Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (40 page)

The waters were muddied even further by the fact that some Victorian collectors were not at all concerned by the idea that dealers might be supplying them with forgeries. To them, what
mattered was the prestige or intrinsic beauty of the object, rather than its provenance. During the later nineteenth century, the Rothschild family employed a Parisian goldsmith and restorer, Alfred André. After his death in 1919, André's workshop was found to be full of plaster casts and wax models for making forgeries. Like Vasters, he had been producing pieces in the Renaissance style to satisfy the demand of Victorian collectors. Three of his pieces were found in the Rothschild collection, clearly marked, suggesting that the family was willing to buy beautiful work that looked genuine, even in the knowledge that it was forged.

Similarly, many of Vasters' forgeries were bought by Frédéric Spitzer, ‘the greatest genius among nineteenth-century collectors', according to a German art historian in 1902, and also a dealer who made a substantial income from Vasters' work.
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Spitzer seemed unconcerned by the fact that his renowned collection was based on a complex series of forgeries. Indeed, he sought out forgers other than Vasters who might supplement his collecting, including Alfred André. In 1910, the year after Vasters' death, another German art historian, Stephen Beissel, noted that ‘as is well known', Spitzer happily ‘employed for almost fifty years a series of first rate artists in Paris, Cologne and Aachen etc. who made old things'.
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In some ways, Spitzer was simply defying the experts by filling his collection with forgeries. But his carefree attitude also raised a variety of complex questions that collectors had to address on a more or less daily basis: did authenticity matter? If the experts could not tell the difference between an original and a forgery, was the forgery not just as good? Which was the most important, an object's intrinsic value, based on its beauty, artistry or craftsmanship, or its monetary value, based on its provenance?

* * *

In January 2010, a painting called
La Belle Ferronnière
was sold at Sotheby's for $1.5 million. Thought to be of Lucrezia Crivelli, the mistress of an eighteenth-century Duke of Milan, the painting is the ‘sister' to another version in the Louvre. For more than eighty years, the identity of the artists for both works has been a matter of bitter dispute. In 1920, when the owner of
La Belle Ferronière
, Harry Hahn, tried to sell it as a work by da Vinci, authenticated by a French expert, a reporter from the
New York World
rang Joseph Duveen in the middle of the night to get an opinion. A sleepy Duveen instantly dismissed the work as a copy, even though he had never seen it. The only real da Vinci of Lucrezia Crivelli was the one in the Louvre, Duveen maintained. Many of the potential buyers took his word for it, and pulled out of the sale. A furious Hahn took Duveen to court, claiming half a million dollars of damages for the apparent slander, but the 1929 trial concentrated not so much on what Duveen had said, but why. The prosecution argued that Duveen wanted to control what was sold to whom, thus making sure that he remained the dominant force in the art market. Declaring an object to be a forgery was one sure way of deterring buyers and scuppering a deal in which he was not involved.

There is no evidence that Duveen was acting so manipulatively, but it is certainly true that expert connoisseurs were in a powerful position, with most of the market prepared to accept their judgement on key authentications. This was particularly the case for those like Franks, Robinson and Murray Marks, who were working before the widespread use of scientific techniques to identify forgeries. For most of the time, Victorian collectors had to rely on their ‘eye' to decide what it was they were looking at. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in high-profile cases like the
Flora
bust, did science begin to have much of a part to play. Even then, there was a lingering tendency to believe that such new-fangled techniques could not possibly add
much to a connoisseur's verdict. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, art historians such as the Italian Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson working in Europe and America developed a brand of connoisseurship which was identified as ‘scientific' – and considered more than a match for emerging technology. Instead of relying on instinct and taste, vague spiritual qualities, Morelli and Berenson adopted a detective approach to small concrete clues. Their technique relied on the close scrutiny of tiny details that could be used to identify the style of a particular artist, often by looking at things that had been created almost unconsciously, like the folds of an ear, and which were unlikely to be closely imitated by a forger. ‘Just as most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favourite words and sayings, that they employ involuntarily, even inappropriately, so too every painter has his own particularities that escape him without his being aware of them,' wrote Morelli, and his books included images of disembodied hands and ears by famous Renaissance artists to make his point.
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Not everyone was convinced by these new methods: Wilhelm von Bode was particularly critical of such a schematic approach. But, in many ways, this kind of connoisseurship was a refinement of the expertise that collectors such as Schreiber, Robinson and Franks had been developing through the middle years of the century, continuing principles of detailed and informed observation. It also had the added advantage of retaining the air of gentlemanly scholarship that the Victorians valued. To many, this approach was the ideal ‘scientific' compromise, and even well into the twentieth century there were art market stalwarts who did not want to sully their reputations with too great a reliance on less genteel techniques. As late as the 1920s, when Duveen was taken to court by Hahn over the
Belle Ferronnière
dispute, such Victorian sensitivities lingered. The American jury was distinctly
unimpressed by Duveen's reliance on vague statements about the quality of his ‘eye', and in the absence of factual evidence could not agree on a verdict, forcing Duveen to settle out of court to the tune of $60,000. In fact, Duveen had experts in modern X-ray techniques, as well as archival research, examine
La Belle Ferronnière
, but he never used their evidence, even though it supported his conclusions. He seems to have preferred to maintain his reputation as a connoisseur of impeccable instincts, and pay up, rather than be seen publicly to doubt his own connoisseurship or to relinquish the power of identifying forgeries to a new generation of scientists.

