Unlikely paintings

At Marques de Santos, a Portuguese auction house, they sell two Italian School 16th-17th century paintings, lot 374 and 375, with an old(?) attribution to Bernardino Campi. They are estimated at 2,400 Euro each. UPDATE: not sold, apparently most people had misgivings about these...

It seems unlikely, and I couldn't immediately find other examples, that upper-class women (viz. the clothing, especially the lace collar) would be painted doing the work of maids. The type of jolly plump girl with rosy cheeks at work is well-known, in the work of e.g Joachim Beuckelaer or indeed Bernardino Campi. But these girls are clothed as lower-class people (with often some spice added by strategic unbuttoning), not the nobility or rich bourgeoisie that wore the more elaborate clothes.

So why the discrepancy here? My gut feeling is that some faker (19th century or much more recent) wanted to give his paintings all possible checkmarks on the 16th century box, by style of painting, subject, and clothing, but didn't realise that some of those didn't match.

Whatever the case, the quality is certainly not good enough to warrant any attribution to Campi, which the auction house wisely didn't do.

Teniers the Much Younger

One has to wonder, when one encounters copies after recently found originals, or things recently for sale, and the like, whether the ones for sale now are also old copies or new forgeries trying to imitate old copies? Making a poor "after Teniers" copy is obviously much easier than making a fake Teniers, and no one will bother doing any serious tests (like dendrochronology) to test whether it is really an old painting or not...

As an example, of which I don't know whether it is old or not, but where I have my doubts: Fairfield Auctions LLC sells a "Flemish School, 18th century" tavern scene, estimated at $500 to $750. Ticks all the right boxes for a Teniers copy, but for the fact that it has bright colours instead of some murky brown, but that's surely a plus?

The back of the painting is a mess, but surely something that has survived 300 years or so should look like that? Even though it looks like the match between the frame and the painting has only been made very recently, that doesn't mean that the painting can't be old?

On ArtValue, I found a "similar" painting "after Teniers" that sold for 1,500 Euro at Artcurial in 2012. And now we have for sale an image that is completely identical in every detail, but for the second smoker on the left, and the one entering on the right. There is one slight problem with the person entering the pub on the right; he is entering through the fireplace ;-) If you are not sure about this, then check this other Teniers copy, sold at Christie's, which shows the exact same fireplace but now completely.

So, is the one for sale a recent fake? I have no evidence, and I haven't actually handled the painting, but I would be very, very wary of buying such a thing.

After LiveAuctioneers, now Invaluable.com: rubbish fakes

In a recent blog post, I ranted about Liveauctioneers which is swamped by (American) auction houses selling fake early modern works.

Less usual but equally problematic, they also appear on Invaluable.com. The one that caught my eye today was "Top Auction Items.com Inc" (yes, most of them don't have the most imaginative or reassuring names), selling works "by" Georges Braque and others, with certificate.

If you wonder where the above "Braque" comes from, it is a reverse and slightly modified copy of this one:

The harbour at Estaque, a finely coloured painting by Braque, has been changed into a rather psychedelic and way more simplific one. Too bad that the auction house was genuinely fooled by this of course...

And the above "Delaunay"? Well, the Eiffel Tower is a very straight copy from the below one, with then some Delaunay-like patterns added. It is at least a bit more convincing than the Braque.

I don't know why they value a weak copy of a Degas painting at $15,000 to 18,000, but at least they don't claim it is a Degas one. And so on, and so on...

Let's just finish with this ridiculous "Musée d'Orsay" label. The fakers behind this "auction house" are the same as the five houses I named in the LiveAuctioneers blog post; how hard can it be for these two sites to exclude such sellers of obvious and rather criminal fakes from their site? It should be obvious after five minutes that these are not genuine art dealers and that providing them a forum to sell their wares is not really in your or anyone elses benefit.

Oh, and you can add to Top Auction Items also the lookalike "Old School Auctions.com Inc.", the exact same company with yet another name (that's the seventh so far).

These jokers sell a very unconvincing "Henri Rousseau" from 1907, from a faker who can't even spell the name of the artist right.  This piece of criminal rubbish is estimated at $80,000 to $90,000!

They also sell the exact same Acrylic Paul Klee I posted about in my earlier blog post, and the exact same Georges Braque I showed above...


By the way, why have these sites all such a big stock of valuable "William Verdult" pieces? They have at the moment 211 Verdult paintings on this site (well, many recurring ones, as is their habit) with estimated values of up to $300,000. There doesn't seem to be much interest in him, but they are selling his works (or fakes of it) by the truckload. At least with the Braques and so on, real ones would be worth that kind of money. But these Verdult pieces? I wouldn't want them for free.

Note that Old School also tries to fake Old Masters: not just a ridiculous Rubens portrait drawing, but also an impressive number of works by "Abraham Mignon Fecit" (sic!). Yes, once one starts paying attention, it is unbelievable how many artists had the surname "fecit". Must have been one heck of a family! While the modern fakes sometimes need some familiarity with the artist to note the difference (certainly with abstract works), the older or more figurative work are much easier to spot and so far I haven't seen any that could fool any slightly discerning buyer. Doesn't make them less obnoxious or punishable of course. 

Rubbish and fakes on LiveAuctioneers

LiveAuctioneers.com would be a useful site if they would just scrutinize their sellers one tiny bit. Most of them are legitimate auction houses, selling legitimate art. Yes, they make mistakes and may be fooled by a fake now and then, but that's simply human error and to be expected.

However, there are a few (mostly American) auction houses, claiming to be reputable and long-running, who sell fakes and dubious works by the dozens. Let's be charitable (and cautious) and simply call them extremely incompetent.

Is there any reason (apart from money, obviously) why rubbish auctioneers like Best Auction For You, Wilson Fine Art and Antiques, Wholesale Art Auctions LLC, Art Everywhere Auctions, and Fine Art Online Auctions (to name just these five) are not simply thrown off LiveAuctioneers? If I was a real auction house, like most on LiveAuctioneers, I wouldn't want to be associated with these three and similar ones in any way, as they give auction houses a very bad name.

Furthermore, by pre-listing the exact same works again and again and again every few days, they are flooding the site ("art-bombing"? "Auction-bombing"?), making it a lot harder to find the interesting lots (certainly when you are looking for famous modern names like Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, ...)

The many houses which sell giclee prints without making any false claims of being original or authenticated are bad enough, but at least they don't sell "original" oil paintings with fake certificates (they often violate copyright laws, but that's less problematic than selling fakes estimated at tens of thousands of dollars in the hope that some sucker will fall for it).

I do love "Acrylic paintings" by Paul Klee, hand signd by the artist, when acryl paint was only commercially available only after his death... but when they are valued at $60,000 to $80,000, it becomes criminal instead of funny.