What's in a Name?

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REMBRANDT OR NOT?

Only a handful of people in the world have the authority to determine whether a painting is a genuine Rembrandt. 

Titian Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn Antonello da Messina Hendrick Avercamp Adriaen Brouwer Francesco Francia Gaetano Gandolfi Giovanni di Paolo

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This past October, Moore Allen & Innocent, a small auction house in Cirencester, in the west of England, put on the block a 9½ -by-6½-inch oil-on-copper portrait of a jovial young man attributed to “a follower of Rembrandt.” After 18 minutes of tense one-upmanship among three bidders, then two, the painting, estimated at £1,000 to £1,500 ($2,000–3,000), finally sold for £2.2 million ($4.5 million), not including the buyer’s premium, to a representative of the London gallery Hazlitt Gooden & Fox.

The bidders were acting on a hunch that the work, The Young Rembrandt as Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher, was by the 17th-century Dutch master himself, despite inconclusive results from a recent study by the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. They were willing to take the gamble because they knew an autographed work by Rembrandt could make nearly 10 times what they paid. “I thought it looked very good,” says the seasoned Mayfair gallerist and former Sotheby’s Old Master specialist Derek Johns, who underbid the painting. “I thought it looked like a Rembrandt.”

Ernst van de Wetering, the head of Amsterdam’s Rembrandt Research Project, an institute founded in 1968 to determine the authenticity of works attributed to the artist (see “Rembrandt or Not?”, page 140), agrees, and his is the most authoritative word on the matter. He’s excited about the discovery of an early work. “You see new painterly adventures taking place in it,” he told the Dutch magazine HP/De Tijd in February. “This is the first painting where you find his now-dynamic rhythm.” At press time, the reattributed picture was reportedly being offered for about $20 million.

Just months before, at Gilding’s Fine Art Auctioneers, in Leicestershire, in the Midlands, a similar episode occurred. A local private seller had consigned a 36-by-26-inch painting of a bearded man in a black costume and white bib collar attributed to the 18th-century Continental school (est. £300–500; $600–1,000). It set off a bidding battle, eventually going for £205,000 ($413,000), not including the buyer’s premium, to a London gallery rumored to be Hazlitt. Experts are now saying the picture could be a Titian from 1510–20. If it is, the resale value would again be at least 10 times the purchase price. But the odds are good that it’s not: A postsale cleaning revealed no further evidence of the artist’s hand.

Old Master attributions have long straddled the line between science, albeit an inexact one, and business. Of late, there has been a proliferation of cases like those outlined above—and not just at small houses. Is this due to new scholarship and technology? Increased demand for name-brand works? Or is it just a continuation of a centuries-old guessing game? Whatever the answer, buying Old Masters can sometimes feel like playing the roulette wheel.

George Goldner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairman of drawings and prints, calls betting on attributions part of the job. “I try to describe it to new collectors as being a bit like justice,” he says. “You go before a court, and with any luck, the judge tries to do the best he can to arrive at the right answer. And sometimes he or she gets it beyond reasonable doubt. But it’s not mathematics in most cases—there is always some potential element of doubt or questions that come in, and you have to live with that. Even the greatest connoisseurs I’ve known in my career have made mistakes.”

In market terms, authorship errors can translate into thousands, even millions, of dollars made—and lost. At Sotheby’s New York in January 1999, the North Carolina Museum of Art offered Madonna with the Christ Child by Francesco Francia, called Il Francia (circa 1450–1517), which had been catalogued in several publications and acquired from New York’s David M. Koester Gallery in 1952. The work fetched $134,500, doubling the $60,000 high estimate. But when it returned to the auction block last December, at Christie’s London, the attribution was downgraded to “studio of” Il Francia and the estimate lowered to £30,000 to £50,000 ($62,000–103,000). “In the interim,” says the London dealer and former Christie’s Old Master specialist Charles Beddington, “a book had been written saying it wasn’t by him. That’s a fairly rare example of something like that coming back and taking a hit for its owner.” The painting brought just £48,500 ($98,000).

Unlike catalogues raisonnés for modern and contemporary artists, those for Old Masters are few and far between, and a significant number of the paintings are not autographed. “I’m standing here in front of three paintings, by [Francesco] Solimena, Guido Reni and [Gaetano] Gandolfi,” said George Wachter, the cochairman of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings worldwide, referring to lots offered in the firm’s Old Masters sale in New York this past January. “Not one of them is signed.” The Reni (est. $700–900,000) brought $959,400; the Solimena (est. $700–900,000) made $825,000; and the Gandolfi (est. $300–500,000) fetched $657,000.

Publication deadlines for auction catalogues or a seller’s impatience to part with a work before sufficient research can be done often results in cautious attributions, such as “from the workshop of” or “by a follower of” a name-brand artist or “in the style of” a certain school or century. “Auction houses have to be very careful about how they catalogue things, because they’re liable for a period of time, particularly if they catalogue something in error,” says Nicholas Hall, the international head of Old Master paintings at Christie’s. Sotheby’s Wachter adds: “There are times when we either pull something out of a sale because we can’t come to clarity on it or call it less than what it might be because we’re not sure.”

