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Another Random Scribd Document
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Forgers and
Forgeries
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Forgers and Forgeries

Author: W. G. Constable

Release date: March 4, 2021 [eBook #64686]

Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORGERS AND

FORGERIES ***
ON THE COVER PAGES
A forgery of a Greek bronze statuette (BACK COVER), and a genuine
example (FRONT COVER). Such “type” forgeries are exceptionally
difficult to detect. Probably made for the tourist trade.

Retail Price $1.00

FORGERS
and
FORGERIES
BY W. G. Constable
CURATOR OF PAINTINGS
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

ART TREASURES OF THE WORLD

NEW YORK AND TORONTO

ART TREASURES OF THE WORLD

100 SIXTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 13, N. Y.
IN CANADA: 1184 CASTLEFIELD AVENUE
TORONTO 10, ONTARIO

Printed in U. S. A. AT14 W
Copyright 1954 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated. Copyright in the
United States and foreign countries under International Copyright
Convention. All rights reserved under Pan-American Convention. No
part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the
written permission of Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated. Printed in
U.S.A.

5
The usual idea of a forgery is of something deliberately
fabricated to appear to be what it is not; something conceived in sin,
and carrying the taint of illegitimacy throughout its existence. In
fact, however, many things made for quite innocent and even
laudable purposes have been used to deceive and to defraud, by
means of misrepresentation or subsequent manipulation. So the
essential element in forgery lies in the way an object is presented,
rather than in the purpose that inspired its making.

Still, it is objects made to deceive which have always held the center
of the stage. Without doubt, the main motive for their manufacture
is to make money. But often there is an element of drama, even of
romance, in the way they come into existence. A famous example is
a Sleeping Cupid which the young Michelangelo is supposed have
carved in imitation of the work of classical antiquity and which, after
being buried in the ground, was bought by a dealer and sold as an
antique, being rated as such until its true origin was revealed.
Though the element of deceit was present from the beginning, the
primary purpose of the work was a challenge to the past; and it is
significant that Michelangelo’s early biographers counted the success
of the imposition to his credit, since it proved that he could 6
successfully rival the sculptors of Greece and Rome.

Such challenges to the past have undoubtedly inspired men who

were or ultimately became professional forgers. This seems to have
been the case with Giovanni Bastianini (1830-1868), the Italian
sculptor. His admiration for early Renaissance Italian sculpture bred
in him a spirit of rivalry which issued in the production of remarkable
imitations to be exploited as originals through collaboration with a
dealer. Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) also seems to have wanted to
prove himself the equal of earlier sculptors, though later he
knowingly embarked on the making of forgeries of medieval and
Renaissance Italian sculpture, skillful enough to be purchased as
originals by various museums. The case for conscious rivalry with
the past is clearer with Rouchomovski, the nineteenth-century
goldsmith, whose abilities, though sufficient to give him a reputation
in his own right, led him to make the famous tiara of Saitaphernes,
which was purchased by the Louvre as Greco-Scythian work of the
third century B.C.

With other forgers, however, desire to confound connoisseurs and

the learned world has been uppermost, generally bred by neglect or
adverse criticism. So it seems to have been with Thomas Chatterton
and his eighteenth-century imitations of medieval poems; perhaps it
operated in the case of T. J. Wise and his forgeries of nineteenth-
century pamphlets; and apparently I. F. Ioni, the Sienese painter and
restorer, well-known for his forgeries of Italian primitive paintings,
derived at least as much satisfaction from trying to take in eminent
authorities as from the money he made. Certainly such motives
inspired H. A. Van Meegeren, the most famous forger of our time.
Van Meegeren, a dexterous painter, skillful in imitating others, did
not receive the recognition to which he felt his gifts entitled him, and
turned his talents to forging the great Dutch masters of the
seventeenth century. In 1937 he achieved spectacular success with
his sale to the Rotterdam museum for $200,000 of his Disciples at
Emmaus, as an early work by Jan Vermeer. A vivid light is thrown on
his motives by a remark he made in 1947 after his arrest and trial:
“The Disciples represented the master-stroke in my plan for
vengeance.” Later, the desire to fill his pockets seems to have
become paramount. A similar case may be that of the Piltdown skull,
once thought to be the earliest surviving relic of prehistoric man.
Recent intensive examination has proved that though the 7
cranium is of respectable antiquity, the lower jaw is that of a
chimpanzee doctored to appear ancient; and there is some reason to
think that it was made and planted near where the cranium was
found, by a disgruntled museum technician who wished to prove
that he could fool the learned world.

