Yes, it's legal to paint copies; it's selling them as real that's illegal (you don't need to make it obviously a copy). The artist claims he didn't pass them o

Yes, it's legal to paint copies; it's selling them as real that's illegal (you don't need to make it obviously a copy). The artist claims he didn't pass them off as real, but that's his defense. He's been linked to forgeries before and the police obviously don't believe him. There's a great episode of Nova from 1991 called "The Fine Art of Faking It" [0] where they not only follow the case of a man convicted of forging prints, but they track down the German farmer who painted a copy of a Matthias Gruenwald painting that ended up being presented as the real thing to the Cleveland Museum of Art (who paid a million dollars for it). He really did just paint a copy and artificially age it for a couple thousand dollars for a friend down the road; it only sold as real after several more sales for increasing amounts. The farmer was never accused of wrongdoing. The best part: they pay him the same amount to do it again, and he does, on camera, demonstrating everything he did to make it look authentically 400 years old (besides being an almost perfect copy of a Northern Renaissance master's painting). For example, to add cracks to the painting, he takes the canvas off the frame and rubs it back and forth on the corner of a table, then rubs a thin wash of brown paint over the whole thing. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/17/news/review-television-how-fake-art-is-created-and-discovered-and-why.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/17/news/review-television-ho...