That was the case at Sotheby’s London last December with the page-size, gold-ground tempera on panel Madonna and Child Enthroned. Wachter and his colleagues believed it was probably by Giovanni di Paolo, based on the opinions of the scholars Laurence B. Kanter and Everett Fahy (like expert witnesses at trials, such advisers may be compensated for their evidence). But they catalogued it as Sienese school, early 15th century. “We couldn’t get a full agreement [on the di Paolo attribution] before the catalogue was sent to the printer,” Wachter says, “although over time it became clear that that’s what it was.” Estimated between £70,000 and £90,000 ($144–186,000), it sold for an impressive £412,500 ($840,000).

Wachter, a 30-plus-year veteran of the Old Masters market, recalls a historic blooper at Sotheby’s London in October 1995. In the sale of the former St. James dealer Hal O’Nians’s collection, a painting attributed to the 17th-century Italian history painter Pietro Testa was estimated at £10,000 to £15,000 ($16–24,000). The work, titled The Sack of Carthage, was purchased by Hazlitt’s John Morton Morris for £155,500 ($244,100), reportedly on the advice of the British scholar Denis Mahon, who had identified it as a very early Nicolas Poussin. Three years later, the picture—rightly attributed to the 17th-century French painter and renamed The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem—was purchased from the gallery for a reported $7.2 million. It is now a star in the collection of Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

What about the original consignors of the “Pietro Testa”? Shortchanged sellers can’t expect much in the way of redress. In this case, though, Sotheby’s “had to pay off the owners, because we had not given them good service, since it was underattributed,” says Wachter. “We didn’t check the way we should have.”

In a similar case last year, the boutique Belgian auction firm Hôtel des Ventes Flagey sold a painting of a man snoozing on a chair in a café (est. €250–350; $340–480) for €4,600 ($6,600) to the local dealer Klaas Müller, who subsequently sold it to a Dutch collector for an unknown sum. The consignors, heirs of Count de Brouckhoven de Bergeyck, had been referred to the smaller firm by the Sotheby’s Brussels office, which had identified the work as an “anonymous 19th-century scène de cabaret.” Six months later it appeared at Sotheby’s Amsterdam, attributed to the 17th-century Flemish genre painter Adriaen Brouwer (est. €100–150,000; $144–217,000). It went for €360,000 ($520,000) to Old Master dealers Bruce Livie and Otto Naumann, who sold it this past March at TEFAF Maastricht, again doubling the price.

Sotheby’s did not respond to queries about whether the heirs of Count de Brouckhoven de Bergeyck were compensated, but a source close to the family says they got about €250,000 ($395,000). In general, though, it’s the buyers, not the consignors, who receive the best protection against misattributions. Sotheby’s and Christie’s guarantee some autographed works for five years from the date of purchase. Buyers can challenge the attribution—potentially forcing the houses to make a refund of the hammer price, plus the buyer’s premium—if they meet certain conditions, spelled out in the catalogue’s fine print. The guarantee is inapplicable, however, if the printed description of the work is generally endorsed by scholars or indicates that there are differing opinions, or if the method used by the buyer to establish alternate authorship is widely unavailable or unaccepted, prohibitively expensive or impractical.

Some cynics might think inflated attributions are fairly common, because of market pressure, but auction houses would be foolhardy to identify a work without sufficient scholarly support. The potential for collateral damage is simply too great, in terms of both money and prestige. “There’s a huge amount at stake,” says Goldner, “and there’s an overemphasis on trying to achieve absolute certainty in an area where it’s very hard to do that.” For that reason, too-cautious identifications are much more common, attracting buyers who aren’t afraid to gamble. They can purchase something, says  Hall, “clean it and do a little more research, and perhaps the person who dissented originally on its authenticity changes his mind.”

Naumann did just that in January 2005 at Swann Auction Galleries, in New York. He bought a postcard-size watercolor and pen-and-ink work on paper depicting a harbor scene with sailboats, estimated at just $700 to $1,000. The catalogue attributed it vaguely to the Flemish school, 17th century, but Naumann had a hunch it was by the Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp, even though he is known more for his snow-covered scenes. Naumann won it for $2,200. Two years later, at the Otto Naumann Ltd. Gallery sale at Sotheby’s New York, the work, upgraded to an Avercamp, fetched $132,000 (est. $100–150,000).

Sometimes, though, the houses are correct, and the gamblers, much to their chagrin, get it wrong. When a rare painting by Antonello da Messina, Christ at the Column, circa 1475, was offered as the cover lot at Christie’s London in April 1989, it was bought in at a phantom bid of £3.6 million ($6.1 million). “Christie’s did a good job cataloguing it, but nobody thought it was right,” recalls Ian Kennedy, the curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, and the former head of Old Master paintings at Christie’s New York. The picture now hangs in the Louvre, which acquired it from the firm three years later for £4.5 million ($8.6 million). “That was the biggest boo-boo made by the trade that I can remember,” says Kennedy. “This picture was worth a bloody fortune, and everybody regretted it.”

The moral: For those not averse to risk, betting on attributions in the Old Masters trade can be exciting and even profitable. “You’ve got to go after the ones that aren’t fully found out,” says the Mayfair dealer Johns. “It’s like turning Aladdin’s lamp into gold.”

"What's in a Name?" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.