Feature: Art - Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square
Published: 08 July 2010
by JOHN EVANS
THIS is a brave exhibition for the National Gallery to mount, revealing mistakes, misjudgments and oddities that have, and can, continue to confound experts, even at the highest level.
It’s the first of its kind fully to explore such a range of scientific discoveries made in-house by a major gallery.
Arranged over six rooms, Close Examination highlights the challenges they face; there are the straightforward fakes and forgeries in Deception and Deceit; those pictures changed for matters of style or taste in Transformations and Modifications; those where scientific analysis and connoisseurship can identify or correct Mistakes; and finally a celebration of what can be achieved by the experts in Redemption and Discovery. Another room, Being Botticelli, concentrates solely on works thought to be by Sandro Botticelli when bought by the gallery in 1874. Visitors can test their own skills and see if they could spot a masterpiece.
Exhibition co-curator Marjorie E Wieseman said: “Scientific examination does not replace traditional connoisseurship and art historical research, but it is an extraordinarily powerful tool when used in concert with them.”
Four examples:
Dendrochronology established, for example, that a portrait of Edzard the Great, Count of East Friesland, was not, as thought, from the 16th century because the last growth ring found on its oak panel was from 1696.
Portrait Group, an Italian work acquired by the gallery in 1923, purporting to date from 15th century, was eventually exposed as a “genuine fake” when traces of the 19th-century pigment cobalt blue were found, among other evidence.
The beautiful Madonna of the Pinks was “rediscovered” as a genuine Raphael of about 1506 after it was spotted in Alnwick Castle in 1991 by Nicholas Penny, then a curator and now director of the National, who realised changes made between the underdrawing and the finished painting meant this was no work of a copyist.
The only way to have copied it would have been with scientific knowledge unavailable in 1855 when it was purchased by the 4th Duke of Northumberland.
Mysteries remain. In 1922 more than a decade after he co-founded the Camden Town Group, Walter Sickert presented the Tate with a portrait said to be of Victor Considérant by Eugène Delacroix. Yet it’s not in Delacroix’s style and apart from the moustache bears little resemblance to other known likenesses of the social reformer. Could it be Sickert’s own work?
• Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square until September 12. Daily 10am-6pm, free admission, late night Fridays until 9pm.
Last admission 45 minutes before closing. www. nationalgallery.org.uk