"The Art Detective"

[fiefoe]

Part of the enjoyment of this book is appreciating Philip Mould's choice of words, his reminds me of Claire Wilcox's cultured voice in "Patch Work".

• 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.
• After a cruelly protracted pause he mouthed the figure for optimum impact.
• 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.
• This is the culture we now occupy—a market that has a thousand eyes on anything and everything of possible significance that raises its head over the commercial parapet.
• When I first joined the art business, in the mid-1980s, even organizing an X-ray (to ascertain whether an earlier image might be lurking beneath a painting’s surface) was a palaver. It meant queuing up on a Monday morning at certain private London hospitals while the less fortunate with damaged limbs waited for the same service. Today a traveling team of professionals in a van not only call round to the restorer or gallery, but also offer other functions, including infrared photography to enable underdrawing—the artist’s sketch lines, which can help prove authenticity—to be detected.
• Dendrochronology, which dates wood by its tree rings and so provides the probable felling date of the tree from which a painted panel was cut, is now a very precise science,
• Paint on canvas or panel is vulnerable to a hundred different types of onslaught and disfigurement. The most common—and rectifiable—is discolored varnish. An oil painting is normally coated with varnish by the artist to act as a homogenizing “window” through which to view the tones, forms and colors beneath, as well as to provide protection. Varnish also acts over time as a sponge for dirt
• As it happened, I did so not because I was convinced that a recoverable original lay beneath (although I was hopeful that something of quality lurked in there somewhere) but because I knew that if it turned out not to be I could always sell the frame—high-quality, contemporary and hand carved—and recoup some of my losses.
• * One of the dirtiest paintings I have ever bought reappeared like a newborn lamb—a Gainsborough in almost pristine state (a feature of some pictures that remained untouched by early cleaning and restoration processes) gamboled from its confinement.
• The sensory appreciation of art is governed largely by what remains rather than what the artist first intended, and guidance on how a work might have changed or suffered is as illuminating as focusing on a work that is in a transcendentally good state.
• Spotting these lame ducks, which in many instances have been demoted by being attributed to lesser artists, and then going some way to reviving them, is another aspect of the quest for lost art treasures.
• The keeper of many pictures in less worldly country houses was often no more than the housekeeper, and the survival of hand-me-down recipes suggests the application of an alphabet of domestic solvents, including urine, lavender, ashes and half-potatoes.
• Picture surfaces were pressed so flat under hot irons that much of the paint and the expressive impasto (the thicker, prouder passages of pigment) are now reduced to enameled flatness, their finish reflective enough to shave in.
• Dobson combined native empathy with poetic poise. It has been plausibly suggested that he ran short of materials during his two-year confinement in Oxford and so was forced to work on canvases smaller than average and to eke out his paint, a trait that only adds to the realism of his portraits.
• I talk about recognizing the strokes, which is another one of those essential attributes in sleuthing certain types of lost paintings. Given my focus, I have had to get to know the distinguishing style and techniques of a raft of prominent portrait painters. Paint strokes, pigment mixtures and approaches are as varied as fingerprints and similarly incriminating.
• Although I lack 90 percent of the necessary patience required, you only have one life, and fantasies provide the ballast.
• it is tempting to think that art does respond to a crucial need for spiritual sustenance. To own an original Rembrandt... or an authentic Rockwell has something of the allure that holy relics had for the medieval mind.
• Instead, as befitted the age, and mine also, I had crashed full tilt into the bleak unknown. The city was Burlington, Vermont, the date November 23, 1992
• * I began to notice that there were chairs for the faithful—except that, propped against them and on the seats, instead of people, there were square and rectangular shapes. When Earle turned on the overhead lights I was presented with a sight that all these years later is still as fresh in my mind as yesterday. There was indeed a congregation: not of people but of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits, close to three hundred in total, not only on the chairs but covering or filling every available hanging space, niche and corner.
