The Victorian collecting boom and the irrepressible fashion for exotic objects from overseas, such as blue-and-white china, was a godsend for the unscrupulous, the profiteering and the criminal. Forgers flourished. While the Flora affair took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was over the previous fifty years or so – at the highpoint of Victorian collecting – that the threat from forgeries had really started to affect the market. For every knowledgeable collector, there were plenty of beginners and amateurs who could easily be seduced by a good story and some convincing brushstrokes, and there were many dealers who were more than happy to pass on dubious stock at a profit – but there were few cases as high-profile or controversial as Flora. Mostly it was a matter of an altered signature, a touch-up of paint, or an attempt to give modern objects the distinctive patina of age. Usually it was an inconspicuous sale in a backstreet dealer’s or at a country auctioneer’s, and in many cases the fact that the piece was not genuine did not emerge until the collection was sold on or broken up – if then. Without modern ultraviolet or X-rays, carbon-dating or chemical spectroscopy to test pigments, collectors had to trust to their eyes and their instincts. Many died unaware that some of their objects were products of a dubious trade.
The lucrative rewards of an increasingly international art market were too great a temptation for many forgers. Political uncertainty in Europe throughout the nineteenth century made it easier for unprincipled dealers to concoct convincing tales about a ransacked castle or an impoverished nobleman to explain the sudden appearance of a piece on the open market. And the apparently limitless demand for works from the Italian Renaissance in particular meant that, no matter how many objects appeared, there was always a ready buyer. Many forgers concentrated on perfecting the most profitable styles, such as those of fifteenth-century Florentine sculptors, so that they could produce a stream of credible copies. Under a carefully organized and structured system, the best forgers were contracted to international dealers, supplying them with imitation masterpieces in return for a comfortable salary. These artists were often highly skilled and the objects they created were beautiful in their own right, even if false. Some forgers even became briefly famous for the quality of their work: Giovanni Bastianini was an accomplished Italian sculptor who forged Renaissance busts and figures that thrilled nineteenth-century art historians. Several were acquired by the South Kensington Museum, and even when their actual provenance was revealed they were considered to be so fine that they were kept on display.
The growing taste for objects from beyond Europe also created new opportunities for deception. Oriental ceramics and Islamic art, for example, were relatively unstudied compared to the more familiar European genres, leaving the door open for the unscrupulous to dupe the ignorant. Victorian scholars struggled to keep pace with the fashion for foreign pottery, tiles, textiles, architectural and archaeological objects, and it became relatively easy to pass off modern copies as originals. A macabre fascination with quartz crystal skulls in the second half of the nineteenth century led to the sudden appearance of examples in both private and public collections, apparently from ancient sites in Mexico. Some were little over an inch high; a few were larger. Many dealers boasted a skull for sale, two were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, and the life-size example in the British Museum was acquired at the end of the nineteenth century from the reputable New York jewellers Tiffany and Co. But no scientific archaeological excavations had yet been carried out in Mexico, and knowledge of pre-Columbian objects was scarce. This was a perfect environment for forgers. Scientists at the British Museum found that their skull had traces of tool marks which showed that it had been extensively worked with rotary cutting wheels, unknown in Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, and analysis of the quartz was damning: it had come from a nineteenth-century mine in Brazil or Madagascar, far beyond ancient Mexican trade links.
Forgeries were so commonplace that everyone was deceived at some point, no matter how careful and scholarly they might have been, or might have liked to think themselves. Charlotte Schreiber became an expert on forgeries in order to be able to identify attempts to cheat her. Joseph Mayer’s collection displayed a number of objects that turned out to be forged, from antique ivories and Babylonian onyx to French miniatures of Napoleon and Josephine. On one occasion, Mayer bought a large number of medieval pilgrim badges from a London dealer only to find that they had been manufactured by two Thames scavengers known as Billy and Charley, who had shrewdly created 11,000 pieces and sold them on with the tale that they were salvaged from a wrecked ship.
