Authenticating Furniture

Fellow appraiser and art adivsor Xiliary Twil of Art Asset Management Group sent me an interesting article from the NY Times on furntiure authentication, including the process involved in authenticating Andrie- Charles Boulle furniture. The process and analysis of a known work was documented for use in authenticating other attributed works. The article goes on to mention other authentication processes.

The process of authenticating furniture is getting more complex and scientific, and now typically involves comparing techniques to known examples.  I recently was working with a client where there was a possibility of Nathan Lombard tall case clock with inlaid eagle. It was close, and was determined to be circle of Lombard, but things like a paneled base, molding style and differing glue blocks told that it was not of Lombard's hand.  I am pretty sure that if it was looked at 30 years ago, it would have been directly attributed to Lombard.

The NY Times reports

The decorative arts adviser William Iselin recently led a team of specialists in Paris as it dismantled an early-1700s desk made by André-Charles Boulle. The piece, commissioned for a French politician, surfaced at auction in 2014 and sold for about $3 million to a private collector. The results of the analysis will help bring clarity to a field struggling with issues of authenticity.

The desk’s tortoiseshell, brass, bronze, ebony and oak components have been peeled apart, cleaned and photographed, and the team documented tool marks on the undersides. Dendrochronology tests showed that Boulle’s workshop used wood from oaks felled in 1698.

The team has looked at about a dozen other Boulle works from private collections, and Mr. Iselin said that its specialists are determining how to make the studies publicly accessible. Their documentation is akin to fingerprinting — recording unique material to authenticate the Boulle pieces and other works.

The project is one of a number of new scientific studies and databases focused on the underbellies of 18th-century French furniture, to make modern fakes easier to detect.

A cluster of forgeries has been identified on the market, including copies of pieces that belonged to Marie Antoinette. Some of France’s most prominent experts have been implicated. (Bill Pallot, who worked at the Didier Aaron gallery in Paris, has been charged with creating several of the fakes and will go on trial next year.)

The Frick Collection in Manhattan has analyzed gilded metalwork by Pierre Gouthière, a Parisian supplier of furniture ornaments used by generations of royals — and their inner circles. The works will be in its exhibition “Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court,” opening on Nov. 16. The catalog examines about 60 objects, from cutlery to fireplaces, and it shows drawings and photographs of two dozen Gouthière works that have been lost. The book also describes his poor business skills; he spent years mired in debt and lawsuits.

During a preview of the show, the decorative arts curator Charlotte Vignon and the conservator Joseph Godla explained how Mr. Gouthière’s workshop molded foliage, fruit, animals, gods and goddesses in high relief. They have examined hundreds of objects credited to his workshop, and have made a few dozen firm attributions, based on documents, materials and craftsmanship.

Mr. Gouthière pared down gilded metal into delicate sheets, and the work, Mr. Godla said, “almost flutters.” In the catalog, he praises Mr. Gouthière’s skill at rendering “a vast range of surfaces — the soft skin of a face, a goat’s rippled fur or the alternating textures of its horns, the fine veins of a leaf.”

Mr. Godla has been cleaning a marble table ornamented by Mr. Gouthière that has long belonged to the Frick. He demonstrated his laborious technique, wrapping a tiny bamboo stick in cotton and dipping it in solvents. As he dabbed the metal, patches of shiny and matte gold appeared from under decades of gray residue.

Many of Mr. Gouthière’s works have recently undergone scientific testing to determine which ingredients were incorporated into their alloys and how their delicate segments were soldered and pinned together. The manufacturing process involved tools like planishers (for finishing surfaces) and burins (for cutting), as well as acid baths, which emitted toxic fumes that shortened the lives of the gilders exposed to them.

Ms. Vignon emphasized that the show and catalog should be considered “a starting point” rather than comprehensive studies. During the past decade, a number of works by Mr. Gouthière have emerged at auctions. In 2007, a pair of porphyry ewers sold for $1.8 million at Christie’s in Paris. In 2015, a pair of lidded porcelain bowls wrapped in Mr. Gouthière’s gilded bronze brought about $3 million at Sotheby’s in London.

On Nov. 18, “Charles Percier: Architecture and Design in an Age of Revolutions,” an exhibition about one of Gouthière’s most versatile contemporaries, opens at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture in Manhattan. Mr. Percier designed wings of the Louvre and palace rooms for the Bonapartes. He also worked on theater sets, textiles, silver, ceramics, clocks, furniture and book illustrations.

The catalog, edited by the show’s main curator, Jean-Philippe Garric, describes how Percier sketched on scrap paper and annotated drawings with instructions for colors and materials that he envisioned. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a scrapbook of drawings from his workshop.) On mahogany furniture, he applied gilded ornaments in the shapes of griffins, dolphins, lyres, wreaths and ribbons.

A catalog essay by the decorative arts historian Iris Moon notes that Percier persevered despite “the continual threat of bankruptcy, material scarcity, and the instabilities of war.” He managed to stay in business from the 1780s until the 1820s, as Napoleon rose and fell twice.

Around 1800, as Napoleon came to power, one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite cabinetmakers, Jean-Henri Riesener, squandered his earnings by buying back his own lavishly inlaid pieces that the new government was discarding. British museums including the Wallace Collection, Waddesdon Manor and the Royal Collection are collaborating to create three-dimensional digital models of their Riesener furniture and to analyze the marquetry and metalwork. Helen Jacobsen, the Wallace Collection’s senior curator, said the gilded bronze components and marble tops will be removed from the wood, exposing original colors and tool marks and perhaps signs that the furniture was altered over the years. There are plans to include the findings in publications, exhibitions and databases.

Source: The NY Times