Attribution, originals and copies at the Iziko South African National Gallery

The question of authenticity is a vital one within the art world. Correct identification of the producer of an artwork has major implications for its monetary value in the market. It is also of great importance for art historians who are naturally concerned about the accuracy of the historical record; in the early twentieth century, connoisseurs such as Bernard Berenson forged highly successful careers out of the business of attribution, their work benefiting both the academic art world and the art market. But it is notoriously difficult sometimes to determine authorship with certainty, and particularly in the case of long-dead artists; records can be hazy and speculative and inaccuracies can persist for years. This was intriguingly revealed recently at the Iziko South African National Gallery’s 2022-3 retrospective exhibition, ‘Breaking down the Walls: 150 years of art collecting’.   

My Masterpiece of the Month essay series accompanied this retrospective exhibition and the first essay considered a 1920 gift to the gallery by businessman Richard Stuttaford, an early 16th century Italian work, The Virgin Adoring the Infant Saviour, with St John and St Joseph. Documents in the gallery’s archives revealed that this had long been believed to be by Renaissance artist Cesare da Sesto. It was sold to Stuttaford as a work by this artist and Stuttaford presented it to the gallery as such. There had never been complete certainty about the matter, however, so the work had been labelled as ‘attributed to’ Cesare, a qualifier which indicates some doubt. But no rival theory as to authorship was put forward.

This all changed when the painting was put on display as part of the gallery’s retrospective exhibition. It was seen there by Renaissance scholar Scott Nethersole of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art who recognized it instead as the work of Cesare’s near-contemporary, Cosimo Rosselli. Compelling archival evidence offered by fellow Renaissance scholar Christopher Daly revealed that it was indeed a Rosselli work, which had long been known of but whose whereabouts had been unknown. It could now be traced to the Iziko South Africa National Gallery. The historical record was corrected and the gallery now found itself in possession of a more valuable Renaissance work.

In the quest for authenticity, however, things can take a very different turn. A case in point was when wealthy mining magnate Max Michaelis presented a large gift of 17th century Dutch and Flemish works (the eponymous Michaelis Collection) to South Africa in 1914. These works were destined for Cape Town but were exhibited in London before being shipped out here. Unfortunately, while on exhibition in London, doubt was cast on the authenticity of the ‘jewel in the crown’ among the works, a putative Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Lady Holding a Glove. Experts wildly disagreed as to whether this portrait was a genuine Rembrandt or not. The highly regarded German connoisseur Wilhelm von Bode, for one, regarded it as such, and so did Irish collector Hugh Lane who had selected the works on Michaelis’s behalf, but London-based connoisseur Claude Phillips disagreed. The far less esteemed Ferdinand Bol was suggested as the artist of the work instead.

Lane and Von Bode stuck to their original attribution but, erring on the side of caution, it was decided to remove the work from the collection and replace it with 22 other paintings to the same value. It is now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. In the literature since 1914 it has been variously labelled as ‘studio of/workshop of/circle of Rembrandt’ and is nowadays catalogued in the Dublin gallery as ‘Rembrandt and studio’, suggesting some vindication of the original attribution, while it appears in Wikipedia as a Rembrandt. No compelling evidence was, or has since been, offered for its original demotion and the removal of this work from the Michaelis Collection marked a real loss. The remaining collection includes many other important works but none that match the stature of a Rembrandt.

Ironically, while scholars agonized about the true identity of the ‘Rembrandt’, the recently-established South African Art Gallery in Cape Town took a very pragmatic view of questions of authorship and had few qualms about exhibiting copies of famous works where the originals were beyond its budget. Early views of this gallery show a number of copies of Old Masters on its walls, including after Raphael, Guido Reni, and Rubens. 

These of course were declared openly to be latter-day copies – no deception was intended. But art galleries and the art market are always at risk of deliberate deception, where works are fraudulently sold under the name of a famous artist while in fact heavily altered by a ‘restorer’ or even produced from scratch by a forger. These are age-old practices, but the  danger of them has only increased with art’s increasingly high monetary value. Is a work by a highly esteemed Old Master or is it fraudulent, so heavily restored that little remains of the original work, perhaps even deliberately touched up to take on the look of a valued artist’s style, or possibly – at worst – painted in recent times on an old support in order to pass as a work of the distant past? 

Questions like these were asked at the South African National Gallery in the 1930s when Lilian Michaelis, the late Max Michaelis’s wife, offered to it a body of works from the couple’s private collection. This offer included nearly 60 Old Master paintings and just over 50 Old Master drawings and prints. These might have been expected to be welcomed, given the gallery’s paucity of holdings in these areas – but instead they were received very negatively, the Trustees stating that they did ‘not reach the standard aimed at by the Board’, local artist Gwelo Goodman dismissing them as ‘duds’, and gallery benefactor Alfred de Pass proclaiming ‘only half a dozen of [the paintings] worthy of hanging’. (1) 

These judgements were made on the basis of sight alone – no scientific testing (anyway in its infancy) was done on the works and nor were international experts consulted. Memories of the earlier dispute over the Michaelis ‘Rembrandt’ possibly factored into the judgement, as well as a lingering sense that the Michaelis’s had never been discriminating collectors. Whatever the reasons, the result was that few items from this gift collection were exhibited in subsequent years – and the fine collection of works on paper had scarcely been seen at all in public when it was finally catalogued and exhibited properly in the 1960s. The gallery’s recent retrospective was able to rectify this to some extent, by showcasing some of both the paintings and the drawings presented by Lady Michaelis, but their proper reappraisal is yet to come. Even should a number of the paintings be found to be heavily restored – through incompetence or design – they might still form the basis of a stimulating exhibition (as per the London National Gallery’s ‘Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries’ of June-Sept 2010) that examines the concern with authenticity in the art world.   

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 (1) Quoted in A. Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery: Reflections on Art and National Identity, UCT Press, Cape Town, 2017, 77-79.