• This was not a museum collection, it was a hidden hoard; not least because the way the pictures were stored and hung, many without labels, gave it the look of a glorious stately house sale in which the untouched contents of the attic had been temporarily tipped into the reception rooms on view day... Canvases hung loosely on their stretchers like flapping sails, the prolonged effects of damp, neglect and lack of keys (the wooden pegs that keep a canvas tight)
• Hogarth: she had the unfashionable hint of a smile showing through her bulbous cheeks. Its candor was mesmeric... As I did so I knew that there was only one artist capable of pulling off this feat of originality. A savage satirist of society, he could not rid himself of the very thing that made him so great: a compellingly honest response to his sitters. https://library.scadmoa.org/objects/399/lady-in-rose-taffeta
• Earle Newton: if something was giveaway cheap—and that was an abiding qualification—and had some connection to history, art, design or literature, he hoovered it up.
• the Savannah College of Art and Design: the college, where I was able to witness for myself how the shambolic contents of a defunct church had mutated into a part of the national heritage.
• Earle was too ill to travel, and she used the time to get to know him better, recalling a turning point in the last few weeks when he told her, with salvationary simplicity, that she was “all right now”—as if he now rated her value along with that of his other possessions.
• “Was it worth the price you had to pay?” I asked as we drove back to the airport.
  Toni could not answer this easily. The death of a beloved brother and the stress her mother had to endure hardly made it a fair question either. She conceded that she understood why her father had done what he had, but could not go as far as condoning it.
• Call it trade snobbery or self-preservation, but when a portrait that has previously failed to sell returns to the salesroom it starts to look sickly in the eyes of the art trade. And it’s not just the faces. As if sapped of their self-esteem, otherwise noble still lifes start to decompose, religious pictures go gloomy, and even upbeat, sunny landscapes will turn overcast. <> Fresh pictures with a new story to tell hum with seductive appeal.
• So did the foliage—a melody of light and dark greens held together with a wiry, serpentine mesh of upper branches. Artists who regularly need to create large areas of greenery in landscapes will often develop shorthand, and the fluent strokes and stipples that shaped these woodland trees was instantly recognizable. Great artists are also risk takers; they constantly push the boundaries of illusion, like ambitious magicians. The painter of this wood knew that in certain lights the trunks of beech trees can shine like white metal, reflecting rather than absorbing light.
• another artistic ruse, more subtle than the shining bark. It consisted of a flashing stroke of creamy-orange pigment on the trunk of an aging, possibly dying, oak tree, a few centimeters from the exact center of the composition. Ostensibly a shaft of sunlight, or freak reflection, it fluoresced like a small swarm of fireflies and lit the orange-browns of the turning leaves above. It was an artistic trick to enliven the glade. <> I had found enough sleepers in my life to ration my emotions, but what now affected my breathing was not just the artist, but the subject.
• As art dealers we are often asked what mental processes are brought to bear in recognizing a lost or miscatalogued painting: sometimes the trick is as easy as turning over the right card in a game of Memory—unambiguous and satisfyingly instant. On other occasions memories shoot through the dark like distress signals, barely long enough to allow their trajectory to be fixed.
• * In England up until this date there were three main styles from which a landscape painter could make a living: topographical, which meant delineating a customer’s house and land with a portrait painter’s precision, possibly even including the occupants themselves as miniature portraits, sometimes on horses or in a coach; classical, for the cosmopolitan Grand Tourist who liked Greek and Roman arcadia and a flash of toga beneath the trees; and mid-seventeenth-century Dutch, particularly favored by the Suffolk business class, who liked their landscape pruned and raked, removed of its menace and conforming to mercantile notions of good order.
