THE FAKING OF OLD PAINTINGS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 61, 4 December 1937, Page 15

THE FAKING OF OLD PAINTINGS

Art Old as Collecting

rA RECENT AETICLE on this page dealing with an'exhibition of art forgeries in Vienna, concluded: "Most oi the visitors come to tlie conclusion that tlie forgeries are so beautiful that oue can hardly be angry with the forg•rg." An more general justification was oflco offered by an old connoisseur, whd declared tbat faking was "agrand *Tfc with.a reason for its existenceA as it seem* to meet a real need of society —tio n«d of being deluded and cheat•d by elegance." And, indeed, records suggeit that often the collector almost goM out of his way to be deluded, writes Jan Gordon in the London Observer. The atory of the Pickwick Club and the Roman inscription has its paraliel ia xeal life when a party of diggers unearthed a pot near Dijon. It bore an inscription, M.J.D.D., which the Academicians pronounced to be of Ronian origin. probably meaning "Magno Jove Deorum Deo} ' ' but quite an ordinary person declared that it was in Teafity a mustard pot, the initials gtancling for "Moutard Jaune de Dijon." Eiccardo Nobili, in his extremely interesting book, "The .Gentle Art of Faking, ' ' records the case of a Erench eollector who bbught at the same ume a genuine piece of Eenaissance sculpture and a fake by Zampini. On arriving back in Paris he returned the genuine and kept the fake. Indeed, from the evidence, faking ATt masterpieces is almost as old as eollecting — both are recorded by Pliny —and ever since, when there have been expert fakers to answer to the detoand. Nevertheless, one must not confuse the work of the brilliant faker with that of a eommon forger. Sometimes the faker is a really good artist; some of Donatello's work ie almost indistinguishable from the Greek, as, for inetancOj the famous bronze horse'S head at Naples. Teniers, the yonnger, made several fake Titians. Within my own experienee a picture was shown to tTtrillo, who said, "If I didn't know

that I didn't paint it I wouldn't have known that I hadn't painted it." The most difficult forgeries of all to detect are those which belong to about the same period as the master. The only test sometimes is a kind of instinct, on the expert 's part, for style; as Mr Kenneth Glark has said, "A style is like a smell and can only be described in terms of itself." Eut mOdern fakers have a very much harder task than formerly, although they bring a skill to the craft whicn, put to other purposes, might bring in more honest incomes. The imitation of time's effects has been brought to a fine finish} the crackle of old paint can be imitated tO a century; worm-eateu wood for panels, the right kind of canvas, none of those things is now overlooked. As a rule, though, the faker is unable to procure old pigments, and nothing can imitate the slow polarisation of the oils used as a medium. Professor Laurie, with his microphotographs, has demonstrated that an artist 's brush strokes are as characteristie as his finger prints, and this the mieroscope reveals clearly. The Courtauld Institute has perhaps the finest laboratory of apparatus for detecting the faker. X-rays will of course show the most obvious cases as, for instance, when an old master has been superimposed on an old canvas. The ultraviolet ray makes some kinds of Tepaintings turn blaek? the infra-red rays will reveal things which have been erased and are invisible to normal sight, while the spectograph is able to analyse the constituents of the actual colours so subtly that minute variations in what may appear to be the same colour become at onCe apparent. „ Yet in spite of this the work of the artistic faker often has a beauty of its own, which is all the more curious when one reflects that many of the men who, when imitating the old can produce such quality, are often only able to Show the most feeble result when they try, as sometimes, to produce original Art.