What you Learn from Archives: Part II

A fine picture this, A Boy in Fancy Dress by early eighteenth century painter Nicolas de Largillière. The painting was purchased at auction by the agents of J. Paul Getty in the early 1970s and currently is on display at the Getty Museum. But, what exactly are we looking at? Who is this character all kitted out in his fancy Roman garb? And what kinds of questions are we to ask of a picture like this?

Opening the object files at the Museum provides some interesting clues. In 1982, the painting was lent to an exhibition at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition. “I understand that you have heard about all of the problems we had with the local public reaction to the exhibition," so the head curator in Montreal wrote to the Getty. "It was an extremely difficult time for me.” What had happened? Had M. Largillière himself arisen from the grave an criticized the hanging of the pictures?

Apparently - - and presumably among other things - - this curator in Montreal had gotten into a disagreement the identity of the sitter in Largillière’s painting with the then-director of the Louvre, Pierre Rosenberg (who seems to be posing as a pope in the photo above). While the Montreal curator claimed that the sitter depicted was a youthful Louis XV, Rosenberg said it was the “Old Pretender,” James-Francis Edward Stuart. This disagreement had to do, centrally, with iconography. As the Montreal curator explained: “For Rosenberg, the absence of the fleur de lis or the ordre de St. Espirit, as well as the symbol of the goldfinch as reference to exile, would support the view that the little boy would represent James Francis Edward Stuart. (He tried to return to England in 1706, 1708, and 1715). I myself believe that the absence of the ordre de St. Espirit as well as the fleur de lis could be explained if the portrait were painted before the death of Louis XIV in 1715, i.e. before the future Louis XV was officially recognized as the heir to the throne.”

With this cloud over the identity of the sitter, the Getty folks then wrote to Aileen Ribeiro at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, asking her to sort the issue out. Calling attention to “the emblematic goldfinch perched on a thornbush”, the Getty folks parsed the key issue this way: “[The Montreal curator] sees it as a reference to the tragic deaths of Louis XV’s parents and brothers by the time he was two years old, and also a reference to the hope for his own survival and prosperity. Pierre Rosenberg, however, recognizes it as a reference to exile.” They ask Ribeiro, a now-retired expert in the history of costume, to narrow down the date of the painting’s production based on “the type of fancy costume the child wears and his hair style.”

Ribeiro’s response was strongly deflationary: "It is virtually impossible on the basis of the costume to assign an exact date to this; on the basis of the hairstyle a date in the 18th century would be more likely (it could be even into the 1720’s), but very often the simple hair worn by children anticipates that of adults later. The costume is probably a theatrical or masquerade costume, Roman dress; from the details (such as the wrinkled hose, in imitation of bare legs) I think this is a real costume, and not merely an artistic convention. ... One or two other points; although the features of the boy are not unlike those of the adult James Francis Edward Stuart, surely his hair was brown, as he was quite swarthy? I agree that it is unlikely that in any event Louis XV would have been portrayed without the St. Espirit."

And here is the dagger: “What I am saying is that I think it is a portrait of an aristocratic boy in fancy dress, and if pushed I would give a date in the first decade of the 18th century, but it could as easily be the 1690s’s or as late as the 1720’s.” Thus, neither the evidence of painting style, iconography, nor costume provided sufficient data by which to establish exactly the picture was executed and, more importantly, who it depicted.

The folks at the Getty clearly took Ribeiro's assessment seriously. Immediately after it was received, they began dispatching letters to other experts -- including Rosenberg -- soliciting identifications. And, as the Getty curator's letter to Rosenberg indicates, Ribeiro's interpretation had been followed hook, line and sinker. While it had been postulated that "the boy represents the duc de Bretagne," so the Getty reported to Robenberg, "I am also skeptical, however, about the identification of our boy as James Francis Edward Stuart, whose complexion and hair were darker. A date in the early 1690s also seems too early for our painting on the basis of style."

