A top secret operation last night saw millions of pounds worth of priceless masterpieces removed from the collections of galleries and museums around the UK. In a further twist, the seven paintings – all by celebrated British Artists – have been switched for copies.

The heist has been coordinated by Sky Arts, with permission from the galleries, to launch a month-long national art competition for a new TV series called Fake! The Great Masterpiece Challenge. Only the museum curators, the production team from IWC Media, and presenters Giles Coren and art historian Rose Balston, know which pictures are real and which have been replaced.

Throughout July, members of the public of all ages and experience are invited to use their detective skills to spot the seven copies hiding in plain sight on the walls of six galleries in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London and Manchester. All seven displays will also be available for investigation online, via the competition website: skyartsfake.com

Those with a keen eye, who manage to correctly identify the ‘fakes’, stand the chance of being invited to take part in the series finale. The finalists will compete to win a specially commissioned copy of their very own.

'You don’t have to be an art historian to have a go at this,' says Phil Edgar-Jones, Director of Sky Arts, 'all you need is a sense of curiosity and an eye for detail. We wanted to tell the story of British Art with a sense of fun, and in a way that would encourage us all to take a closer and more critical look at the works of great British Artists.'

Each programme in the series will shine a light on a particular period of British Art, featuring interviews with specialist curators from each gallery and the contemporary artists who have been commissioned to secretly recreate the masterpieces from scratch. During the competition, curator-led tours of these collections are available at each gallery.

Galleries taking part:

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the fake will be hidden in a display on ‘The Art of The Stuart Courts’, including portraits of Mary Queen of Scots, James I and Charles II

At the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral, the copy will be placed amid a collection of ‘Golden Age English Portraiture’ by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney

At the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the copy will be hidden amongst paintings of ‘Animal and Sporting Art’ from the 18th and 19th centuries

At the National Museum Cardiff, the copy has been made of a ‘British Landscape’ painting hanging alongside masters such as J.M.W Turner and Richard Wilson

At the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, the imposter hides amongst the collection of ‘Victorian Narrative Painting’

Manchester Art Gallery’s popular display of ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ paintings with works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt will hide one masterpiece which is not all that it seems

Manchester Art Gallery is also creating a special display of paintings of the city by LS Lowry and Adolphe Valette; one of which will be a copy

The final of the television series will be hosted at the world’s oldest public museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where the competition will reach its climax.

Fake! The Great Masterpiece Challenge is the first Sky Arts series to be presented by Giles Coren, award-winning critic and columnist for The Times, presenter of the hit BBC series Back in Time for... and co-presenter, with Sue Perkins, of the landmark Supersizers series.

The programme is the television debut for Rose Balston, an Edinburgh-educated art historian and writer who lectures for the V&A and founded her own company, Art History UK, to run bespoke guided tours of art and architecture both in Britain and abroad.

Fake! The Great Masterpiece Challenge will be recorded throughout July and August and screened on Sky Arts in the new year, when the identity of the seven ‘fakes’ and the artists who have been commissioned to copy them will be revealed.

To enter the competition visit: www.skyartsfake.com

Five top tips to spot a fake

1. Gut instincts go first! Stand and look at the work … is there something that just feels wrong?
2. Brush up on brushwork. Just as handwriting identifies a letter writer, the brushstrokes an artist uses are unique. Compare brushstrokes between paintings purporting to be by the same artist.
3. Probe the palette! This is the range of colours an artist uses. Some colours were unavailable in the past, and this, along with the taste and fashion of the time, dictated the palette used by artists. Are there any colours that seem out of place in a particular painting?
4. Be mindful of the medium. This is the type of paint an artist uses. Acrylic paint is a relatively recent invention, and prior to this most paintings would have been in oil or tempera, painted on either on canvas or wood panels. Does the paint look right for the period?
5. And finally, the finish. The finishing touches to a painting often betray its age and authenticity. Varnish applied over a work can crack with time or become discoloured.

Five fun facts on famous fakes and copies

1. For the filming of 2006 film The Da Vinci Code, 150 paintings from the Louvre were reproduced for the London set, using digital photography. Artist James Gemmill overpainted and glazed each, even copying the craquelure and the wormholes in the frames, Source: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
2. The great Michelangelo was said to have been involved in art forgery: in 1496, he sculpted a sleeping cupid and then artificially aged it by burying it. He then sold it as ‘antiquity’, Source, Artsy.net
3. In May 2000, Sotheby’s and Christie’s realised a fake was afoot when both auction houses offered the same artwork by Gaugin in their catalogues. The scam was traced back to a New York art dealer called Ely Sakhai, who would purchase an original painting, then commission a copy to sell with the papers and provenance of the original. He would then sell the original to a separate buyer. Source: Forbes
4. It’s not just paintings that are faked, William Boyd and David Bowie tricked the art world by creating the biography and back-catalogue of a fake artist: Nat Tate, a totally imagined character whose works fetched thousands of pounds at Sotheby’s
5. Last year it was reported that two con men sold a fake painting for €1.5 million, only to find out that all the money that they received was counterfeit, Source Artnet