Bill Pallot and Bruno Desnoues claimed chairs had adorned rooms of Marie Antoinette, in multimillion-euro con
A French furniture expert and a renowned restorer have been found guilty of conning the art world with a multimillion-euro scam in which they faked 18th-century chairs they claimed had adorned the rooms of historic figures including Marie Antoinette.
In one of the biggest forgery scandals to hit the French art world for decades, the two men duped not just wealthy collectors including a Qatari prince but also the Palace of Versailles.
The chateau, which before the French Revolution was home to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, spent more than €1.5m (£1.3m) acquiring six royal chairs that were fakes. The case was seen as extremely damaging to France’s reputation as a world centre for heritage and museum collections. After the police investigation began, in 2016 the ministry of culture ordered an audit of Versailles’s acquisitions policy.
Bill Pallot, 61, who was known as the world’s leading expert on 18th-century royal French furniture, wrote the definitive book about seats of that era and was nicknamed Père La Chaise. On Wednesday he was given a four-year suspended prison sentence and a €200,000 fine. He was also sentenced to four months in prison, which he had already served on remand after his arrest.
