Demystifying Drawings #6
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.
Part 2
To what extent have new technologies impacted your work and what changes do you foresee in the near or distant future?
Access both to new analytical technologies and to databases of information relating, for example, to watermarks and paper structure, are both immensely beneficial. When my colleague Cristiana Romalli was researching the extraordinary Mantegna modello for one of the great Hampton Court tempera paintings of The Triumphs of Caesar, in preparation for our sale of the drawing in New York in January 2020, it was infrared photography – something that has not been used all that much in the study of drawings – that revealed the fundamental compositional change to the left of the drawing, which proved beyond any doubt that this was indeed a working design by Mantegna himself (the only one for the series that survives).
As for future developments, there has been much talk of AI’s potential for recognising patterns of mark-making, and thereby making attributions, but I have to say the examples that I have seen so far don’t inspire much confidence or excitement. At this point, at least, the analysis will only ever be as good as the instructions and the dataset of examples that are provided to the system, and I see no evidence that we yet have a sufficiently sophisticated and nuanced way of doing this to yield valid and interesting results.
I do, though, have higher hopes for non-invasive optical and microscopic analysis, right down to a molecular level, of pigments used, which, when used in conjunction with substantial databases, may permit us to detect fascinating patterns. If, for example, we could establish that the ink in certain drawings by a particular artist has precisely the same physical or chemical structure, that would strongly indicate that those drawings were made at the same moment.
Is there an anonymous drawing that has passed through your hands that still irks, either because it has since been identified, or because it has remained tantalisingly elusive?
That’s a difficult (and slightly painful) question to answer! Though given that during my time at Sotheby’s we’ve probably had at least 30,000 drawings pass through our hands, many of them arriving with little or no background information and researched by us in a very short time, it’s unavoidable that one or two will have escaped our collective beady eyes, and slipped through the net. Of those that I know about (which I hope includes all the significant ones…), one that I think of with some annoyance is the drawing of Atlas and Hercules by Lucas Cranach, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which we offered for sale in New York in 1997, as ‘German School, 16th Century’. I can at least partially forgive myself for not having known immediately, from the poor black & white photo that was all we saw before getting to New York a few days before the sale, that it was a rare and somewhat unusual Cranach drawing, but when half the leading curators and collectors in the world spent much of the viewing hovering around it like flies, the alarm bells should have been louder, and I really should have done what was necessary to work out what it was! In the event, the drawing made its price ($277,500, against a pre-sale estimate of $4,000-6,000 – much the same, I believe, as it would have made if it had been correctly catalogued), which was a great relief. But still…
As for the other half of the question, yes, there are quite a few wonderful drawings that I’ve known for many years, but that still prove stubbornly resistant to attribution. My colleagues and I often say to each other “it’s so good, we have to be able to work out who did it!”, but sadly that’s not always possible. What is true is that as the level of quality increases, the chances that a drawing was made by someone we’ve never heard of correspondingly decrease. But at the same time it’s important to remember that the very erratic survival of drawings over the centuries means that for some artists we have many drawings, while for others we have none at all, even though the records of their estates mention hundreds and hundreds of drawings, all presumably now lost, meaning that we have absolutely no idea of that artist’s drawing style. Maybe the mystery high-quality drawings are lone escapees from the fate suffered by their maker’s other drawings.
Is there an authorship that you are particularly proud to have recognised?
I think the most satisfying attributions are often those that come most instinctively and take the least time, but the context in which the attribution is made also plays a big part in how one remembers it. One particularly happy memory for me is spending an afternoon in 1994 going through – at breakneck speed – box after box of drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, with David Scrase, who was preparing an exhibition of Dutch highlights to send to various German museums. One rather lovely farm landscape there had gone under several different names, but it seemed to me very clear it was by Cornelis Saftleven, and it duly went into David’s exhibition with this new attribution. There was also a drawing in Egbert Haverkamp Begemann’s own collection which he thought was by John Michael Rysbrack, but I recognised as a late work by Jacob de Wit.
It’s also satisfying to come up with something interesting outside one’s main area of expertise. Two years ago, we were looking at what we believed to be a slightly eccentric Italian drawing, struggling to find a convincing attribution, when I suddenly had the idea, for no reason that I can really explain, that we might actually be looking at an El Greco. There are hardly any certain El Greco drawings to compare with, so we conservatively described it as ‘Circle of El Greco’ when we offered it for sale, but in the event the attribution was accepted by several leading Spanish drawings scholars, and the drawing was acquired, as an El Greco, by the New York Hispanic Society.
