Fakes and Forgeries

One evening, a lady who was new to my drawing class tentatively mentioned that her mother-in-law was writing a book on a Rubens painting in the National Gallery that she believed to be a fake.

Immediately I knew which painting she meant. Each time I had been in the National Gallery, I had been struck by its obvious differences from the other Rubens paintings there, its clumsy handiwork and what seemed to me to be its more modern appearance. These were a passing but repeated series of observations which I had never shared. To have them suddenly and unexpectedly corroborated was exciting. The lady was surprised by my interested reaction as she was apparently accustomed to a more dismissive or less receptive response.

The mother-in-law turned out to be Euphrosyne Doxiadis -an expert in Greco-Roman funerary art who had been studying the Rubens Samson and Delilah since 1986 when she first encountered it with two younger peers, as a mature student at Wimbledon School of Art. All three students made similar observations to those that I was to make years later, and they submitted a report to the National Gallery in 1992, detailing the problems with the painting that the Gallery had acquired for a record-breaking £2.5 million pounds in 1980. Despite Doxiadis’s investigation and other notable criticisms and analysis, the Gallery was disinclined to explore the possibility of the painting not being an autograph Rubens.

Doxiadis had made a website in which she described the noticeable stylistic incongruities in the National Galllery’s Samson and Delilah (her new site is here). Slightly more difficult to see in reproduction, in real life the painting obviously lacks the lively pictorial surface shimmer created by the airy brushstrokes of a genuine Rubens. It has none of the individually visible narrow brushstrokes which flicker across even his largest works to provide highlights and animation. There is no fluidity to the paint marks. Instead the handling in the Samson and Delilah is stolid and flat, and the modelling is clumsy, almost blobby, meaning the illusion of form or depth is often absent. This is particularly noticeable in comparisons of drapery from other contemporary Rubens paintings with that of the Samson and Delilah.

Photo comparisons from Doxiadis’s old website

Doxiadis noted the stylistic differences that included the brash, “gaudy,” colouring, which seems very unlike the colours of Rubens. Rubens reds were vermillion, and rose and madder lakes made from cochineal beetles. Old Masters tended to use ‘lake,’ pigments sparingly as the colours were impermanent or ‘fugitive.’ The lakes also tended to be transparent so they were used for glazing and influencing colour rather than heavy laying in or ‘bodywork.’

Rubens used a technique to obtain a violet or purple color, a pigment that did not exist in his time, making a bluish tone by mixing wood charcoal with lead white and with madder lake or cochineal lake, creating the desired violet or purple color.”

To my eyes the purples and reds in the drapes of the Samson and Delilah suggest unsubtle mixing and modern colours, although analysis by the National Gallery finds the latter is not the case.

Close up photos of Samson and Delilah I took in the National Gallery

Rubens was working in a tradition where the artists made paint to their own specifications so inevitably the physical properties of that paint appear different to those of mass produced paint, and this is just one aspect of the technical proficiency that would distinguish the work of Rubens and his assistants from a modern and less accomplished piece.

An original Rubens painting of Samson And Delilah is known to have existed. Doxiadis advances the theory that the National Gallery’s version is a twentieth century copy made in the long tradition of students copying the works of Old Masters and that it was never intended as a fraud. Copyists would deliberately include pictorial differences in their copies. From its depiction in 17^th century images it is clear that compared with the original, the National Gallery’s composition is truncated on the right, chopping off Samson’s feet. There were also originally three soldiers in the doorway rather than the five seen there now.

Engraving after Rubens Samson and Delilahby Jacob Matham c. 1613 (pictured mirror reversed).

Banquet at the House of Burgomaster Rockox by Frans Francken c. 1630. Detail below.

Most of us are more accustomed to listening to music than inspecting Old Master paintings and so we might be able to identify our favourite singer from their voice alone, and maybe from only a few bars of a song. Many readers will now be familiar with the work of Bob Moran and through that familiarity of style and subject matter, able to distinguish his work from that of other cartoonists.

