Fake or fortune (or perhaps both)

Although I'm fascinated by the Second World War and write novels set in that period (1), I also have a Master of Philosophy degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and that's why I am sitting in Harrison Stinson Hall at the University of Michigan, Kalamazoo. I'm at the 53rd International Congress of Medieval Studies, munching a banana and free chocolate.

The chocolate came from my friend Lisa Fagin Davis (2), and is a gift from the Medieval Academy of America. I have just returned from a stall in the merchandising section of the conference, where a charming man is selling pages of medieval manuscripts. Lisa sent me over there and I asked to see the work she thought might interest me.

Here it is in all its glory:

It was lovely to hold and view up close. It is gouache and gold with traces of pencil on vellum, and from a series called 'The Hunting Party'. The colours are bright, the picture beautifully rendered, and the illumination glorious. It can be yours for a mere few thousand.

Only, it's a fake.

The painting is by an unidentified artist who worked in the nineteenth century known as 'The Spanish Forger' (although it is likely that he actually was French). 

The Spanish Forger was spectacularly successful in selling his work as original medieval illuminations. Nowadays they pop up in collections all over the world.

Here is one of his pieces in the University of Sydney:

Spanish Forger cutting, University of Sydney,
Special Collections, s.n. (Voelkle Catalogue L134)

A glorious piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:

And this one's at the University of Pennsylvania:

Univ. of Pennsylvania, LJS MS 33

His works fooled many experts and art collectors. No one suspected forgery until 1930 when the curator of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Bella da Costa Green (who will one day be the subject of a blog of her own), refused to support the purchase of the lovely piece below for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The Betrothal of St. Ursula
(The Morgan Library and Museum, New York)

The panel was later tested using neutron activation analysis and it was discovered that the green pigment was copper arsenite, otherwise known as Paris Green, a paint pigment not available before 1814. Bella was absolutely correct. There was no way the painting could be authentic, although it had been painted on medieval vellum.

And that is how he got away with it for so long. The Spanish Forger (as Bella da Costa Green dubbed him) painted his works on the vellum or parchment leaves of genuine medieval books, by painting in blank margins or scraping off original writing. He also 'completed' unfinished miniatures or added miniature paintings to illustrate genuine medieval choir books. He knew full well that illustrated leaves were much more valuable than plain ones and probably made a fortune.

Lisa told me that several pointers now clearly give him away. As she put it, 'backs and boobs', but also gold, head tilt and facial expressions.

Backs: If you look at the back of the paintings you can sometimes actually see where he has scraped away the original writing. In the piece I saw (pictured above) at the back of the painting faint lines are visible, from its original purpose as a choir book. This is a lovely picture of two noble ladies and a gentleman playing chess. The back (dorse) of the page tells a different story. It's a snippet of liturgy and never would have been in the same book as such a secular scene.

NY, Columbia Univ.,
Plimpton Add. MS 18

NY, Columbia Univ.,
Plimpton Add. MS 18 (dorse)

Boobs: He appears to have been rather obsessed with large-breasted women in low-cut gowns. The sort of cleavage he painted is just 'wrong' in an authentic medieval work.

We are not subtle
medieval maidens

Just not medieval cleavage...

      

Still not medieval cleavage.

Gold: Lisa tells me that the Spanish Forger painted his miniatures in the wrong order, by applying the colour before the gold leaf. In medieval pictures gold was always applied first and then burnished. Only then was the illustration added, so that examples exist of unfinished miniatures where the only thing that has been applied is the gold. In the Spanish Forger's work, the gold sometimes overlaps the colour and that's absolutely wrong!

Head tilt: Many of the Spanish Forger's individuals have a tilt to their head that would not have been seen in medieval paintings.

The Betrothal of St. Ursula
(The Morgan Library and Museum, New York)

Way too much cricked neck.

Ouch! My neck hurts.

