Foreign travellers are flogging off cheap imported copies of paintings, claiming to be the artists.

They are asking $300 for the oil paintings even though the same pictures are available on the internet for $6.50 each.

The door to door 'artist' with a work she is selling. (Right) A painting listed on a Chinese website. By SunLive and Herald on Sunday.

The scam operates with young sales staff going door-to-door with bags of oil paintings.

The Bay of Plenty is the current target area although Herald on Sunday inquiries have found Northland, Auckland and Hawke's Bay were previously hit by the same scam.

Inquiries have also exposed the huge trade in imported copied oil paintings prevalent in shops across the country and TradeMe.

SunLive General Manager and former art gallery owner Ross Brown had two visits in three months from young people with strong European accents selling similar styles of paintings.

Brown says both claimed they were the artists but backtracked when closely quizzed.

The man, who says he was Romanian, even offered to sign the painting.

When Brown asked him to pose for a photograph with the painting, the man left.

The woman, who was photographed during her sales pitch, also backtracked from her claims of painting the work, says Brown.

He says she then claimed to be one of a group of visiting art students who were selling each other's work.

Eventually, she admitted she had been given the paintings from a flat in Auckland.

SunLive trawled the internet and found a company based in China _ Doupine Ltd _ which offered cut-price oil paintings.

A company representative claimed the pictures as theirs after seeing photographs provided by Brown.

Doupine Ltd offered to provide the Herald on Sunday 100 oil paintings for $1178, including shipping.

"There are over 40,000 paintings in our stock for prompt shipment,'' says the company staff member.

Ross Brown's daughter, artist Hayley Brown, says copied oil paintings from China were hugely damaging to the local art industry.

Hayley Brown, who sells her work around the world, said publishers of prints had struggled to stamp out copying but had found it impossible to halt those doing it from China.

The copiers used original art for inspiration then produced a huge number of copies.

Last year award-winning Kiwi artist Heather Straka exhibited 50 copies of one of her paintings, after sending a digital photograph of the original to the Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen in southern China.

The result was a bewildering game of spot-the-difference, paying tribute to the high quality copying carried out in China.

Otago University art history associate professor Mark Stocker says the ``key question'' was whether the door-to-door sales staff were claiming to be the artists. "Saying `I did it' is different.''

Do you know the door-to-door sellers?

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