The art of forgery

Last night Mary and I attended a Marlay Group lecture at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The subject was The Scientific Detection of Forgery in Paintings, given by Professor Jehane Ragai of the American University in Cairo. The Professor emphasised that provenance of an old master, that is to say being able to prove where the picture has spent the last 300 or 400 years, was the first thing you would look for, but even that was not proof that a picture was authentic; there may have been a forger at that time, capable of producing such a picture, as with the case of a well known Bellini that is currently on display in a national gallery. She went on to say that modern advances in chemistry often caught the forger out. One such case was a forgery of The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals. Under examination, the wonderful white collar around the Cavalier's neck was found to contain a zinc pigment, which didn't exist until 100 years after Hals' death. The current row over the false Rembrandts, not least those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection in New York, has caused great consternation, and one of my favourites, Man with a Golden Helmet, which can be seen at the Berlin State Museum, is, Professor Ragai said, unquestionably a fake. But she pointed out, undoubtedly the work of a genius - some of whom slip through the net. The Professor ended by telling us there are few national galleries on earth that are not showing a fake by a master, and that - hold your breath - some 15% of pictures auctioned at Christies or Sotheby's are fakes. The lecture was attended by several art experts, and none of them queried the lecturer's figures during questions.