Demystifying Drawings #5
HOW TO:know that an attribution is ‘Right’
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Gather all physical evidence: watermarks, inscriptions, collection marks, signatures, mount, condition and so on.
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Gather all documentary evidence: given provenance, sale history, publications, reproductions and so on.
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Is the paper type consistent with the drawing’s style? Are the artist’s materials consistent with the period and location? How reliable is the inscription? If the drawing is published, how reliable is the publication? What is the function of the drawing?
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A combination of the empirical and the subjective. What ‘circle of possibility’ does the evidence indicate? Does instinct match evidence?
Greg Rubinstein, Senior Director and Head of the Old Master Drawings Department at Sotheby’s, discusses the complex issue of authorship.
The ‘Sight’
When it comes to questions of attribution art experts are often thought to have a sixth sense. They are almost inexplicably attuned to the innate characteristics of an artist’s graphic personality. Philip Pouncey, perhaps the most admired of all drawings attributionists, is said to have had had an uncanny aptitude. His obituary in the Burlington Magazine cites a classic example of this oracular ability: “No drawings by an obscure Ferrarese imitator of Michelangelo, Sebastiano Filippi, called Bastianino (1532/4- 1602), were known when Pouncey remarked, apropos of a black chalk study of a crouching nude man which had lain disregarded for more than two hundred years among the anonymous Italian drawings at Christ Church, 'If Bastianino had made drawings, this is exactly the sort of drawing that one would have expected from him': an observation triumphantly confirmed by the subsequent discovery in an altar-piece by the artist, of the figure for which the drawing undoubtedly served as a study.”
But what about those who do not possess ‘the sight’, however? Are there more empirical methods for addressing problems of authorship?
Drawings from the 15th to 18th centuries are rarely signed and so with what degree of certainty do we know who drew them?
Well, to paraphrase the immortal words of Supertramp, some you do, and some you don’t, and some you just can’t tell. The degree of certainty that is possible varies immensely from one drawing to the next, and one artist to another. But if you apply a consistent and logical approach to the process of thinking through what the correct attribution might be, you can often get a very long way towards certainty.
For almost all artists – at least those who have left us a reasonable corpus of works on paper – there are some drawings that simply can’t rationally be attributed to anyone else: drawings that are signed, those that are incontrovertibly linked to the artist by some other documentary record, and drawings that are clearly direct preparatory studies for other works by the artist in question. These ‘documentary drawings’ then serve as the springboard for other attributions, made on the basis of stylistic or technical closeness.
There’s no getting away from the fact that attributions made solely on stylistic grounds are subjective, and no two people see a drawing in exactly the same way, but systematic methodology of analysis, and a clear vision not only of the work of the artist in question but also of the broader artistic milieu, counts for a lot. At this point, I hear the much-missed voice of the great Dutch art historian and teacher Egbert Haverkamp Begemann whispering in my ear. He always spoke about how one had to construct in one’s mind a ‘circle of possibility’ for each artist’s style, starting with the unarguable, documentary works and building out from there, on the basis of stylistic comparisons. Depending on the artist and the milieu, the ‘circles of possibility’ for other artists may be closer or further away, and more or less straightforward to define, but it is only once you have as good a sense as possible of these different circles that you can begin to locate your unattributed drawing correctly within the overall pattern.
It's also worth mentioning the significance in this context of a drawing’s provenance, and its publication history. If, say, an illustrious early collector such as Pierre Jean Mariette attributed a drawing to a particular 18th-century French artist, there is a very good chance that that is really who it is by – Mariette very possibly bought it directly from the artist, or at least from someone who knew them personally. And in that situation, the more obscure the attribution, the more likely it is to be right. Similarly, if generations of top drawings scholars and connoisseurs have recognised and published a drawing as being by a particular artist that also adds weight to the attribution, though it is also very important to be aware of the evolution of scholarship (think only of the constant discussions regarding attributions of Rembrandt/Rembrandt School drawings!). And I would also say that even if earlier attributions and publications can help point you in the right direction, you can never simply accept them unquestioningly. If you want to maximise your chances of getting it as right as possible, you need to start from first principles every time, going all the way back to the question of what period and school you are dealing with, then gradually narrowing things down, until you can’t go any further.
Is there an artist whose graphic idiosyncrasies are unmistakable to you, and, if so, what are they and to whom do they belong?
There are certainly quite a few artists whose drawings you’re never going to mistake for anyone else’s, but usually that’s because of a particularly distinctive combination of materials, handling and subject matter, rather than Morellian recognition of specific quirks. For example, David Teniers’s drawings can be immediately identified thanks to their unique combination of subject matter, costume and facial types, very distinctive broad, rhythmic hatching, and exclusive use of graphite (rare in Dutch and Flemish 17th-century drawings).
Are there any particular ‘tells’ that help you to read a drawing and assess its qualities?
Leaving aside any evidence provided by the materials – the paper, the ink etc. – there definitely are clues in the actual handling of the media that can help you see that a drawing is a copy, or even a fake. For example, in those 20th-century fake Guardis and Canalettos that we see all the time, even if you don’t spot the weaknesses in perspective and composition, you can immediately tell they are not spontaneously drawn, because there is a little dot of ink at the end of almost every pen line. That is a sign that the hand making those lines was moving slowly, stopping at the end of each one before lifting the pen from the paper – totally the opposite of how Guardi or Canaletto dashed off their drawings.
Another thing to watch out for is a disparity in terms of quality and success between the overall composition and the individual elements within it. If you have what looks like a study for a rather accomplished and successfully resolved composition, but the figures themselves are not well drawn, or the perspective is confusing here and there, then there’s a good chance that what you actually have is a copy of a good painting or drawing, drawn by a different, less talented artist.
But overall, judging quality is mainly about understanding what the artist was trying to achieve when they made the drawing, and judging how successful you think they have been in realising those aims.
Would you describe cataloguing – or ‘categorising’ - as more of a science or an art?
It is definitely a bit of both! What we do when cataloguing a drawing for sale is to try and work out as accurately as possible how and when it came into being. If we can attribute it to a specific artist, so much the better, but that’s obviously not always possible, which is why I like to use the term ‘categorising’.
Essentially, this is a three-stage process: identifying all the relevant evidence; analysing and interpreting that evidence; and drawing the relevant conclusions.
The evidence you need to identify and analyse can be physical (paper structure, watermarks, media employed, indications of use such as pricking/indenting/squaring, state of conservation, signatures and inscriptions, collectors’ marks) or documentary (provenance, sale history, publications).
When analysing the evidence, you ask yourself a series of questions, such as whether everything you are seeing in terms of materials is convincing and consistent, whether those materials tell you anything about where and when the drawing was made or how it was used, what do any inscriptions or collector’s marks tell you, how does the condition affect what you are seeing, how reliable or relevant are any documents or publications, and so on. You also need to try to understand the drawing’s function; an academic figure study, a finished study for a print and a landscape sketch are going to be very differently drawn, even if they are all by the same artist.
Then, based on all this, we try and fit the drawing into our mental database of styles and images. Did it come with an attribution? Did we have any initial reactions or thoughts about what it might be? How do those ideas hold up under scrutiny, in the light of analysis of all the evidence?
Judging whether two drawings are or are not by the same hand is perhaps in some ways an art, but the process of getting as close as possible to the right attribution or ‘categorisation’ definitely involves being totally methodical – totally scientific – in approach.
Part two of the interview will follow in next month’s newsletter.