Similarly painters often have a recognisable ‘voice’ or style. Put simply the National Gallery’s Samson and Delilah is like the work of a tribute band.

The finesse of a later Rubens also in the National Gallery for comparison.

People have a tendency to side with authority. How could Doxiadis know better than the experts at the National Gallery? When I chose to listen to her daughter-in-law in my class instead of dismissing her story I did so because I had similar suspicions founded on experience and independent study, but I had also learned that truth does not necessarily come from authority. I could identify with Doxiadis’s position.

My views on many subjects from art to authority are commonly met with knee-jerk intolerance, exasperation or eye rolls. Often this is by those who have done nothing more than accept received wisdom and never looked into the subjects under discussion. Study does not guarantee rectitude but it is clear that the haughty indignation of the ignorant is immaterial to the truth.

Prior to 2020 people would often fail to associate me with my paintings or to identify me as the teacher of my classes. Their expectations were that I should appear in some way different, perhaps older. As we are being conditioned to prefer virtual reality, there are many people who do not listen in person but instead pay attention to what appears on a screen. I joke that I have had to go on podcasts to get people I know to listen to me. With the validation of an interviewer, people who won’t listen in person for five minutes will listen for an hour and a half.

No doubt these are faults I share. It’s just easier to notice when you are on the receiving end. We all have that friend or family member who smiles at us reprovingly when eventually we come to a realisation of something that they have been pointing out to us for some time. When I started at art school one teacher would say ironically, “You tell a student a hundred times and they get it in a flash.” I wonder how many people and their contributions I have overlooked because they did not present in the way my preconceptions and prejudices demanded.

In recent years, those of us who contradicted authority have all been subject to this pre-judgement. When considering the opinion of others we have to bear in mind the possibility that they could be right, or at the very least, have something to offer.

Detail of the National Gallery’s Samson and Delilah

When I met Euphrosyne Doxiadis, she told me that the establishment had closed ranks on her. “There’s a dictatorship of experts…Everyone was closing doors because they didn’t want to get involved with something so controversial.

Over the years she was publicly derided by high profile art critics. She was warned off her investigation and she and her children were threatened. “Publishers were reluctant to take Doxiadis’s book on although the independent London-based Eris press, distributed by Columbia University Press, eventually came to her rescue.”

In 2021 I came across an article in the Guardian that reported that AI analysis “evaluates Samson and Delilah not to be an original artwork by Rubens with a probability of 91.78%.”

Perhaps you notice a shift in your perception of this story at this point? Maybe you now think it is more likely that the Samson and Delilah is not an autograph Rubens. If so, please consider why that is. Is it because a mainstream media article and AI said so? We know about the failings of the media but AI is also programmed and fallible. There are numerous examples of it providing incorrect information to steer people’s opinions in line with state agendas.

What do we know about the accuracy of AI or the nature of its programming in general, let alone in authenticating paintings? Why do we require this unknown authority or any authority of dubious purpose or provenance to provide certainty? The jury system is founded on the principle that we are capable of discerning evidence for ourselves. Instead we are being encouraged to rely on a tool of technocratic tyrants. We wait for liars to decide what is true.

During the course of her investigation Euphrosyne discovered that the National Gallery’s painting was backed by a cheap modern pink blockboard. The National Gallery claims that the original oak panel had been planed down to a “thickness of 3mm.” This would be quite some feat on a painting of 73 x 81 inches or 185 x 204cm. 

Before 1980 the painting did not have the blockboard backing. Doxiadis suspects the painting to actually be on canvas now glued to board. Whatever the truth is of the painting the National Gallery knows it. A former National Gallery trustee told Doxiadis she was right.

The National Gallery does not declare any questions of authenticity in its exhibition presentation of its Samson and Delilah. For a long time the painting was listed as one of the highlights in its collection. The thousands of visitors who pass through its doors every day study and photograph the painting oblivious to the dispute over its authorship. They are unknowingly misled.

