Old "Attributed to Simone Martini" is copy after Master of the Gold Brocade

Allgäuer, from Germany, sells on 11 January 2018 as lot 1989 a "Painter of the 19th / 20th century" Maria Lactans, estimated at 100 Euro. They indicate that it has an old attribution to Simone Martini.

It actually is a copy after the Master of the Gold Brocade, a composition I discussed at some length in a post from May 2017. The version for sale is probably later (as indicated by the auction house) and in any case definitely not by the Master of the Gold Brocade; but even so it is a very cheap copy (if you exclude shipping costs and the like when you're not based in Germany). If it would turn out to be 16th century, it would of course be worth closer to 5,000 Euro, but without provenance and seeing only the front of the painting in a photo, this is for me impossible to be certain about.

This composition is of course very closely related to the one by the Master of the Magdalen Legend I discussed last week; the main differences are the background, the clothing of the child, and the position of the hands. In every original by the Master of the Gold Brocade, this background brocade is symmetrical left-right, but in this version it is more some loose decoration, again indicating that it isn't an original.

The auction also has a decent and cheap copy after Van Dyck: lot 1997, a work of nearly a square meter. 300 Euro is a bargain for this.

UPDATE: the Master of the Gold Brocade, estimated then at 100 Euro, is now (19 April 2018) for sale at Christie's New York with an estimate of $6,000 to $8,000, described as "South Netherlandish School, last quarter of the 15th century". Good work by whoever bought this!

UPDATE 2: and it sold for a whopping $21,000, or 200 times the estimate it had 3 months earlier!

Beautiful frame

Allgauer, from Germany, sells on 12 January 2017 a "French, 19th/20th century" Genre scene, estimated at 5 Euro.


This small work (diameter of 9 cm only) has a wonderful frame, made from leather. I know nothing about frames, but I can't easily find other examples of such an elaborate frame, with nice Orientalism influences which are reminiscent of Art Nouveau (though too symmetrical for that).

The painting is a typical sweet French romantic park scene, well executed in a sketchy style which seems influenced by Impressionism. I guess the work is from about 1910-1920.

As a curiosity of serious quality, it should fetch a few hundred Euros probably, but it is hard to predict such a thing when, like I said, one knows next to nothing about it. I'll probably tweet this one to the Frame Blog, perhaps they have more information on this!

Bendor Grosvenor on connoisseurs and Erik Larsen

Bendor Grosvenor shares some thoughts on connoisseurship in a very enjoyable article in The Art Newspaper today. He is also the author of the Art History News blog, highlighted on the right side of this blog, and an expert on Van Dyck through years of first-hand experience with his works.

In the article, he gives Erik Larsen as the typical example of the not-so-good expert who ruins things for years afterwards. His attributions are notoriously unreliable (and often simply wrong), but are still used by sellers and auction houses to improve the chances of selling a work for a lot of money.

At Allgauer, they will sell a Van Dyck next month, 16-18 April 2015. The attribution is based on the "expertise by Dr. Erik Larsen, Florida 2002". This should justify an estimate of 120,000 Euro. Even taking into account that the painting needs a thorough cleaning, there is nothing there to justify an attribution to Van Dyck (or his workshop of even a good follower). It is worth a few thousand Euro at most, and even for that price there are many pictures I'ld rather have. One has to wonder whether they don't keep the painting dirty to keep bidders interested, as a clean picture would make the wrong attribution even more obvious.