• The countryside he recorded as a young man—either as stand-alone landscapes or the setting for his portraits—is arrestingly fresh and natural, full of breezy observation to lift the spirit. Stems of corn and barley don’t unbendingly stand, they sway; sandy banks, rocks and pools of light riddle the woodland with a naturalist’s observation; clouds don’t loiter, they scud; the larger trees in particular are animate and expressive—each a separate biography
• * The process of glazing was highly challenging. It required artists to judge and anticipate the effect of one color glowing through another. An oil painting on canvas or panel requires a base of underpaint before the artist can embark on the work... The consummate glazer, however, allows underpaint (in Gainsborough’s case it could vary from orange to pinky-beige) to partly shine through. Gainsborough’s top pigments tended toward transparency, sometimes with unusual added ingredients like ground glass, increasing the possibilities for the depth, mood and refinement that glazing can achieve.
• The problem with a screen is getting a grip on the painting’s physical properties. Buying art through a computer is like trying to taste with a cold.
• Adrienne Corri, an actress turned amateur art historian who shook the trees of Gainsborough scholarship in the early 1980s with a combination of relentless research and confrontational vigor... she attempted to prove that a portrait of the actor David Garrick in the Alexandra Theatre, in Birmingham, was by the young Gainsborough.
• a throwaway line by an eighteenth-century politician that a Mr. Fonnereau of Ipswich gave young Gainsborough his “first chance,” by lending him £300. This led to the most arduous part of her odyssey, which was to try to find a bank record to prove it. It took her a year just to gain access to the archives of the Bank of England, but in retrospect that was the easy part. She went on to discover that eighteenth-century banks ran a hideously arcane system by which account holders did not have their bills paid directly by their bank but via smaller, merchant banks that acted as intermediaries. At the Bank of England, ten ledgers recording these intermediary loans were in use at any one time, making the linking of payer to payee a Sisyphean task.
• this was the first time I had appreciated the emotive power of my newest hunch: if my conjectures were right, when else in my career would I have the opportunity to find so critical a work, the very first work in a great artist’s career?
• There is one characteristic, however, that I genuinely believe gives the professional buyer the edge: few things bring oxygen to the brain better than financial risk. Admittedly this normally applies before you have committed, and in the case of this painting it was after, but the principle remains the same providing you can muster honesty of response.
• Surrounded by timeless growth, I was struck by the idea that everything was now as Gainsborough would have seen and felt it: the same coolness in contrast to the outside Gainsborough, the thicket of mare’s tail and enchanter’s nightshade around our feet, the stained-glass play of sunlight through broad leaves.
• the spire of Great Henny Church had transformed into an artistic baton, its express function, it now appeared, to orchestrate the composition. Looking outward from its tip to the foreground, I could now guess exactly where the marl diggers had been at work,
• 2 Cornard Wood: For myself and others there that day it was a moment of memorable poignancy. On the left was the great operatic masterpiece, one of the most admired productions of its day. On the right something altogether meeker and less contrived, but inextricably linked: a youthful precursor to the great things to come.  https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/cornard-wood-near-sudbury-suffolk-thomas-gainsborough/wgGFLHPTNTUoOg?
• There was nothing accidental about Rockwell’s capacity to perform miracles of artistic entertainment. He staged the set, cast the actors, arranged the figures, chose the props and retained a balance between artistic ingenuity and the message for which he was being paid. It is no coincidence that the film director Steven Spielberg is a collector of his work, for both are masters at reaching a mass audience with a type of American storytelling that can enfold depth, humor and fantasy.
• Framing is a surprisingly challenging science, and if the color, design or proportions are wrong, much as with the clothes you choose to wear, a glamorous picture can be reduced to a dowdy frump. Linda’s response—a questioning of the painting followed by its acquittal—was fascinatingly revealing.
• * Dave was a pragmatist used to addressing and solving mechanical problems; he talked with the same precision as Don but with the irony of a younger brother now telling the story his way. To me, the third of four siblings myself, it rang true and took me closer to the conclusion that they were hapless victims of their father’s contrivance.
• * on removing it they revealed runners that were clearly designed to allow something to be drawn back. It could only be the adjoining panel wall. When they pushed the section, which measured eight feet by four feet, it gave way with ease. Almost paralyzed with astonishment, like Howard Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen, they saw, in previously darkened solitude, five oil paintings—the very same pictures they thought had been distributed in the divorce settlement.