In 2004 art critic Waldemar Januszczak appeared on television presenting a fulsome description of a sculpture of a faun by the artist Gauguin. Januszczak expounded on the psychology of the art work and provided an explanation of the sexual connotations of the signature ‘Pgo,’ which he considered to refer to a nautical phallic slang word. Two years later it was revealed that the sculpture was a fake made by Shaun Greenhalgh of Bolton.

Greenhalgh was jailed in 2007 for 4 years and 8 months after selling forged artefacts for decades. He was caught attempting to sell fake Assyrian reliefs to the British Museum after earlier receiving £440,000 from Bolton Museum for a forged Egyptian sculpture. Greenhalgh pushed his luck one too many times.

To his credit Januszczak laughed off the embarassing incident and wrote the forward to Greenhalgh’s memoir.

Interestingly Greenhalgh, with his knowledge of the art market and of the acquisition and forgery processes, calls into question other artworks. Notably he regards the iconic image of Egyptian queen Nefertiti as a fake. He explains that details on the sculpture are additions made in plaster known as stucco.

That’s the work of, if not an amateur then, a second or third rate sculptor and none of those would work for the Pharaoh. You’d only have the best. It would be like finding a Michelangelo sculpture in marble and then you find out that the ears, the eyes, all the hands, the difficult parts, were all made in stucco and added on. It just wouldn’t be done.”

He reasons that the bust of Nefertiti has only one quarzite eye because of the difficulty for a forger in finding two identical stones. The bust also shows signs of contrived damage that has targeted the ears and back of the head rather than the face, despite it having apparently receiving an impact to the front that removed a protruding cobra from the headpiece. He concludes,

The damage is selective and that’s a dead ringer for a fake.”

Greenhalgh also claims authorship of a recently discovered drawing attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that has been given the title of the La Bella Principessa (the beautiful princess). The forger says that he made the drawing in a Renaissance style of a bossy girl called Sally who worked on the checkout in his local Co-op supermarket.

To the best of my knowledge this drawing is unlike other existing da Vinci drawings in that it is a colour study. Oxford University’s Professor Martin Kemp who wrote a book on his authentication of the drawing has rubbished Greenhalgh’s claims.

Another recently discovered da Vinci, around which there is ongoing controversy, is the Salvator Mundi which became the most expensive painting in the world when it was bought at auction in 2017 for $450 million. It did not feature in the da Vinci exhibition at the Louvre in 2021 because, reportedly, after subjecting it to examination, the museum found it to be inauthentic.

A “Swiss art-research lab which claims that more than 70 percent of the works it checks out turn out to be either fakes, forgeries, or misattributions.” This figure is high as it is based on a sample made of dubious artworks brought forward because of doubts about their authenticity. An important distinction is made between the confusion of misattribution, where works have been mistakenly or deliberately labelled as the work of a master, and those that have been deliberately forged.

One famous case of deliberate deceit is that of Dutch painter Han van Meegeren who became a forger as an act of revenge against the art world of the 1930s and 1940s. He “denounced modern painting as ‘art-Bolshevism,'” and successfully passed off his forgeries as Vermeers, even selling a painting to Goring during the Nazi occupation. That sale contributed to making him something of post-war public hero but his forgeries were of such poor quality that it is hard to believe that anyone ever mistook them for being by the same hand as Vermeer’s. People deferred to the opinion of the foremost expert of the time.

Van Meegeren The Supper at Emmaus 1936–1937

Vermeer Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window 1657-59

In recent years we have been asked to accept what is presented to us by authority without question and to over-ride or ignore our instincts. We have often deferred our critical faculties to experts without considering the possibility that they could be deceiving us due to financial or other interests. When we know better we often lose our tongues or have our voices silenced.

In the instances described above we see that deceit can extend to the misrepresentation of our history and culture. If it is possible for our institutions to mislead us over the nature of iconic images then our perception of our past, present and future could be distorted.

Francis O’Neill is an artist and writer who took to the streets in Oxford in April 2020 to run an information stall that became a hub of resistance to the lockdowns. He has since become known as the spokesman for the Yellow Boards outreach group in London. You can follow his SubStack here.

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