Yet, when the National Gallery exhibited 40 fakes, copies and imitations in an exhibition in 2010, the gallery’s director at the time, Nicholas Penny, said he was proud to own fakes.
Concerns over whether Peter Paul Rubens painted the Samson and Delilah picture in the National Gallery have been reignited by new evidence.
The gallery's mistaken acquisitions have at times paid off: some paintings thought to have been by unknown artists or copies of genuine works have since turned out to be the real thing, created by the hand of the greatest Master Painters.
Rachel Billinge, a research associate in the gallery's conservation department at the time, said she sometimes looked upon the forgeries with more admiration than the works by their genuine counterparts.
One of the gallery's most embarrassing acquisitions was A Man with a Skull, bought in 1845 as a work by Holbein, although even at the time many experts doubted the attribution.