LEFT: A forgery by Giovanni Bastianini, part copy and part style imitation. RIGHT:
A fragment of an original relief by Desiderio da Settignano on which the forgery
was based.

But whatever mixture of motives may go into making a forgery, the

predominant one is almost always financial gain. It follows that what
the forger makes is mainly determined by the market for his goods,
which in turn depends on current activity among collectors and in
the learned world. In the Middle Ages, fantastic curiosities and
saintly relics were much in demand, and forgers saw to it that the
supply was kept up. Later, the growth of scientific knowledge and
religious skepticism spoiled this market; while recognition of the
artist as an individual and the development of art collections
stimulated production of forgeries imitating the work of particular
artists or of particular epochs. These have since been the staple of
the forger’s trade, reflecting the tastes of the day. The eighteenth-
century collectors’ passion for classical antiquity helped to sustain in
Rome a flourishing industry for the supply of classical statues and
gems, with Thomas Jenkins, painter, art agent, and banker as one of
its leading figures; English Regency taste produced a fine crop of
imitations of Sèvres and Meissen porcelain, made both in England
and elsewhere; the Gothic revival, bringing in its train a new
enthusiasm for Italian primitives, created hitherto neglected
opportunities for the forger, who maintained an active sideline in
keeping up the supply of Palissy ware and Italian majolica, until the
taste of the aesthetic period turned his attention to Delft ware; and
in our own time we have seen the forger swing from fabricating
Famille Rose and Famille Verte to meeting twentieth-century
demands for the art of the T’ang, Sung, and earlier Chinese
dynasties.

8
ABOVE: An example of a flourishing nineteenth-century industry: a forgery of a
fourteenth-century Italian diptych, with (BELOW) a genuine example for
comparison. The crackle and facial types indicate the forgery.

9
Just as he responds to changes in taste or in learned activity, 10
so the forger follows in the footsteps of the tourist, for whom
he has provided flint implements to be discovered in prehistoric
sites; Greek and Roman coins, gems, and statuettes at appropriate
places in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor; scarabs and small sculpture
in Egypt; and today, pottery and figurines in Central and South
America.

Nor does the forger confine his attentions to the art of the past, but
extends them to contemporary work. Constable and Corot were
imitated while they were still living; forgeries of Renoir, Degas,
Picasso, Matisse, and others are common today; while, among
Americans, Winslow Homer and Ryder fabrications circulate freely.
Artists are apt to be forgetful as to what they have produced,
especially in the case of sketches, and have been known to deny
authorship of perfectly genuine work; so that risks of confrontation
are not too great. With a contemporary artist recently dead, his work
not yet fully known or catalogued, a vogue for collecting him fanned
by a skillful entrepreneur, prices not so high as to provoke critical
examination, and with not too many genuine examples accessible for
comparison, the forger is in velvet.