John Charles Robinson used the issue of forgeries to emphasize the distance between himself and Henry Cole, accusing Cole of being too easily duped into spurious deals which showed him up as an amateur. In 1864, Robinson was delighted to pronounce that Cole ‘fell into every hotbed of falsification and fraud’ while on a buying trip to Germany, handing over £260 to a dealer in Hanover for textiles of the most commonplace kind: ‘they ought not to have imposed on anyone possessing even the most rudimentary acquaintance with art,’ snorted Robinson dismissively.14 A few years later, Robinson high-handedly ordered the return of some late-fifteenth-century French playing cards that Cole had bought in Paris and which Robinson believed to be forgeries, going on to discuss in a twenty-three-page letter to the board and colleagues at the British Museum why his own assessment was indubitably more accurate than the Director of South Kensington’s.
After Cole’s retirement, as Robinson made his case to be part of the new museum hierarchy, he was keen to emphasize his record on spotting fakes and forgeries. He felt he had strong justification, particularly when the press weighed in on his side, alleging that the loss of Robinson had opened the door to incompetent and costly mistakes. ‘The authorities have been in the habit of buying spurious or counterfeit articles as originals, and. . . they have given a price considerably above what might be deemed the market value,’ noted the Daily Telegraph in 1885, taking it for granted that the market was more or less flooded with forgeries.15 There was a popular and lingering perception that the staff at South Kensington had been all too easily fooled, and Robinson was perfectly happy to encourage the idea that, without him, the museum was floundering. When he was invited to present the prizes at the Birmingham School of Art in 1888, he used the occasion to lambast the ‘dull and comparatively stagnant regime’ of ‘mere administrators and inexperienced, irresponsible amateurs’ who had attempted to run South Kensington in his absence, and pointed out their record of ‘astonishing blunders’ that, he claimed, had become ‘notorious throughout Europe’.16
But matters were not quite as clear-cut as Robinson tried to make them appear. Like Murray Marks, he was involved in a complicated and frequently obscure trade. The market for forgeries was so rampant and sophisticated that it was almost impossible for collectors to avoid being taken in on occasion. Most famous of Robinson’s errors was a large ornamental dish, which he believed was made by the sixteenth-century Parisian ceramicist Bernard Palissy. Palissy’s works were enormously fashionable at the time. Consequently, there were plenty of craftsmen making a living by churning out pieces in the same style, and both Palissy originals and more modern copies had been shown at all the international exhibitions, including London’s Great Exhibition. In 1887, on one of his trips to France, Robinson was delighted to be offered the chance to buy a genuine Palissy platter; on his return he sold it to the museum for £50. It was just the kind of prestigious, high-quality piece that he was known for supplying. It appeared to be another of his triumphs.
The platter looked as though it had been broken at some point and reassembled with strips of canvas cemented to the china, crossing each other on the reverse. At the South Kensington Museum, after a couple of months on display, staff noticed that the damp in the cases had made the canvas sag, and they took the dish to the workshops to be cemented more firmly. It was a job that had to be done delicately, and it took some time, but, as t
hey reached the point where the canvas strips crossed, it became clear that a maker’s mark was inscribed on the plate, hidden by the cloth. As the restorer eased away the last of the canvas, the letters PULL were revealed, the mark of Georges Pull, a German-born soldier and naturalist who took to making ceramics in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. It was a modern mark, identifying the piece as no more than a copy worth around £10. Robinson had been cheated.
Pull was not a charlatan. He made precisely crafted ceramics inspired by the Palissy style, and often so closely modelled on the originals that it was difficult to tell the difference. But he signed his work, and did not try to pass it off as anything other than his own. It was unscrupulous dealers who, with a quick fix of sealing wax, tried to persuade unsuspecting buyers that they were holding original sixteenth-century ware in their eager hands. Robinson could not believe that he had fallen for such a simple trick. He was still convinced that the dish was genuine, and when he heard of the discovery at the museum he immediately sent a note arranging to call by and examine it himself. He presumed there was some mistake, that the staff were, once again, just being ignorant and crass. But when he arrived to inspect the platter, he could not ignore Pull’s clearly marked signature. Robinson had to accept that he had been swindled, and had to begin the delicate task of vindicating himself to the museum.