Victorian collectors were caught in this changing world, where untried science was beginning to encroach on long-trusted scholarship, and where the art market was continually confused by accusations of forgery. The more specialized and knowledgeable connoisseurs became, the more forgeries were discovered, and the more collections were undermined and the market disrupted. The thorny question of what was genuine had always mattered to serious collectors: in the seventeenth century, for example, Rubens' patron, Sir Dudley Carleton, quizzed the artist at length to find out which works were by Rubens himself and which were the product of studio collaboration. But it was during the nineteenth century that issues of authenticity became widely discussed, and collectors began to realize the extent of the forgery problem. In such an atmosphere of doubt, it is perhaps not surprising that many of them tried to shore up their authority and retain some control over the market.

In 1881, Murray Marks suddenly acquired a very beautiful twelfth-century enamelled gold reliquary cross. Like the Vasters drawings, the cross, which had originally belonged to Ludwig I, King of Hungary and Poland, appeared in Marks' showroom apparently from nowhere. It was spectacularly beautiful, and inevitably caused a stir. Marks, taken by the intricate workmanship
of the piece, showed it off to customers with pride and eventually sealed a profitable deal. But the cross was never his to sell. It was not a forgery, but it was part of an ingenious plot to make money from forgeries. Twenty years earlier, a Hungarian dealer working in Vienna, Salomon Weininger, had been asked to do some restoration work on the cross and three other pieces which came from the city's Imperial Treasury. While the objects were in his workshop, he copied them, and then returned the forgeries in place of the originals. The genuine pieces he sold on secretly to collectors: one of them, the Holy Thorn Reliquary of Jean, Duc de Berry, eventually ended up in the British Museum.
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So immaculate were the copies that the art world was confused for many years about which were the authentic objects and which were the forged ones. The case quickly became notorious, and Marks, who openly admitted that the cross came from Vienna, must have suspected that it was one of the pieces at the centre of the controversy. He may not have been sure whether it was an original or not, but that hardly makes his decision to act as dealer for the sale seem less dubious. It appears that he intentionally sold an object that was either a forgery or which he knew had been stolen from one of Europe's greatest treasure houses.

There was nothing secretive about the way Marks went about selling the cross. He openly invited clients to inspect it, and he used his contacts with other dealers to ensure everyone knew what a fine piece was in his possession. Robinson, in particular, was intimately involved. Like Marks, he was drawn to the quality of the reliquary's workmanship and, like Marks, it seems, he was willing to set aside any niggling doubts as to provenance. As far as we know, Robinson was not involved in the sale, but he was certainly part of the marketing drive to find the reliquary a new home: in March 1891, he borrowed it from Marks to display at the Society of Antiquaries in London where he wrote disingenuously that ‘nothing is known of the history of this cross'.
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No doubt the two men shared quiet conversations, speculating over the origins of this most collectable of objects. Why did they choose not to make their suspicions public? We cannot, of course, be sure, but I doubt that it was simply a case of assuring Marks a profit. Robinson, after all, had no reason to have any interest in that. It is more likely that a complicated combination of factors kept them silent. The sale was prestigious, and turning a blind eye to the fact that the cross might be stolen or forged allowed Robinson and Marks to reflect the glory, asserting their positions at the top of their profession. Moreover, casting doubt on the piece's provenance would have destabilized the market yet again, and perhaps involved them both in an international scandal. In contrast, celebrating the cross as a legitimate masterpiece sustained the Victorian system of connoisseurship that they had both worked so hard to establish. It allowed them – like Duveen later – to stake a claim for saying what could and could not be sold. It put the power to decide in their hands.

While the
Flora
affair was to rumble on into the twentieth century, Marks found himself soon absolved for his part in it: ‘there never was any ground for impugning in the slightest degree the good faith of the vendor,' reassured the
Times Literary Supplement
.
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He also received a vote of confidence from staff at the South Kensington Museum, who were no doubt mindful of the number of loans and advantageous deals he was apt to make on their behalf. He provided ‘much valuable information respecting the provenance and history of many. . . objects', asserted an official report.
²⁸
With his name cleared and his reputation intact, Marks' association with South Kensington continued, and became one of the longest and most fruitful of the many enduring alliances he made over the course of his life. Having begun in the 1860s by luring Henry Cole with the splendour of the Dutch rood screen, he went on to work with five other Directors and generations of
museum staff. His correspondence reflected the technological advances of a changing age: his handwritten letters gave way to typewritten notes and, finally, to telephone calls as he negotiated deals on the museum's behalf. His generosity filled the galleries with lovely things even as a new world order took shape: when he retired from business and moved permanently to Brighton in May 1916, during the darkest hours of the First World War, he offered all the objects from his London house on loan to the museum, brushing aside the staff's concern that the ‘Zeppelin danger' was too great to risk such a display.
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In the five years before his death in 1918, at the age of seventy-seven, Marks gave numerous pieces to the collections. He marked his fifty-year friendship with South Kensington with photographs, carvings, portraits, ironwork, sculptures, an oak door and, inevitably, a lovely example of K'ang-hsi period blue-and-white china. In a final flourish of generosity, he also gave the museum a group of bronzes, showing Bacchus and his faun, which he believed to be a rare fifteenth-century work from Florence. It was finely modelled, elegant and yet substantial, and, since bronzes were something of a speciality for Marks, it was a fitting tribute to his lifetime's work. Yet there is now considerable doubt over the origins of the Bacchus bronze. Recently re-evaluated, there is something not entirely right about the modelling of the faun's ‘knee', as well as evidence of later techniques in a cast screw; the work is now considered to be relatively modern. As it has not turned out to be as special a piece as Marks believed, it is not on display in the galleries. It seems that, in his final handsome gesture, Marks was himself undone by the rampant Victorian trade in forgeries.

S
TEPHEN
W
OOTTON
B
USHELL