Expression: his subjects tend to look a bit too 'sweet', cloying rather than pious. Here is an original fifteenth century artwork from the University of Pennsylvania collection. The Virgin's expression is pious and not cloyingly sweet: 

Lewis E 96 Book of Hours, Use of Paris
from the Special Collections
of the Free Library of Philadelphia

Psst, I'm not a forgery.
(detail from above)

I am! But I'm still worth money
(detail from picture at right)

Univ. of Pennsylvania, LJS MS 33

Ironically, the Spanish Forger's work is now highly collectable, and worth real money. And when items are valuable, forgers appear. The Spanish Forger's work is itself subject to forgery. 

Caveat emptor...

Update!!! We bought it! We are now the proud owners of a pricey fake. Isn't it beautiful:

(1) See https://deborahburrows.com.au/. My latest novel, Ambulance Girls Under Fire, is out in e-book form and the trade paperback is available in Aust/NZ. The novel will be published in the UK in July 2018.

(2) Lisa's blog on the Spanish Forger may be found here:
https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/manuscript-road-trip-the-spanish-forger/

William Sykes - Connoisseur or Forger? by Imogen Robertson

Daily Post (London, England), Tuesday, January 12, 1725

On December 31st 1724 Mr. William Sykes died in Bruges. He was a painter and picture dealer, a member of the Virtuosi of St Luke’s, an exclusive club of artistic connoisseurs, one of the close friends who received a mourning ring from Sir Godfrey Kneller and as you can see above 'a Gentleman distinguished and universally known for his extraordinary Performances and uncommon Judgement in that Art'. 

He left his business at Two Golden Balls, Portugal Row, Lincoln’s Inn--Fields to his son, and the family continued in the art trade through the rest of the 18th century. 

Google him now, however, and you’ll read that he was a forger. 

I’m working on a novella in the Westerman and Crowther series that revolves around art fraud in the period, so I stumbled across Sykes in the early stages of my research. I then went down a rabbit hole of art history and am reporting from deep underground. 

The internet articles about William Sykes seem to originate in Noah Charney’s book The Art of Forgery. Its a beautiful book, but I’m not convinced by his takedown of Sykes. It's made me realise how careful we need to be, or how careful I feel we should be, when accusing historical figures of crimes. I don't think Charney is careful enough, he's providing snappy prose rather than history in the pages which deal with Sykes and I think that's a shame, particularly because it makes me wary about the rest of the book. 

So here's my issue: Charney writes ‘Horace Walpole, the eighteenth century art historian called the con man William Sykes a ‘noted trickster’.’ 

No he didn’t. George Vertue did. According to A. C. Ducerel.

George Vertue by Jonathan Richardson, 1733

George Vertue (1684 -1756) was an artist and engraver who around 1713 embarked on a grand project to collect every scrap of information he could about the history of art in England. He died however before he could shape those notes into something fit to be printed. Horace Walpole, who had often corresponded with him, bought the manuscript notes and used them as the basis for his Anecdotes of Painting in England. In the first volume he wrote about a picture he owned at the time which was known as ‘The Marriage of Henry VII’. Now another of Walpole’s correspondents, A. C. Ducerel wrote to him (23/2/1762), and told him that Vertue had said: 

'That Lord Pomfret bought this picture of one Old Sykes above 30 years ago, which Sykes dealt in pictures and was a noted tricker—that he (Sykes) gave it that name, well knowing how to give names to pictures to make them sell—that Geo. Vertue had carefully examined that picture ... and that, upon the whole, it was suspected, at the time that Lord Pomfret bought it, that Old Sykes, who was a rogue, had caused the figures and representation of the marriage, to be added to the representation of the inside of a church, Old Sykes having before been guilty of many pranks of that sort.' 

So Walpole didn’t use that phrase ‘noted trickster’. It was Vertue who said it to Ducerel, who related it to Walpole who then flew off the handle. Of course he did, Vertue was impugning his picture, of which he was very proud, from beyond the grave. I seem to remember he paid £84 for it.

Now, in one of those gleams of serendipity which seem to come up when researching, it turns out that the picture which Walpole was defending is up for sale next week at Christie’s in New York, and certainly someone messed about with it. A lot. When Walpole owned it it looked like this:

Well, that's an engraving of how it looked. After very careful restoration - it now looks like this:

Lot 8 Attributed to Hugo van der Goes (Ghent c. 1440-1482 Rode Klooster, near Brussels), The Virgin and Child with Saints Thomas, John the Baptist, Jerome and Louis, oil on panel, 43 5/8 x 49 ¼ in. (110.8 x 125.2 cm.). Estimate 3,000,000 - USD 5,000,000 © Christie’s Images Limited 2017.

