Yves Chaudron

Yves Chaudron was a French master art forger who is alleged to have copied images of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as part of Eduardo de Valfierno's famous 1911 Mona Lisa painting theft.

Theft of the Mona Lisa
Valfierno's account relayed by reporter Karl Decker, in The Saturday Evening Post in 1932. According to Decker, Valfierno had provided details of the theft in confidence; to be published only after his death.

According to that account, in 1910, Valfierno had conspired with Chaudron to steal the Mona Lisa and produce copies of the painting which would then be sold to private buyers. The plan had been to sell each copy as the "original" while the location of the real painting was unknown.

Chaudron, "spent the winter of 1910 creating clones of Leonardo's great portrait" while Valfierno made arrangements to steal the real painting. In the early hours of 21 August 1911, Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia and two accomplices carried the Mona Lisa out of the museum covered in a painter's smock.

Chaudron's copies
6 Chaudron copies had already been sent to the United States ahead of the theft and while the stolen original remained in France, Valfierno followed his fakes and sold each for up to US$300,000. The original remained hidden for two years until one of Peruggia's accomplices tried to sell it in Florence, Italy. A museum administrator there was suspiscious, reported the attempted sale and the accomplice and Peruggia were arrested. The original Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre in 1914.

Later life
According to Valfierno's account, Chaudron retired to the countryside only months after the theft and the completion of the forgeries. He continued to produce forgeries of other artists' work but never to the same scale as his work related to the Mona Lisa theft. As Valfierno's account was only released in 1932 (some years after Chaudron's death), the forger was never arrested or tried and his role in the theft was effectively unknown during his lifetime.