While Rosenberg then responded with incredible grace demuring that he is "nothing like" an expert on Largillière, the identity of the sitter henceforth remained unspecified. So, as the authorship of Largillière never seems to have been contested in this case, the key issue for assigning scholarly (and monetary) value lay in the identification of the sitter. If this was the dispute, upon what did our confederation of scholars agree?

The first shared presumption was that the picture did depict someone—Largillière, a well-known portrait painter, was not simply doing this painting as an imaginative caprice. Further, all interpreters assumed that the features in the picture might possess telling iconographical or symbolic significance; by knowing what the goldfinch signified, the identity of the sitter and conditions of image-production could be revealed. Finally, and somewhat in contradiction to the former point, it was assumed that the depicted hairstyle and clothing might well reflect then-current fashion trends; so, if the fashion depicted could be dated, then the date of the painting's production could safely be inferred.

Needless to say, nothing is mentioned in this correspondence of the nature of the dog, the character of his relationships to the boy and to the bird, or indeed why it would have been desirable for any of the nobility named above to have posed for such a weird picture. Curiouser and curioser, sir! Curiouser and curioser indeed.

Fake! A Story from the Archives

So, there was Old Ken in a certain library the other day. This library was hosting a book sale where my eye happened to fall upon the book represented above: Fake by Clifford Irving. Price? $2! Now, as you must know by now, forgeries and faking is a topic of no small interest to Old Ken, so I had to have a look.

You can imagine my delight as I read the opening paragraph of the first chapter, which goes like this:

"In the summer of 1961, ... a dapper, middle-aged, expatriate Hungarian bachelor gentleman calling himself Elmyr Dory-Boutin rented a comfortable suburban house on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Ibiza. His hair was dyed an apparently ageless jet black, he sported a monocle on a gold chain, all his sweaters were of cashmere, and during his seven-year residence on the island he came to wear a wristwatch from Cartier and drive a red Corvette Stingray convertible." (p. 3)

Obviously, you can imagine that Old Ken would like the cut of this man's jib!



Well, it turns out that our bachelor gentleman is less Hungarian royalty than a forger of Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro and others named Elmyr de Hory who was hiding out on Ibiza to avoid extradition.



As if that were not enough, it turns out that stuffed into this particular copy of Mr. Irving's fine book is a packet of documents including a letter from one Kendrick Talbot of London. Basically, the story is this: Talbot was a London book-maker who had made a fortune in the gambling business before retiring to Ibiza in the 1960s. There, he met de Hory, a compulsive gambler and spendthrift. Because De Hory was constantly losing money to Talbot, he would give Talbot the supposedly-authentic modernist paintings he claimed to be collecting as collateral against his debts.



Well, after de Hory's hoax was exposed in the 1970s, Talbot who claimed not to "know a painting from a bar of soap" sought to bring the paintings to market as "authentic fakes" or real de Horys.



As you can see, some of these are more convincing than others. While the "Modigliani" at upper right here is fairly respectable, the supposed Toulous-Lautrec below it is hopeless.



Anyway, the photos reproduced here were attached with the letter as Talbot was trying to hawk the paintings represented to one Mr. Jack Glenn of Long Beach at the prices denoted above. The epigraph to the book by our Mr. Clifford Irving - - who, interestingly enough, was put in jail for writing a libelous biography of Howard Hughes - - says it all: "If fools did not go to market, cracked pots and false wares would not be sold."

What you learn from Archives

Recently, Old Ken went on a visit to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to see some of the object files. What might be in these files, you ask, and what could anyone possibly want with them? Well, let's take an image like this one of a geographer and find out.

If we consult the object file for this painting, we find that it was purchased by the collector Norton Simon at Sotheby's in London in 1968 for 2500 GB pounds (or what was then $5,974). Incidentally, at the same auction, Simon also bought one of the Chardin still lives now in the Museum's collection for 4000 GBP.



