Art historian: Successful forgeries tend to be those most recently painted  While such a phenomenon may sound counterintuitive, a forger is able to exploit current modes of aesthetics to create paintings that appeal to the eye of his or her contemporaries  This very quality, however, is what makes those paintings seem amateurish to subsequent generations
As a result, a majority of forgeries are identified as such roughly twenty-five years after their creation
What is deemed aesthetically pleasing does not change in the course of twenty-five years.