Robinson wrote long and detailed notes of justification to Cunliffe-Owen, explaining that an extraordinarily astute French dealer ‘with great ingenuity’ had been so clever with the dish that it was ‘practically indistinguishable from the ancient specimens of the same type’. He assured Cunliffe-Owen that it was no reflection on his competence as a dealer, nor on his ability to continue working for the museum. He offered to repay the £50; the offending dish was destroyed. And, in his own defence, Robinson emphasized the enormity of the forgery problem, and the constant battle collectors faced in their search for genuine pieces: ‘It has become almost impossible even for the most learned and experienced connoisseurs and experts,’ he pointed out unrepentantly, ‘to avoid being from time to time deceived.’17
Among European experts, Augustus Franks at the British Museum became perhaps best known for his prowess in detecting forgeries. Despite acquiring objects at a rapid rate, across a variety of different fields and from a range of sources, Franks was rarely taken in. He, like Duveen, was famed for his ‘good eye’, ‘a marvellously wide knowledge of every kind of antiquity. . . an almost uncanny faculty of recognizing forgeries whenever and wherever he saw them’, in the words of a colleague.18 In 1875, for example, he was granted a week’s leave to travel to Switzerland to examine Palaeolithic remains excavated from a cave in Kesslerloch. His report to the museum trustees focused on several objects – a decorated bird bone, a perforated bone head, and engravings of a fox and a bear on bison bone fragments – that had been declared as genuine by numerous experts. Franks noted his ‘grave doubts’, however, as to the artefacts’ authenticity. A few months later, Ludwig Lindenschmidt, founder of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, published a paper proving beyond doubt that the pieces were forgeries and that the designs had been copied from the illustrations in a German children’s book.19
Franks could count numerous such successes: there seemed to be something about the detective work involved with unmasking forgeries that he particularly enjoyed. An anecdote recounted by one of his colleagues at the Society of Antiquaries suggested that he relished the opportunity to expose cheats, and was able to appreciate the humour in what could be tense situations:
Dredging operations were going on at St Paul’s wharf, and a large number of curious things were found. Medals of considerable size were among the finds. [Franks] drew an obverse and reverse of a medal, took it to the foreman of the dredging operations, and asked him if they had come across that medal. No, they had not, but of course they might come across one; if they did they would let him know. In three or four weeks’ time they had the astonishing luck to come upon the very identical thing. The foreman himself brought it to Franks, so unfeignedly delighted was he to have found the desired medal. The thing was correct in every point. Franks asked the man if he knew the meaning of the inscription under the head of the obverse. No, he did not; he understood it was Latin. ‘So it is; S. Fabricotus, the forged Saint.’ The man fled.20
Yet, despite making himself an expert in forgeries, even Franks was by no means infallible. Several of the large collections he acquired for the British Museum contained one or two suspect pieces, and a German stoneware vase he accepted from his friend Charlotte Schreiber, moulded with the heads of European kings and dated 1587, is now known to be a forgery. A French porcelain vase painted with flowers and cupids, which he bequeathed to the British Museum from his own collection, is also fake. Even Franks could not afford to be complacent about the scale of the problem facing collectors. Indeed, like Robinson, he was keen to emphasize the pervasive threat of the forgery trade and the unscrupulous who profited from it: ‘there is scarcely an object in the range of ancient or medieval art to which the attention of the forger has not been given,’ he explained to the Society of Antiquaries. He went on to note that this was a problem not only for the individual, ‘the hapless collector’, but for collecting as a whole, since the market in general was inevitably distorted by the volume of forgeries being produced. The forger, Franks complained, tended ‘to depreciate the value of even genuine remains of the past by his dishonest industry’.21
