It is the romantic heartland of popular Parisian art, but now the slopes of Montmartre are seething with rebellion as local painters say that they are being forced out by fakes from China and Eastern Europe.

The artists of Montmartre — the quarter of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso — should be enjoying a boom. Every year ten million tourists make the trek to the home of Belle Époque bohemia, up the hill from the Moulin Rouge cabaret.

With its romantic history and lanes of faux period cafés and souvenir shops, the site competes with Notre Dame and the Eiffel tower as the city’s most visited spot.

To the anger of the 300 licensed artists of the Place du Tertre, behind the Sacré Coeur basilica, millions of euros worth of foreign-made oils and water-colours of Paris are flying out of surrounding “galleries” while visitors are shunning more expensive originals by the resident painters.

“We cannot survive, because we can’t compete with the low cost of the prints — which is what they are,” Dorothée Dabrou, the president of one of the three associations that represent the city-certified painters of the Place du Tertre, told The Times yesterday.

As a sea of tourists jostled by her easel, she added: “People don’t realise they are being sold a reproduction. They are delighted because they think they have scored a bargain.”

The machine-produced canvases, often finished with hand-touches, range from kitsch scenes of the Eiffel tower to imitations of Cézanne and the Fauvists. Most use the giclée technique, in which oils are sprayed on a production line in a way that looks superficially like hand painting. Prices range from €18 (£14) for small oils to €500 for large portraits and landscapes. The locally painted scenes of Paris life and architecture sell for about three times more.

None of the pseudo-Parisian canvases in more than a dozen gallery-style shops yesterday indicated their origin or that they were mechanical reproductions. They often carried realistic paint smudges and French-type signatures such as “Lelage” and “Paul” and the widely used “Burnett”. “Burnett must be a common name in China,” a gallery assistant joked. Staff in the galleries were reluctant to talk about the origin of the paintings. “Little here comes from France,” said a salesman at the Défense d’Afficher gallery and shop, which sells miniature Eiffel towers and canvases of unidentified origin. In another outlet they acknowledged after five minutes of denial that the paintings were not originals, but the assistant added: “The customers know that they get what they pay for.” Owners declined to speak.

The painters on the square are especially indignant because, they say, some of the Oriental fakes are copied from the work that they produce — which according to the official city regulations must all be original.

“They come and take photographs of our paintings and send the images to China where they are reproduced,” said Nicole Mathieu, 57, who has exhibited on the square for decades. To file a lawsuit for fraud, a local artist recently paid €500 to a shop for a machine-made copy of one his works, signed “Jani Dulac”.

The gallery issued a certificate of origin but gave the game away with a misspelling that called the work “Saint Garmain” instead of Saint Germain. The case is pending.

Made in China

— In April a raid on a factory in southern China revealed that “Free Tibet” flags were made there

— The World Health Organisation estimates that 10 per cent of drugs are counterfeit — with China the biggest source. Toxic substances have been found in many products, including a cough syrup that killed 115 people in Panama in the 1990s

— Chinese counterfeiting even stretches to books. In 2002 Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk up to the Dragon was released — purportedly by J. K. Rowling

— In 2003 White House staff had to conceal “Made in China” stamps on goods that George Bush posed with during a speech on US industry

Sources: CBS, BBC, China Daily, CNN

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