The two main methods of making forgeries, manufacture and

misrepresentation, are in practice often combined; but it is
convenient to discuss them separately. The simplest type of
manufactured forgery is the straight copy, although this has
considerable disadvantages. In addition to the necessity of choosing
the right materials, imitating the right technique, and giving a proper
appearance of age, the risks of confrontation with the original are
great in these days of systematic combing of collections, aided by
swift and easy travel, by photography and widespread publication.
Sometimes, the forger attempts to meet this risk of confrontation by
introducing variations into a design, so that the forgery may pass as
a version of the original. But even so, comparison of the two is
almost inevitable, with the almost equally inevitable exposure of any
defects in the copy. It is this risk that makes forgers prefer to copy
objects that are types rather than those stamped with the
individuality of some particular master. The strictly controlled design
and iconography of much Byzantine painting, and its 11
standardized technique, encourages modern repetition; and
the putting of one more copy on the market is not in itself likely to
arouse suspicion. Similarly, the fact that eighteenth-century Chinese
potters paid homage to those of earlier dynasties by making most
admirable copies of their work, confuses the situation in favor of the
forger. Another advantage (to the forger) of such objects is that
many of them can be reproduced by casting. With some knowledge
of the materials used for the originals and some skill in giving an
appearance of age, such things as Chinese grave figures, Greek or
Near Eastern bronzes, and coins can be produced in quantity.
Sometimes, indeed, variation in the material of the cast is an aid to
deception; as in the case of Renaissance bas-reliefs, when a cast in
wax or stucco may, after some manipulation, be passed off as a
sketch for a marble original.
ABOVE: A forgery of Vermeer by Van Meegeren, purporting to be an early work
of the artist, purchased as an original, compared with (BELOW) the earliest
known painting signed by Vermeer.
More common than straight copies of particular objects, however,
are imitations of the style of some period or master. This avoids the
risk of comparison with a more or less identical original, and helps in
passing off the forgery as an unknown example of the style it
imitates. It was on this basis that Bastianini, Rouchomovski, and
Dossena worked, as did the German painter Roerich in his 12
imitations of Cranach and other early German masters. Usually
such imitations of a style do not embody a new conception or an
original idea; for the most part they consist of borrowings from
original works, pieced together to make a more or less consistent
whole. Often, these borrowings are secondhand, being taken from
photographs, engravings, or reproductions in books. A specific case
was the use of Weisser’s Bilderatlas zur Weltgeschichte (1882) by
Rouchomovski for the reliefs on the tiara of Saitapharnes. The use of
such models is, however, the Achilles’ heel of the forger. Once their
source is tracked down, detection of the imposture is almost certain.
A forgery of fourteenth-century Italian wood sculpture by Dossena.
An X-ray revealed modern nails in the interior.
That, perhaps, is why forgers have on occasion virtually abandoned
the use of models, either wholly or in part, and produced objects
different from anything that is known, but which could fit into some
particular historical or cultural background. Here, they are exploiting
not only ignorant enthusiasm but the desire among the 13
learned to extend knowledge of little-known epochs of human
history, or to find material that will justify theories about them.
Comparatively crude examples are the so-called Baphomets, stone
figures said to have been worshipped by the Knights Templar; and
the “medieval” pilgrim’s badges made in nineteenth-century London
by William Smith and Charles Eaton, now widely known as “Billies
and Charlies.” The appeal of the unknown was more skillfully utilized
by Rouchomovski and Van Meegeren. In the tiara of Saitapharnes,
existing models had been used, through reproductions, for the reliefs
and inscriptions; but as a whole, the tiara was something of a kind
unknown, yet eagerly sought for, and so was more readily accepted
when it came into the market. Similarly, unknown early works of
Vermeer had long been a matter of speculation among art historians,
and in certain quarters a hypothetical character for them had been
built up; so that when The Disciples at Emmaus appeared and more
or less fitted the bill, it was all the more easy to believe in it.
 A forgery of Egyptian limestone sculpture (RIGHT) compared with a genuine
example of the type (LEFT). The forgery was proved so by analyzing the binding
material of the color.

So far, the forgeries discussed have been substantially new 14

constructions. This is to be expected when the motives of
challenge to the past or self-vindication are at work; usually,
however, the forger prefers to use a genuine piece, wholly or in part,
as a starting point for his operations. This has none of the
disadvantages of a copy; it avoids some of the difficulties of finding
suitable materials; and it provides a pattern for such things as color,
texture, and surface condition, in any changes or additions that the
forger may make.