The estimate is 3-5 million dollars, in case any of you fancy it.

So was this transformation William Sykes’s handiwork? I think there is no way of knowing. This detailed and scholarly article almost convinced me, but a portrait that the author, Alain.R.Truong identifies as by Sykes, and relies on for comparison is now listed on the National Trust site as by an unknown 19th century painter. I’ve emailed to ask about that and will let you know if I hear anything. 

Charney’s accusation however in The Art of Forgery is not that Sykes repainted the painting above, but that Sykes forged an inscription on the back of a different painting. The painting, now known as The Enthronement of Saint Romold as Bishop of Dublin, was for a long time thought to be a Van Eyck portrayal of The Enthronement of Thomas a Becket. It did certainly pass through Sykes’s hands, but that doesn't prove the inscription is the work of Sykes. 

painting by Master of the Youth of Saint Romold
(Museum: National Gallery of Ireland)

Charney implies Sykes attributed the painting to van Eyck because he was ‘the most famous and highest selling artist in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries in England’, which, given Sykes died in 1724, would make him a prophet as well as a forger. 

George Vertue gathered information from Sykes about painters the older man had known, so was willing to take his words on some things, but he’s very distrustful of him too. When Vertue decides that a portrait, traditionally called ‘Mary Queen of Scots with her son’, in The Drapers Hall in London is in fact no such thing he writes ‘I fancy Sykes the painter was concerned in it’. Hmm. Well. Assertion is not evidence. 

I have noticed that though Vertue was an early student of Godfrey Kneller, he didn't get one of those mourning rings, and Sykes did. Jealousy, perhaps? That could make an interesting novel... 

www.imogenrobertson.com

twitter.com/@robertsonimogen

FAKING IT by Eleanor Updale

STERN'S SCOOP

 Thirty years ago yesterday, the Sunday Times published what it thought was a magnificent scoop: they had bought from the German magazine Stern the rights to serialise Hitler's newly-discovered diaries. 

Thirty years ago today, they began climbing down. In no time, after some straightforward checks, the diaries were exposed as fakes, and a once-great newspaper was made to look very stupid.

HITLER HOLDING HIS DIARY (NOT)

Those of us who were around at the time will remember excitement that greeted their publication, and the unrestrained joy of the rest of the British press when the 62 handwritten volumes were revealed to be forgeries: written in modern ink on paper that would not have been available in Hitler's lifetime, and sometimes using figures of speech that simply weren’t current in Hitler’s day.

Though the Sunday Times will be forever tainted by its mistake, the main casualty affair was the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (by then Lord Dacre), who had been sent by the Sunday Times to authenticate the diaries.  Trevor-Roper, son-in-law of Field-Marshal Earl Haig, was the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and, at the time of the diary debacle, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. 

Trevor-Roper already had enemies in the historical establishment.  He was one of the last mainstream historians to dabble in several periods at once, with books and articles on subjects including World War II, the Tudor Church, and the economics of the Civil War. He was famously slow with his books. Even Mrs Thatcher chided him:.‘On the stocks? On the stocks?  A fat lot of good that is! In the shops, that is where we need it!’

In many ways Trevor-Roper embodied the crazy Oxford ‘Modern History’ syllabus of the day (55BC to 1911, with everything from 1688 onwards covered in eight weeks). In the 1970s you would sometimes see him walking round the town, looking very aristocratic and proud – though he was in fact of relatively lowly stock: the son of a provincial doctor. But he was one of the few Oxford professors of whom the outside word had heard. Then, as now, academics who were not invited to write newspaper articles or appear on radio and TV resented any colleague’s public exposure.  Even (perhaps especially) fellow media tarts, such as AJP Taylor were embroiled in spats with him.  It was a pretty nasty period for infighting at universities - giving rise a new collective noun: a malice of historians.

