CHICAGO—The Paul Gauguin The Faun sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago is a fake, according to the museum. The art institute, which has had the ceramic figure in its collection for a decade, said the work is one of a spate of forgeries by the Greenhalgh family, recently sentenced for creating and selling everything from faux Assyrian stone reliefs to copies of Henry Moran paintings, the Associated Press reports. Olive and George Greenhalgh and their son, Shaun Greenhalgh, pleaded guilty earlier this year to defrauding art institutions and other buyers over the course of 17 years.

Sotheby's sold The Faun to a private dealer in 1994, and the dealer sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997. Now all three, none of whom suspected the work was a fake, are discussing what to do next. ''No one could think of any other instance in which anything like this happened here,'' the institute's director of public affairs, Erin Hogan, told the Chicago Tribune.