the Freud estate, confirmed the gallery had been asked to take down the images. She said: ‘Our client does take very seriously any activity which may be deemed to be a breach of copyright.’
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