One possibility is to construct a forgery with the aid of genuine

fragments, or on the basis of a damaged original. Joseph Nollekens,
the eighteenth-century English sculptor, who worked with Thomas
Jenkins in Rome, himself tells of making extensive additions to
pieces of Roman sculpture found as the result of excavation, which
in due course went into famous collections in England. Similarly,
Dossena sometimes used fragments of genuine quattrocento work in
his forgeries. This, too, was the method favored by Ioni for making
his early Italian paintings. One great convenience of such procedures
(for the forger) is that if suspicion is aroused and investigation
made, it can always be alleged that the added work is merely honest
restoration. Indeed, the line between restoration and forgery
sometimes becomes blurred. Occasionally there appears in the art
market a graft of a piece of one original onto another; its sellers
would be consumed with indignation were it suggested that they
had handled a forgery.

The exploitation of genuine work, however, often takes much simpler

forms than that described above. The signature of a master may be
added to a school piece, or to anything that bears some superficial
resemblances to his work; sometimes, indeed, the addition is to a
work by the master himself, to convince the doubting and to
increase its sale value. Not infrequently, however, there is present an
inconvenient signature of the real author, which has to be obliterated
or manipulated into something more attractive. A special form of
manipulation is to put on some anonymous portrait a name which
more or less fits the dress and character of the sitter, and so
increases its sale value. Shakespeare and Milton are often so
honored; and many mediocre portraits picked up in England have
been adorned with the names of Colonial worthies, and thus found a
ready market in the United States.

All the examples of forgery so far mentioned are of the

manufactured type, however little work may have been expended on
them. In this they differ entirely from the forgeries which depend
wholly on misrepresentation, a genuine article of one kind 15
being passed off as of another, without any physical change. It
is not usual to brand such things as forgeries, and legally they are
not so regarded; but morally, in that something is made to appear
what it is not, they seem to be truly forgeries.

ABOVE: A forgery (partly cleaned for examination) of a fifteenth-century

Florentine portrait, compared with a genuine example (BELOW). The forgery is
on an old panel, but was finally proved false by the presence of titanium white,
a twentieth-century pigment.
A simple and widespread means of falsifying in this way is a
certificate of authorship and genuineness. Sometimes, the writers of
these are of the highest competence and probity. These two qualities
are not always combined, however; and the certificate then becomes
either intentionally or innocently misleading. Unfortunately, most
certificates are written for a fee, and there is always temptation for
the writer to err on the side of pleasing his employer; while there is
no question that sometimes certificates have been given deliberately
to defraud. Moreover, forged certificates bearing reputable names
are not unknown, a special variety being the stringing together of
words from a genuine letter, with all qualifying or negative phrases
omitted. There is, however, a more insidious method of giving 16
a certificate, that of publication of an object in a reliable
journal. Editors are generally careful enough; but they are
defenseless in the face of a plausible case put forward by a name of
some reputation, especially when the passage relating to the object
is included in a more general context. This kind of certification is
particularly difficult to cope with, since such articles will continue to
be cited in later publications, perhaps mainly to controvert them but
nevertheless renewing their availability for dishonest purposes.

Construction of false pedigrees is another means of

misrepresentation, much used in the case of copies or versions.
Sometimes, a pedigree is completely false, naming imaginary former
owners whose existence cannot be proved but equally cannot be
disproved. Sometimes, such history as the object may have is
grafted onto that of another and accepted version, so that the two
may become confused. A special case of this is the planting out of
objects in houses whose owners are ready, for a consideration, to
describe them as having descended in the family, or even as having
been bought from the maker by an ancestor.

