Identification and Provenance Research Makes a Million Dollar Difference

Richard Brooks of the London Times reports that BBC Antique Roadshow art appraiser saw a landscape painting at a recent Sotheby's sales noted as "English School" with an estimate of $16,500.0 to $25,000.00. The painting sold forfor $111,000 including buyers commission. Phillip Mould of the BBC Antiques Road Show and dealer inspected the painting and decided it was an early Gainsborough. He purchased the unidentified painting at Stoheby's which is now valued at close to $1.2 million.

Mould bid by phone in order to keep suspicion down on the painting. The provenance research was also pivotal in identifying the artist. As the Sotheby's experts failed to properly identify the painting as a Gainsborough the last sentence of the column is very telling, stating Now Sotheby’s could face having to compensate the painting’s vendor for drastically underestimating its worth.

Brooks states A vital clue for Mould, who runs an eponymously named gallery in central London, was the tiny depiction of a couple at the front of the canvas.

The expert spotted that they looked similar to a drawing Gainsborough had made of himself and his wife Margaret. Now held by the Louvre in Paris, it was created less than a year before the mystery Sotheby’s oil painting.

Working with his colleague Bendor Grosvenor, Mould set about trying to discover the painting’s provenance.

The building on the left of the picture, which shows Ipswich, a mere village in the 1740s, provided another clue.

Christchurch mansion, which is still standing, was owned by the Fonnereau family, who saw Gainsborough, a local teenager, as a promising artist and lent him money to develop his talent. “In return, Gainsborough put the Fonnereau house into his picture,” said Mould.

The BBC valuer and his team of art detectives finally turned to the painting’s records of ownership. In 1824, it was sold for £43 by Evans, a Pall Mall auction house. The vendor was George Nassau, whose father, Richard Savage Nassau, had been painted by Gainsborough in 1750 and was another family friend.

All these clues persuaded Mould to bid for the painting. The fact that its guide price was pushed up to £50,000 suggests other bidders may have also twigged that it could be a Gainsborough.

To read the London Times article, click HERE.