Spotting a fake

Yesterday I went to a breakfast at the National Gallery to see their latest exhibition, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes & Discoveries. The breakfast was rubbish, (they could learn something from the Courtauld), the sort of food you get in the Green Room at the BBC, whereas the exhibition was fascinating. In Gallery I, you get the opportunity to see some of the great fakes that the National possesses, and quite frankly I would be happy to have any one of them in my collection. In the other galleries, you are invited to study the technical skills of three or four artists working on one canvas, while the master, eg Rembrandt, was only responsible for part of it, and there was an interesting discussion as to whether it therefore counts as a Rembrandt. The curator pointed out that Rembrandt was quite honest about this to any buyer, telling them they could have a painting where he'd done the outline sketches only, one where he'd done the sketches and perhaps the heads, or one where he'd done the whole painting; only the price would be different. The problem for historians in 2010 is to decide which is which. In fact one of my favourite paintings, The Man With The Golden Helmet (in the Gemaldegalerie, Berlin), attributed to Rembrandt, is unquestionably a work of genius, though scientists are in no doubt that the canvas could not have been produced until after his death. In all, this is a treat for academics and scholars, but also for amateur art lovers like myself, because you come out realising how easy it was for those people who ran the National 200, even 100 years ago, to be fooled into buying a Botticelli, for example, that they might now discover is a fake. Well worth a visit.