The skill, ingenuity, and knowledge of the forger and of those who
exploit his work, are opposed to the skill, ingenuity, and knowledge
of the collector and the learned world. The unaided human eye, if it
has a trained and well-informed mind behind it, can go a long way in
detecting forgeries. It is surprising how forgetful, careless, or
ignorant a forger can be. He may employ materials whose
inconsistency with the period to which his work claims to belong can
be seen even by the unaided eye. More common is the introduction
of such things as types and details of costume, or the use of coats of
arms, that are later than the alleged date of the work. All such
evidence, however, needs scrutiny, since it may simply be a case of
later additions to a genuine object. More useful, therefore, may be
tracking down the source of a forger’s borrowings. If, for example,
these at first sight seem to come from an original work, but follow
much more closely the variations from that original in a later copy or
engraving, the conclusion is obvious. Again, investigation of
pedigrees, checking of literary references, searching through
exhibition records, may all reveal suspicious or occasionally damning
evidence of falsified history.

17
ABOVE: A forgery of a portrait by Cranach, and (BELOW) a genuine example. A
style forgery, skillful, but coarser than an original.
To tests based on observation and historical verification, we 18
must add those mainly dependent on feeling. For the sensitive
and trained observer, a number of indefinable characteristics will
“add up” to a definite conviction of genuine or false. Qualities of
surface and handling, subtleties in color and in the definition of
form, the degree of unity in conception and treatment, and the
emotional character of the work are among the things which
influence such decisions. Thus, a copy, however exact, may reveal
itself as lacking the coherence and the feeling which inspired the
original; and the most skillful imitation of some older work may be
recognized as a creation of its own time. Nobody can completely
divorce himself from the prevailing thoughts, opinions, assumptions,
feelings, and standards of his own period; and inevitably these will
color whatever he produces, whether he be a forger or an original
artist.

Scorn is often poured on judgments of the type described, and the

expert who produces them in a court of law is the delight of the
skillful cross-examiner. True, the only merit of snap opinions based
on defective sensibility and inadequate experience is that they have
a fifty-fifty chance of being right; but with sensibility backed by
knowledge, an almost supra-rational instinct develops as to what is
genuine or false. The so-called impression or hunch is, in such
circumstances, more accurately described as a synthesis of many
experiences. It is often forgotten that such almost instinctive
judgments are not confined to art and archaeology. They play an
important part in the sciences (where they are called hypotheses), in
politics, in war, in business, and many other fields. Their value varies
with the men who make them; but this does not lessen their
potential value, and their occasional indispensability. In the detection
of two particular types of forgery they are especially useful.
Imitations of contemporary work can be very baffling, since the
forger works with materials which were or might have been used in
genuine work, does not have to give an appearance of age, and
works against the same general background as does the artist he
imitates. Similarly, a school piece which is misrepresented as the
work of an old master, was produced in a similar physical and
emotional environment. In such cases, a final verdict often has to be
based on nothing but imponderable elements of style, realizable only
through feeling based on knowledge.

19

ABOVE: An imitation of the work of John Constable, distinguished from an

original (BELOW) by its coarse handling and mistakes in topography.
The methods so far described of detecting forgeries may well 20
be as old as the practice of forgery itself. Certainly, they form
the basis of all investigations of which we have records, as well as of
those made today. Their efficiency, however, has been immensely
increased by the development of scientific methods of investigation.
The first great step forward came with the use of photography,
which permitted comparison of suspicious objects with genuine
examples in a way hitherto impossible. Next came the application of
various scientific techniques to the analysis of the physical
constitution of an object. So spectacular have been the results in
some cases as to create a blind faith in such methods of
investigation, almost as though a piece of scientific apparatus were
an oracle which when consulted would answer “Yes” or “No” to the
question of whether an object is genuine. The limits of scientific
investigation are, however, clearly marked. This method is solely
concerned with the physical make-up of an object, and is completely
indifferent as to who made it, when and where it was made, and
why it was made. All that it does is to make possible the discovery of
physical facts bearing upon these matters, which have to be
observed and interpreted by human minds and used as the basis for
human judgments.

ABOVE: A forgery of a painting by Utrillo adapted from a genuine example,

compared with another genuine picture (BELOW). Note the clumsy handling of
paint and drawing in the forgery.

