Fakes at London's National Gallery

I posted a short while ago about London's National Gallery exhibition on fakes and frauds within the collection. It was a short video, which is still on the Appraiser Worskhops blog home page (click HERE to visit).  Martin Gayford writing for Bloomberg has a good preview of the show. He does state there is a lot of scientific information, so I assume there is less connoisseurship and more forensic evidence of the fakes and frauds. Proving that at combination of both are necessary in determining the artisan and strong authentication, as it should be in national museums.

Gayford writes

The show amounts to a sequence of studies conducted by the conservation department, the police pathology unit of art history. The subjects are works in the museum’s own collection, and the case files -- old and new -- reveal the countless ways in which pictures can be disguised, confused, doctored, misunderstood and just plain faked.

The deliberate, criminal forger isn’t the only villain in this plot. Equally important sowers of confusion are art dealers, ever hopeful of putting their goods in the best possible light.

Take for instance Giorgione’s “The Sunset,” one of the better-known pictures in the collection. Most of the painting is (probably) by Giorgione, one of the most mysterious and contentious of artists. Yet the St. George killing a dragon in the middle distance is the handiwork of an early 20th-century restorer.

At that spot there is a gap in the original paint surface -- and no evidence of what Giorgione might have put there. So this isn’t exactly a fake, though it was definitely “improved” to enhance its marketability.

A lot of that has gone on, and still does. There are other pictures on show in the same category, among them a picture purchased as a Holbein. It’s an authentic 16th-century work, but it has been discreetly altered to look more Holbein-like.

It sounds like a very interesting exhibition. To read the full article, click HERE.