Mould - The art detective: fakes, frauds, and finds and the search for lost treasures

Table of Contents

I suppose youve heard, he began. In fact it may have been you.

I had no idea what he was talking about. Responding to both my blankness and evident curiosity, he started to play me, alternately giving and taking line.

It was even on the radio this morning. Surely you must know? he pressed.

Know what?

About the Rembrandt.

What Rembrandt?

The self-portrait thought to be a later copy or follower. The one with a low estimate of 1,000. Oh, come on, you must have known.

Sadly not, I replied. Where was it?

Up the road.

Given that the man I was talking to, Mark Ransom, was an experienced and canny dealer and would award this type of lead-up only to something of great consequence, he now had me hooked. He knew it, and I had no choice but to be hauled to shore at his own pace.

OK, where up the road?

At Moore Allen & Innocent in Cirencester.

He now had me thrashing in the water. I had previewed that actual sale in person two days earlier at the auction house and definitely did not recall anything that could be deemed a great work of art. Certainly not one that approximated to anything by the most famous old master in Western history.

They say its the record price paid for a picture at a country auction, apart from anything else, he added with contrived nonchalance.

What did it make? I asked weakly.

With or without auction commission?

He had toyed with me enough. Get on with it, I snapped.

After a cruelly protracted pause he mouthed the figure for optimum impact.

Twopointsixmillionpounds.

The story becomes more stressful. Professor Ernst van de Wetering, one of the greatest art connoisseurs of our times, and specifically of Rembrandt, in the professors capacity as chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), got to hear of its emergence at auction and, unusually for an academic in his position, he issued an invitation to the unknown buyer to show it to him. He later pronounced it a genuine work, not, as it happened, a conventional self-portrait but more a generalized character figure (as distinct from a formal, recognizable portrait), with the new title Rembrandt Laughing. As this book goes to print, it has just resurfaced in the art press in relation to a proposed export license (essential for major works of old art leaving the UK) at a valuation rumored to be 20 million.

I still dont know what happened. Damn it, I spent a good half hour wandering around that Cirencester salesroom. I was on holiday, after all, with all the time in the world. Perhaps I did just overlook itit was a small work on copperbut I also now wonder whether it was being confidentially inspected in a backroom while I was at the preview. Or am I making excuses? I had also failed to flip through the catalogue (a cardinal slipup), where it was illustrated on the front cover no less. All in all, hardly something that as a professional I am proud to own up to, particularly as over the next week I realized just how profoundly I had been out of the loop.

First a restorer told me that he had been sent down to analyze the paintings condition a week before the sale; then a dealer confided that in partnership with another he had been prepared to go up to 500,000; and later I met another who had prepared a bid for twice that amount but did not get his hand up at the sale because the price escalated so fast. The following month I talked with a major London auctioneer who told me that he had been tipped off by one of his clients and had taken the day off to travel down by train to view it. If you add the man who underbid (the distinguished New York dealer Otto Naumann, I later discovered), the successful purchasers who apparently bought on behalf of a private collector and the runners (dealers without galleries who seize opportunities at country sales) who had been aware of it, I can see now that I was naively out of the loop.

This realization in part prompted me to write the present book. One of the most obvious ways to explain how so many people in different countries were aware of a diminutive painting in a relatively small auction house two and a half hours from London is the technological revolution. The Internet is now an integral tool in the workings of my business. It is amusingly ironic that I, a dealer with a certain knowledge, failed to see something when physically present in an auction room while a shoal of prospective buyers, a large proportion of the informed old-master trade, had been frantically researching and preparing bids for some weeks before the sale after the illustrated catalogue was posted on the auction-house website. Sure, many would have come down to see it as a consequence of what they had seen online, but only as a consequence. And I knew, of course, that it would not just have been the fact that there was a high-quality digital image of the picture for all to find with their search engines, but that with a few clicks of the mouse it could instantly be shared with others: curators, art historians, fellow dealers, prospective clients, all of whom could offer responses, no doubt some of them guarded, which would translate into the type of bidding fervor that was witnessed that day in Cirencester.

This is the culture we now occupya market that has a thousand eyes on anything and everything of possible significance that raises its head over the commercial parapet. And it is not just the raw commodity that is so much more accessible, but knowledge too. The ability to research and compare prospective discoveries has developed at the same expansive rate. For the skilled researcher has within immediate reach myriad public collections, archives, articles, price records and biographies that can either shore up or kill a hunch with lightning speed. For a discovery to be established, it has to work on paper as well as in paint. Crucial aspects of a pictures provenance (its history) can sometimes be instantly established, discoveries that fifteen or twenty years ago might have taken days, if not weeks, of professional archival research. In a business fraught with auction deadlines, the Internets power makes the dealing of the previous generation look like dark prehistory.

Yet it is not just information technology that has progressed, but also technical analysis, the means by which the physical properties of a painting can be diagnosed and understood. Scientists in lab coats are now increasingly entering the formerly forbidden world of artistic attribution. To me one of the most valuable functions of science is to be able to establish a pictures terminus post quem, the earliest likely date that it was painted. Databases and other scientific tools still have far to travel in this area, but paint analysis has become more precise in establishing the physical compounds of pigments and the way in which they are applied and, when combined with the use of ever-growing records of when these pigments were first found to have been used and by whom, can add valuable corroborative evidence. Scientific data is one of the bedrocks of the Rembrandt Research Project, the authentication panel chaired by Professor van de Wetering, which I describe in a later chapter. The RRP has helped create convincing arguments that have turned formerly overlooked copies into multimillion-pound originalsand also, sometimes very painfully for the owners, the reverse.