• In the art world, tangible revelation normally follows a painfully uncertain process of restoration as a picture’s true form and identity is gradually uncovered. Not so here. With a slide of the wall a year of uncertainty was put to rest, every clue explained, the spectral shadow that had haunted the siblings’ peace of mind roundly exorcised. The Rockwell hung before them, together with another picture from the cache, its surface glowing almost as pristinely as if it had just left the artist’s studio,—and, as Don added with a note of triumph, the canvas conspicuously included a tacking edge where it had been extended for the printers. There could be no better signature of genuineness than that.  https://prints.nrm.org/detail/261030/rockwell-breaking-home-ties-1954
• A slice of lemon had tumbled from his glass and lodged itself between his shirt buttons, an observation for which he thanked me before becoming pipingly emotional on the subject of the Rembrandt, which had filled the art press the previous week. He was intoxicatingly keen to unburden himself.
• Maastricht is to the newly cleaned, researched and represented old master what Cannes is to the latest film... It is the art world’s equivalent of the mayfly hatch, when trout unanimously break the surface
• Art history and connoisseurship are in my view separate disciplines that sometimes combine, but not always: a military historian does not necessarily make a good general, a professor of economics a good businessman.
• Van de Wetering, it rapidly became clear, had elevated this power of communication to an art form. As he sipped his beer and nibbled on his meatballs he lured me into his subject with unusual charisma and conviction. He began by speaking of Rembrandt the prodigy, the most intelligent and adventurous artist in Holland, an artistic giant thrillingly discovered in his native town of Leiden by young intellectuals who identified in him the promise so sought in the Renaissance to “surpass the achievements of antiquity.” He had set the scene like the introduction to a great historical novel
• “Notice how the light from the nose and cheekbone reflect into the eye socket,” he said. “This can be described as a traffic of light, an example of Rembrandt’s utter sophistication. The normal beholder does not question the means of illusion. If the illusion is successful by definition you do not see its means—but it’s the means that create the effect.
• A Shakespeare sonnet costs you nil. Great art should be everybody’s, but the problem is that concepts of rarity and originality can block perception. The eye is disturbed by the aura of authenticity when looking at the original. This is why I greatly support the idea of popular reproductions, as they remove you from this.”
• He spent much of his free time visiting Amsterdam’s museums, where his devotion to the work of old masters began to take shape. This pastime grew into a driving urge to work among them, so he wrote to the chief restorer at the Rijksmuseum, the country’s leading museum, suggesting that they should meet. Along with observations about modern restoration, he laced his letter with humorous asides. Fortunately the chief restorer both had a sense of humor and liked Martin’s approach and offered him a traineeship... Rather like Ernst van de Wetering, he fell back on his alternative resources for survival, finding work as a male catwalk model and as a part-time translator for the local football club during the European Cup.
• * He managed to deduce that whoever had overpainted the picture in the seventeenth century had scratched a line in the hair with a sharp point, copying a technique Rembrandt himself often employed to add surface texture and animation to such areas. In so doing, that person had scored through to the layer beneath, which bore the indent in such a way as to reveal that the paint in that area had not dried. This neatly validated the professor’s belief that the studio would update such paintings for the market relatively soon after their completion, probably two to three years after they had failed to sell—not long enough for some of Rembrandt’s darker pigments fully to dry.
• A compact, neatly built man with sharply adversarial eyes, horn-rimmed glasses and a faultlessly cut suit, he possessed all the presence of a well-known character actor,
• * Starkey had a hunch that it represented the flirtatious and unfaithful Catherine Howard... What she was wearing was portrayed in brilliantly readable detail—Holbein was also a jewelry designer and knew his way around stones and their elaborate settings—and Starkey had just been studying the inventory of Catherine’s jewels, a detailed list compiled by the clerk of the king’s wardrobe, Nicholas Bristowe.. The irony was that in its early history the painting had been called Queen Catherine Howard but had subsequently been demoted, for no particular reason, and it took Starkey’s simple piece of forensic proof to reestablish it.