The ease of making forgeries, getting them into the shops and persuading collectors to buy them was driving prices down. With their livelihoods potentially at risk as a result of such widespread dishonesty, it would perhaps have made sense for dealers to be at the forefront of the battle to control the forgery rackets. But matters were not so simple. One or two Victorian dealers were notoriously crooked: in London, Louis Marcy, for example, was known to trade almost entirely in fakes and forgeries. A volatile character, his real name was Luigi Parmiggiani, and his motive was not so much personal gain as an attack on the capitalist art world and all it represented. He indulged an anarchistic streak by intentionally skewing the market with forgeries in an attempt to disrupt and embarrass those he considered pompous speculators living off an unfair system. His notable victims included J. C. Robinson, who bought a gold-mounted sword from the rogue dealer in the belief that it had belonged to Edward III, alongside two daggers, once allegedly in the possession of Edward III and Edward, the Black Prince. Few of those at the heart of the London collecting market were as blatant as Marcy, but equally few crusaded to shore up the value of genuine objects by stemming the influx of forgeries. It was too difficult a task. Many dealers acted honestly, but some of the forgeries were so skilfully made that even the most experienced and astute buyers were deceived. In addition, the existence of forgeries, while depressing the market as a whole, offered the individual the promise of riches. Many dealers could be tempted to turn a blind eye if there was enough profit to be made.
Often the circumstances in which a forgery came on to the market were so opaque that it was difficult to be sure just how much the dealer knew about the provenance of the object. Murray Marks appeared trustworthy, and his reaction to the Flora debacle emphasized his resolve to keep his good name unsullied. But there were murkier moments. In 1912, towards the end of his career, drawings of 980 designs by German goldsmith and jeweller Reinhold Vasters came – somehow – into his hands. Born in Aachen in 1827, Vasters was a consummate craftsman. Like Pull, he did not necessarily set out to make fraudulent sales, at least at first. His early work was clearly marked. But he also found that he was able to produce pieces convincingly like those of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and in time he began deliberately making forgeries. Between 1853 and 1890, he created a series of beautiful jewelled pendants, gold and enamel spoons, chalices, cups and bowls which were sold as genuine, with prices to match. When Marks acquired the Vasters drawings, he offered them to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but staff there turned th
em down and he took them back. They were sold at his death for £37.16s and then presented to the museum by the new owner. What became clear, almost immediately, was that the designs were the blueprints for Vasters’ forgeries. They were clearly modern production drawings for pieces that had been sold during the last fifty years as genuine works from the Renaissance. Marks had owned the very documents that proved Vasters had duped the market, and its leading collectors.
It took time to prove exactly what Vasters had been up to, and it was a hundred years before further study revealed that many fine metalwork objects in collections across Europe and America, thought to be Renaissance, were actually examples of Vasters’ work: refined, skilful, very beautiful – but false. The collections of the Rothschild banking dynasty and of William Waldorf Astor, the American financier and statesmen, both included Vasters’ fakes; the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum are today among the public collections which own Vasters’ work, often still on display because of the quality of its craftsmanship. But Marks, who was keenly interested in forged bronzes, was in a good position to identify what Vasters was doing. He had traded one or two of Vasters’ pieces to clients; he now had in his hands almost 1,000 modern drawings that were identical to objects he must have seen coming into auction houses, showrooms and collections. He may not have had sophisticated dating techniques to help him, but he would surely have recognized some of the pieces in the Vasters portfolio. Was he suspicious? Did he turn a blind eye in the interests of business, or because he was daunted by the extent to which Vasters’ forgeries had penetrated the market? Was there something about the audacity of Vasters’ scheme that he admired? It remains a mystery. As with many of the numerous sales of forgeries during the nineteenth century, the exact role of the dealer is difficult to determine.
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Page 29
