How can you tell if it's a fake?

Fakes and forgeries have been sold by unscrupulous salesmen for thousands of years. Even great painters have been tempted - Michelangelo was not above passing off a statuette of his own as a Roman antiquity by burying it in his garden to get an aged effect.

Yet faking is notoriously difficult to spot and is not restricted to expensive works. "Where there is mass appeal and the object can be easily replicated, the forger will be tempted," says Lars Tharp of the Antiques Roadshow.

His new book, How to Spot a Fake, is full of immensely detailed tips on furniture, pottery, silver, glass and jewellery, to stop you getting ripped off.

"One of the reasons that people find fakes so interesting is that if you watch an expert pontificating about an object, the thought that he may get it badly wrong is something that people get pleasure from," he said. "The other thing is that many of the anecdotes about how these objects were made are just rollickingly good stories."

Roy Bolton, from Phillips International Fine Art Auctioneers in Park Street, Oxford, says there are lots of fakes around but that the majority are very easy to spot because they're so badly made: "They are just not good enough and any proper antique dealer or expert can spot them a mile off.

"It's the better fakes that are a worry and no one knows how many are out there or on the market." There has been a lot of media attention recently concerning fakes. Sotheby's in London sold two armchairs for over a million which turned out to be fake. Another man was caught not only faking paintings but also faking their records in the V&A museum in London.

If fakes are discovered, the new owners return them to the auction house for the original sum, and the experts then have to chase the seller, often through the courts.

But Mr Bolton, 26, said Oxford was a fairly safe area to buy antiques, compared to say London, because its dealers and auction houses are established and few. He advised anyone wanting to buy antiques to stick to an auction house, whose experts have no vested interest in the pieces, except to get a good price for the seller, or an antique dealer registered with an antique association.

"There are lots of associations, such as LAPDA which polices its members. Its like a badge of quality," he says.

He also advises anyone thinking they have found an undiscovered masterpiece for a bargain to get it checked out by the experts first.

Lars Tharp also has a few tips for the amateur antique collector: *First, look at how the object has aged. "If it's a piece of furniture or something that has been in common daily use, common sense will lead you to look at the areas on that piece which should show wear. Look for wear where you wouldn't expect it to occur and if you find just as much wear there as elsewhere then beware. Likewise be suspicious of a uniformly spread layer of muck."

*If you are buying something from an antiques shop, write any information down. "If you're in a shop where you're trying to work out whether to buy something, make sure that whatever opinions someone gives to you verbally, from which you inform your purchase, go down on paper. If you've got a piece of paper you have the chance to prove the salesman wrong. The Trades Description Act is there to protect buyers. *A further trick to watch out for is if the object is being sold at the wrong price. "If it is being sold at what I call the in-between price - too expensive for a copy and too cheap for the real thing - then you should definitely start sounding alarm bells," says Tharp.

*Another trick a dealer could employ is pleading ignorance. "For instance, a Chinese bronze that is being sold in a furniture shop, where the chap shrugs his shoulders and says, 'Well, as you can see I don't specialise in bronzes but it appears old to me'.

Could your bit of pottery be real or a fake?

Here is an example that caught collectors out:

Clarice Cliff pottery was cheap pottery made in the 1920s and 1930s and certain ranges, such as Bizarre, now sell for hundreds of pounds. But it is easily copied and people often imagine that pieces containing the Clarice Cliff mark came from her brush.

In fact, she had a team of Bizarre girls at the factory executing the patterns.

Her signature became a general trademark on many other designs. And now Clarice Cliff pottery is being produced, quite legitimately, by Wedgwood.

The real thing is identifiable by the bright, geometric patterns in strong colours. Watch out for a Wedgwood mark which means it is a 1990s reproduction.

Antiques Roadshow: How to Spot a Fake, edited by Lars Tharp, is published by Boxtree priced £20.

Story date: Wednesday 10 November

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