Plenty of academics enjoyed seeing Trevor-Roper brought low.  But he was not the only one taken in by what appeared to be an irresistible story.  I have posted some links at the bottom of this page to first-hand accounts of how it all went wrong. 

It retrospect it seems extraordinary that so many people fell for the hoax, but in fact the episode is a very good example of the power of group-think, and of how difficult it is to ask obvious questions or to challenge accepted 'truths' when those around us accept them. In the case of the Hitler diaries, an overbearing proprietor - Rupert Murdoch - was so determined to publish that his underlings willingly suspended their normal journalistic and historical instincts. Trevor-Roper was a board member of Times Newspapers, and although theoretically he was there to keep an eye on the owner, he was swept up by the 'bravado' Murdoch admitted to the Leveson inquiry last year.  

But it would be wrong to imagine that the Hitler Diaries affair, though a landmark error in handling evidence, was a one-off.  We need only look at the very recent reports on the banking crisis, NHS scandals, and the cock-ups at the BBC to see that such frailty is still with us today.

Elizabeth Chadwick’s excellent post last month on this very site, in which she cleverly blasted away accepted 'truths' about the family of Eleanor of Acquitaine, shows how malice, cowardice and ambition are not indespensible ingredients of mistakes. There’s something much more potent, and perhaps more common, lurking in the background.  It’s the failure to ask primary questions when faced with a humdrum ‘fact’ – something ‘everybody knows’, which one generation of historians has passed on to another.  In the case of Queen Eleanor’s brother, there is no cause to believe that anyone deliberately set out to mislead. It’s just that no one, other than Elizabeth Chadwick, asked themselves, “Really?  How do we know that?”

 We are at a funny time in historical research.  Students are (rightly) warned at the beginning of all good history courses about the dangers of believing everything you read on the Internet.  Untruths and half-truths can get bedded in to the accepted narrative faster than ever, as mistakes, and speculation disguised as fact, are cut and pasted from one article to another.  But in another way, the Internet may be our saviour: electronic images of original documents have never been easier to access; plagiarism can be detected with simple software programs; references can be more easily checked.

And that last point is crucial.  Sometimes you hear historians harking back to the pre-Google age, when anyone writing a learned work needed genuinely to read any source from which he quoted, to get the reference right.  What the Internet is revealing is just how often past scholars simply copied those references from each other's work, adopting the interpretation of their predecessors about what the original said and meant without consulting it at all.  Putting right some of the accepted ‘truths’ of the Trevor-Roper era has become fertile ground for PhD students everywhere.

And yet, and yet...Many things still go unquestioned, and not just in the world of words on paper.  I had a very interesting conversation with a painter the other day about the stunningly modern techniques used by El Greco in the 16th century.  He said it was almost as if...

Of course we all accept that the El Grecos in our galleries are genuine… don't we?  The experts must have checked them....surely?   But don't forget that it was only a confession that exposed Han van Meegeren, the Dutch forger who sold fake ‘Vermeers’ to the Nazis.  

And what's wrong with a good old-fashioned hoax, anyway?  With digital technology it is growing ever easier to produce copies indistinguishable from the real thing.  Maybe we should celebrate the forgers of the past, who needed fabulous skills to pull off their deceptions . 

Konrad Kujau.        photo : Achim Necker

The key forger of the Hitler Diaries, Konrad Kujau, served a prison term. When he came out, he made a successful career capitalising on his notoriety by openly selling forgeries to an eager public.

Shortly after the Hitler Diaries debacle, Britain’s most celebrated art forger, Tom Keating, died.  He'd become a bit of a media poppet in the 1970s, when he took the art establishment for a long and lucrative ride.  
 Maybe we all love to see the experts overturned. 
  

*

 Hitler image above: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-12975 / CC-BY-SA

Here links to a couple of articles about the Hitler Diaries, written by people who worked for the Sunday Times when the ‘exclusive’ was published:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3636377/Hitler-diaries-scandal-Wed-printed-the-scoop-of-the-century-then-it-turned-to-dust.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/25/rupert-murdoch-bravado-publication-hitler-diaries

There's a book, too:

www.eleanorupdale.com