21
The scientific procedures with which we are concerned here fall into
two main groups. Of these, one includes various techniques for
extending the range of human vision. The simplest is examination by
microscope, which enables characteristics of a surface to be seen
that would otherwise be invisible, so that, for example, painted
cracks or cracks artificially induced can be distinguished from crackle
due to age. With the microscope, too, evidence of removals and
additions can be obtained, such as the manipulation of signatures
and inscriptions, or the presence of repaint or artificial patina; while
the structure of pigments, stone, etc., can be ascertained, as a step
toward their identification. More elaborate is examination under
various rays of the spectrum, to which the human eye is not
sensitive but whose results can be recorded. The best known of
these is X-ray, which penetrates certain substances but is held up in
different degrees by others, especially metals, so that a
photographic film behind an object will record a map of such
substances in an object, thus revealing much that is below the 22
surface. On the other hand, ultra-violet rays falling on a
surface cause fluorescence, which varies according to substance and
texture, so that additions to the surface may be revealed. Infra-red
rays, in contrast, penetrate the surface, and are reflected back from
the layers beneath, so that a photograph taken by infra-red light
may reveal something concealed from the eye, which X-ray may not
pick up.

The second group of investigatory methods includes various means

of analyzing the materials present in an object. The most familiar is
chemical analysis; but this is being supplemented and to some
extent displaced by spectrographic analysis, with its recent extension
in the use of X-ray diffraction. By these means, it is possible to
detect even minute traces of substances whose presence or absence
may be decisive in settling the date or provenance of a material.
Some recent applications of quantitative analysis have proved helpful
in ascertaining the date of objects. One of these techniques,
determination of the extent of fluorination, was used to prove that
the jawbone of the Piltdown skull was a modern forgery; while
another, based on the amount of radio-active carbon present, which
is known to decay at a certain rate, is still in course of development,
but promises to be most useful.

Thus, a formidable group of weapons are available against the

forger. To be effective, however, the significance of the facts they
bring to light must be understood. Decisive proof that an object is
not of the period or by the hand to which it is attributed comes only
through the discovery of facts which are not only inconsistent with
the attribution but cannot be explained except by assuming that the
attribution is wrong. For instance, the body of a work may contain a
substance unknown at its ostensible date. Modern nails inside a
piece of wood sculpture said to be of the fourteenth century; cobalt,
unknown as a pigment until the early nineteenth century, in a
painting attributed to Velázquez; and titanium white, a twentieth-
century invention, in a portrait labelled fifteenth-century Florentine—
these are all good evidence that the object is not what it is held out
to be.

Moreover, the facts discovered always have to be controlled by

reference to established standards. Structure revealed by
microscopic examination must be compared with that of known
substances; chemical and spectrographic analysis has to be checked
by reference to a codified series of earlier tests; crackle on a surface
can only be labelled as false if the nature of genuine crackle is
known; and the reading of whatever is discovered by X-ray, 23
ultra-violet, or infra-red rays calls for comparison with verified
results of previous examinations. The facts yielded by one method of
investigation may by themselves not be sufficient evidence of
forgery; if, however, they can be joined with the results of other
methods, all pointing in the same direction, a strong case can be
built up. As in a court of law, this, rather than production of a single
dramatic and decisive piece of evidence, is what usually happens.

It might be thought that the combination of expert and scientist

would leave the forger with his occupation gone. On the contrary, he
continues to flourish. In the face of the expert, he discards the
clumsy copy and the inept certificate, utilizing the improved methods
of photography and reproduction and the increasing flood of learned
works, to help save him from anachronisms and inherent
contradictions in his work. The scientist he meets either by
concentrating in fields where scientific methods of inquiry are
relatively helpless, or by himself going to school with the scientist.
The results of recent scientific work have put at his disposal much
knowledge of what to do, what to avoid, and how to baffle certain
types of investigation. Moreover, he has even taken over certain
procedures worked out by scientists, such as those for hastening the
effect of time, and has applied them to his own problems; cases are
known of forgeries having been submitted, through innocent hands,
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