Well, I am sure it is easy to guess what happens next. After the purchase by an art dealer, the painting is cleaned, inspected by Constable experts and is attributed to Constable and sells this past January at Sotehby's NY for $5.2 million.
The article states some experts are not sure on the new attribution, and then of course goes into some of the issues and legalities of experts withholding opinions due to liability issues and the potential for litigation. Christie's states there is no clear attribution for the painting, and the Viscount Hambleden, so far, has refused to sue.
The NY Times reports
The viscountess had decided to downsize.
When Lady Hambleden, the former wife of the fourth Viscount Hambleden, moved from her stately manor to a cottage in a village outside London, she had little room, and even less desire, for the Aubusson carpets, Louis XV chairs, Regency girandoles and lesser English paintings that populated her estate.
So, in 2013, she held a kind of “Downton Abbey” tag sale at Christie’s in London. Among the 300-plus items she put up for auction was an oil sketch that copied “Salisbury Cathedral From the Meadows,” one of the best-known works of the great 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable.
“The painting was so black, so somber and a little nightmarish, with dark clouds and a ghostlike cathedral, I never considered it as important,” Lady Hambleden said in a phone interview.
Listed as the work of a Constable follower, it sold for just £3,500 (around $5,200).
But the anonymous buyer, an art dealer, had a hunch. Real Constables were often painted over during the 19th century, when their rough, seemingly unfinished quality put off prospective purchasers. So the dealer had it cleaned and took it to a leading Constable expert, Anne Lyles, a former curator at Tate Britain.
“When I first saw this sketch, newly cleaned, there was just something about the application of the paint, the texture in the sky and the expression of the light and shade — all looked promising,” she said recently in a phone interview.
In January, the painting, now deemed a true Constable by Ms. Lyles, was sold at Sotheby’s in New York. It fetched $5.2 million.
At a time when the attribution of paintings can be so litigious that many experts have retreated from the field, the startling reassessment of the “Cathedral,“ and its sudden explosion in value, provides a rare window into the often imprecise, and debate-riddled, field of identifying the authorship of artworks.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has twice changed its mind in the past four decades over whether its portrait of Philip the IV is a masterpiece by Velázquez (the current view), or a fine painting by an also-ran. Sotheby’s was sued after it sold what it had determined to be a copy of Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps” for £42,000 (about $83,000) in 2006, only to have a scholar later declare it was actually by the master himself.
This time it is Christie’s that is facing questioning over whether it bungled the attribution of a painting. “We understand that there is no clear consensus of expertise on the new attribution,” the company said in a statement.
It then provided the name of an expert who holds a different view from Ms. Lyles. “I could see no sign of Constable’s hand in the work,” said Conal Shields, an art historian and Constable scholar.
Nonetheless, some in Hambleden, an idyllic village of brick and flint cottages that was the backdrop for movies like “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and often fills on weekends with equestrians and shooting parties, say they feel aggrieved on behalf of the viscountess.
“Lady Hambleden is a lovely person — very gracious, friendly and kind,” said Steve Skowron, a neighbor of the viscountess, who was Countess Maria Carmela Attolico di Adelfia when she married William Herbert Smith, the fourth viscount, in 1955.
“She’s very well liked in the village,” he said. “She has an annual Christmas party and invites everyone over. The case of the John Constable painting is a very strange one. How can Christie’s have missed it? I think the consensus of the village is that she should sue.”
Yes, admits Lady Hambleden, 84, when she first learned the painting was by Constable, “I felt like a fool! I know it’s not my fault, but that was my first feeling.”
But she said she has no intention of suing over a work for which she had little affection and that her mother-in-law had stuffed in a cupboard for 60 years.
“It was sold under my name,” she said, “but on behalf of my children. So it would be their decision whether or not to bring legal action.”
Her sons did not respond to a number of messages seeking comment.
In the 2006 case involving Sotheby’s and Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps,” the reattribution also came after a scholar had the painting cleaned and restored.
The consignor sued, alleging negligence and breach of contract. But in January a judge ruled in Sotheby’s favor.
Karen Sanig, the head of art law at Mishcon de Reya in London, said the crux of the case wasn’t whether the painting was a Caravaggio or not.
“It all comes down to a question of whether the auction houses carried out their analysis with enough care and attention,” she said. “Which the court found they did in the circumstances.”
Ms. Lyles’s willingness to register an opinion on the Constable contrasts to the situation in the United States, where scholars and artists’ foundations, like the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, are increasingly sitting out authentication battles because of fears of being sued.
“If you lower the reputation of an artwork incorrectly, then you’re liable for damages,” said Ms. Sanig, referring to the legal concept of slander of title to goods. “We don’t have lawsuits involving artwork on the same basis in the U.K.”
Constable, who is known for his expressive brushwork, often done with a palette knife, and for mixing colors on the canvas, is now viewed as a precursor to Impressionism. But for decades after his death in 1837 his sketches were over-painted to make them more palatable to buyers who expected something more finished.
“He leaves bits of the primed canvas showing through a finished painting; he leaves these visible brush strokes; he doesn’t smooth out the tones of his colors so there’s an even gradation,” said Jonathan Clarkson, a senior lecturer in the history and theory of art at the Cardiff School of Art and Design and the author of a monograph on Constable. “And at the time people just thought this was sloppy practice, that it was because he couldn’t paint better rather than he was choosing to paint this way.”
Complicating matters: as Constable’s reputation grew, forgers and imitators picked up their pace. And one of his seven children was also an accomplished artist, whose work can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from that of his father.
So before Ms. Lyles would affix her name to a reattribution of the 18-inch-by-24-inch Hambleden “Salisbury Cathedral,” she wanted to show it played a role in the evolution of the final work, rather than being someone’s imitation, albeit with brilliant brushwork. She found several features that, to her, proved the link, including the striking way the light from the stormy sky falls on the Cathedral spire.
Sotheby’s later hired her to write the catalog entry for the sale, for an undisclosed fee. “Obviously,” she said, “I’m not going to risk putting my name to something that I don’t believe in.”
With her imprimatur as the bedrock evidence, the painting was put up for sale as a Constable at Sotheby’s Jan. 29 sale. The bidding soon surged past the high estimate of $3 million and ended light years from the high estimate that Christie’s in 2013 placed on the work — $1,200.
And even that value would have been excessive for Mr. Shields, the dissenting Constable expert: “It’s a really crass, inept painting.”
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