Purchased as an anonymous work and credited only to the fictional "School of Caravaggio," several attempts have been made to make a secure attribution of this "Geographer" to a particular artist. As early as January 1971, Alfred Moir (a professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara) had assigned the painting to the obscure Baroque painter Pietro Paolini, whose "Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes" (ca. 1625-30, now in the Getty) is above. Offered in correspondence to Simon, Moir's assessment was made on grounds such as the following:

"it [the painting] seems conceived in terms very close to Ribera, but the dress and to a certain extend the face seem to be handled in a manner similar to Valentin's. [...] It occurs to me, however, that their influence, and hints of a responsiveness to the style of G.B. Caracciolo, together with the general coloring and handling of the picture, would not be inappropriate to Pietro Paolini, and tentatively I would suggest this as the appropriate attribution of the picture."



Above, and also now in the Getty, is a specimen of work by this "Valentin" mentioned by Moir (the French Baroque painter known as Valentin de Boulogne) - - a "Christ and the Adultress" from ca. 1620. So, according to this connoisseurial way of thinking, attribution or the assignment of a creator's name to the object is of central importance and this is to be done by identifying the visual similarities of the work to some pretty obscure figures and then advancing a "likely candidate" from amongst them.

Now, copies of the Museum's old labels indicate that Simon clearly accepted Moir's attribution; from "School of Caravaggio," this painting was then assigned to Pietro Paolini. By the late 1980s, however, the "School of Caravaggio" label still had some currency as the Museum appealed to Edward Maeder, Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to try to identify from whence the costume may have come, and thus the likely nationality of the artist. In response, Maeder suggested the following:



"I would agree ... that the costume is indeed of Eastern European origin. The ties on either side of the collar at the neck of the white shirt are typical for the first three-quarters of the 16th century. ... The 'frogs' or front closings of applied braid are typical for Hungary and Poland in the late Renaissance. ... The biggest problem from the point of view of the costume historian seems to be the fur-lined coat with long sleeves. Am I correct in assuming that the sitter's left sleeve (the viewer's right) ... is a different color from the sitter's right sleeve (the viewer's left)? This would indicate that he is wearing the fur-lined over garment on this right arm and holding in place beneath his left."

The logic here seems to run in the following way: by identifying visual resemblances between the "typical" products of various known (if very obscure) artists and imagining what they might look like if inflected by certain erudite artistic influences, it becomes possible to place this mysterious painting and its maker in a likely space and time. Equally, the depiction of costume is taken as an index of what was "normal to" the geography and time-period in which the painting was made. All of this must neglect the possibility that the painter might have asked the sitter to dress in archaizing clothing (or vice versa) or that the artist executed this one picture as a radical departure from his conventional mode of painting. The intellectual-parlor-game-dimension of this attribution fun is then taken to an even higher pitch by Leonard J. Slatkes, late Distinguished Professor of Art History at CUNY Queens, who claimed - - solely on the basis of visual inference - - that "the work was probably executed in Rome during the first third of the third decade of the 17th century. The artist was most likely from the Southern Netherlands"!

I would hasten to emphasize that through all of this very learned discourse, not a single line had yet been wasted on exactly what it is that the geographer is shown doing or what we might make of the strange objects represented around him. The image is certainly suggestive in these regard; although the volume opened before the geographer is rendered as an opaque block merely suggesting legibility, other features are depicted in detail. Drawn to our eye by the diagonal, ivory slash of the quill pen, the inkwell in the foreground, for example, is a fascinating form. It appears to be a triangular box with corners decorated by the heads of elephants whose curving trunks form loops.

This sixteenth century Italian inkstand, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, offers an interesting parallel. It too is supported by three animal heads (in this case, rams), which appear to carry the ink in a central reservoir. Perhaps further research could identify a much closer approximation of the inkwell we see depicted in the Norton Simon painting - - not to mention what we might learn by trying to identify the globe or even the kind of calculation signaled by the gesture and mode of discourse being conducted by the geographer himself.

If nothing else, then, what is fascinating about reading through these archives is just how different the questions the contemporary interpreter (or at least this contemporary interpreter) are from those that were the primary interest of art experts only a few decades ago.