• a miniature of a hitherto unknown lady on loan from the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, became a star turn. Starkey ingeniously argued, with the assistance of Bendor, that it could represent Lady Jane Grey, on the basis of floral emblems, jewelry and birth date.
• * On a deeper level they consoled a population starved for religious art following the Reformation: she was the nation’s Virgin Mary, stripped of her halo and reconditioned with the trappings of earthly wealth and power. As she got older, and her resolve not to marry grew more obvious, her image evolves into Gloriana, a desexed and almost abstract figure embodying and guiding the nation’s fortunes.
• Overpaint on a sixteenth-century painting has a soupish, coagulated appearance, in contrast to the mineral-rich, cracked surface of the real thing
• I knew that the picture had been transferred from panel to canvas because it had said so in the Sotheby’s write-up, and now it all made sense. The picture had been deadened. The perilous business of transferral to canvas, gladly no longer practiced, was much favored by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in the first half of the twentieth century, and the fashion spread. Instead of attempting to stabilize a panel picture whose planks had worked loose or were partially rotted—common afflictions in early British portraits—conservators would sometimes plane down the reverse of the oak panel till it was paper thin and then apply it to canvas.
• we now came face-to-face with it in unprepossessing surroundings, subjecting it to the type of scrutiny that its subject herself had endured while a princess. It had struck me as ironically comparable: our purpose was not very different from that of those who had imprisoned the twenty-year-old Elizabeth in the Tower of London and sought to discover the truth behind her reported actions and words.
• there was no precedent for the oak as a symbol for Elizabeth: it would be a hundred years before the oak was informally recognized as a royal badge following the Restoration of Charles II, who during the Civil War had hidden, it is said, in an oak tree. There was one man, however, for whom the oak was a personal badge: Robert Dudley.
• It was more than possible that the picture had initially belonged to Elizabeth, but, given her later desires to show herself in portraiture as a desexed virgin queen, it would have been given away as being awkwardly off-message for the palace walls, laced as it was with outdated marital and fertile allusions.
• Without even a momentary hesitation I punched back with another £50,000, and its speed had the bone-cracking effect I intended. Poltimore lifted his head, and then, failing to induce more from my adversary, cast his eye around the assembly, over to the telephone bidders and then back again to the underbidder for signs of life.
• Given the date of the portrait’s execution, quite likely later that very year, this written evidence added a compelling dimension to the symbolic message. <> One by one the visual sentiments proclaimed themselves like unfolding riddles. An affronted Queen, recently on her death-bed, was telling their Lordships, in as sovereign a way as possible, not to panic—that she could sort it out. This single assertion clarified everything: the suggestively ripe background became a riposte to the rumors that she was barren; the pairings within the vegetation a beckoning toward marriage—the only way a legitimate heir could be provided; her dress of red and white, the colors of the Tudor dynasty,
• Sir Henry Blake+Edith Osborne: Prestigious postings in the diplomatic service followed, and wherever the husband-and-wife team went they were recognized for progressive governance, as well as Edith’s talent for classifying and recording nature with her delicate watercolors and her skill with languages. In Newfoundland, Blaketown is named after them, as is the flower on the Hong Kong flag, Bauhinia blakeana. Edith’s record of the native moth population in Jamaica remains to this day an invaluable reference source in London’s Natural History Museum.
• I had encountered the first positive link between Homer and the Blakes. There was much more in the next column. Clearly it must have been a slow news day, as exhaustive detail was expended in describing the childrens’ costumes, and none more so—to my growing excitement—than those of the governor’s children, who were dressed as “Arabian Knights.”... This was more than I could ever have expected: a description of the three young Blake children (who I had not until then known existed) that corresponded almost exactly to the watercolor!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Under_a_Palm