The Dulwich gallery in London will challenge the public and art experts to spot the fake from a Chinese company

The Dulwich picture gallery in London is to give the public, and any art critics with the nerve, a potentially mortifying challenge.

A £120 (HK$1400) replica of a priceless painting, commissioned online from a Chinese studio that churns out masterpieces from any period and style, will be hung in the genuine frame alongside the gallery's collection of dazzling Old Master paintings this spring. The public and art experts will then be invited to pick the fake.

"The replica is excellent quality, and when it arrived we were delighted with it, but when I put the two side by side, it was a very interesting experiment. The difference was instantly apparent," said senior curator Xavier Bray.

Dulwich, the world's oldest purpose-built public gallery, with works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Tiepolo, Murillo and Poussin, is giving no hints about the size, date or subject of the painting. However, the price may be a clue: the Chinese studios charge according to the scale and complexity of the works, as the original artists did, and Doug Fishbone, the artist whose inspiration the Made In China project is, managed to argue the price down from about £150.

The painting was made by the Meishing Oil Painting Manufacture Company , where 150 artists, many art students funding their own work, toil in the style of Botticelli, Van Gogh or Picasso, for clients from across the world. Strictly speaking, the works are not fakes, since the studios are usually careful to change the size slightly from the originals. Fujian province now has hundreds of studios turning out such paintings, with the village of Dafen alone estimated to produce five million replicas a year.

Fishbone and Bray hope to visit the studio and meet the artist who made their picture, but deliberately commissioned it online, emailing the highest-resolution photograph they could create of the original, and receiving their new work by post.