Fake or Fortune? (сериал) Сезон 6 (2017)

The team are on the trail of two pictures brought to their attention by viewers, both believed to be by Paul Gauguin - one of the giants of 19th-century art. Could two lost works have surfaced in Cambridgeshire and a suburb of Manchester? Paul Gauguin is one of the most intriguing artists of late 19th-century France, a stockbroker who abandoned Paris for a bohemian life in Tahiti. He is certainly one of the most valuable - his Tahitian masterpiece When Will you Marry? sold for $200 million in 2015, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold. A woman in Manchester thinks she may have inherited Gauguin's very first pencil sketch for this iconic painting. If it's genuine, this fragile relic of the artist's time in Tahiti could be worth over £200,000, but its authenticity has been called into doubt. To raise the stakes even further, the team are on the trail of a second possible Gauguin - a still life depicting a bowl of fruit. A Cambridge-based man has spent years trying to prove that his oil painting, inherited from a family friend, is a genuine work that dates back to the crucial moment when Gauguin discovered the style which made him famous. The team have got a battle on their hands because the authenticity of both works has been called into question by leading auction houses. The quest to find out the truth about the two pictures takes them to Bilbao, Brittany, Paris and the Imperial War Museum as they delve into the story of the sketch owner's grandfather, a German art historian who fled the Nazis for a new life in England. But as the investigation progresses, they stumble across a forgery scandal that is only beginning to come to light.

The team embark on a long-distance investigation to Australia as they try to prove that an online purchase from an English auction site is a lost work by Tom Roberts, considered one of Australia's greatest artists. When Australian couple Joe and Rosanna Natoli came across a painting bearing the signature Tom Roberts on the website of an English auction site, they couldn't quite believe it. Roberts is considered one of Australia's most important artists - a pioneer of Australian Impressionism whose works hangs in major galleries. Even minor pictures sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds and the painting, a dramatic image of an anguished artist titled Rejected, had all the hallmarks of a lost early work. After a fierce bidding war, Joe bought the painting, shipped it back to Brisbane and presented it to a leading expert on the artist's work - only to be told that it was not genuine. This was just the beginning of Joe and Rosanna's troubles. Three years after they bought the painting, Joe's business went bankrupt and the family lost their home. Joe still firmly believes that his original hunch was right, and he has asked Fake or Fortune for help. As an early work by Tom Roberts, the picture could be worth over £200,000. If the team can prove that Joe was right all along, it might give the family a chance to secure a home of their own. The team believes some of the answers to the mystery lie in Tom Roberts's time in England, where he trained at the Royal Academy in the 1880s. The quest for further proof takes them to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, where they encounter several alarming fakes. Can the team find enough evidence to earn the painting a second hearing?

The team try to find out whether a beautiful English landscape is a work of national importance - a lost masterpiece by John Constable and quite possibly an alternative view of his greatest work, The Hay Wain. Now owned by a British businessman, the painting appears to have all the hallmarks of Constable's sketches - his more impressionistic, preparatory works. If genuine, it could be worth at least £2 million. There are few more iconic paintings in British art than Constable's The Hay Wain. A picture with a direct link to this milestone in British art would be the holy grail for any collector or museum and the picture appears to depict the very same scene, Willy Lott's cottage on the banks of the River Stour. The trouble is, Constable is one of the most faked artists of the 19th century, and the painting has a chequered past. Thirty years ago, several top Constable experts decided that it was not an authentic work. It is a particularly personal case for Philip Mould, who briefly owned the painting in the past but had to let it slip through his fingers after he failed in his attempts to prove its authenticity. Now scientific analysis techniques have moved on and neglected records can be searched more deeply online, can the latest advances and deep research into the picture's provenance turn up enough evidence to prove that it is a genuine work by John Constable?