Not my problem, alas....

Dennis Mahon, 1932
by Frank Brooks
 

The spectacular difference the attribution of a painting can make to its value has been made only too clear by a current court case centring around "The Cardsharps", a painting bought at Sotheby's for £50,400 in 2004 by the Anglo-Irish art historian and connoisseur, Sir Denis Mahon. Sotheby's listed the work as a 17th-century copy of a work by Carravaggio now in the Kimbell Museum in Texas. Mahon, however, was convinced the painting was by Carravaggio himself. Subsequently, some experts have agreed with Mahon and some have upheld Sotheby's view that the work is a copy by a follower. Sotheby's also point out that the market at the time evidently agreed with them by setting the auction price at £50,400: in other words, it seems only Mahon thought the piece was by Carravaggio.

    A genuine Carravaggio would potentially be worth £50 million, and the huge difference has prompted the original owner to take Sotheby's to court, claiming they failed to carry out proper research and analysis, which would, he says, have established that the painting was an autograph work. Whatever the outcome of the case, it powerfully demonstrates that a change in attribution can make a painting worth as much as a thousand times more. Presumably the painting is good enough to convince at least some experts that it is by Carravaggio, and no-one is disputing that it is later than 17th-century. But a copy is not seen to contain the highly-prized quality of "originality", the spark that set Carravaggio apart from other painters of his time. 

Anthony Blunt

    This is not the first controversy over an attribution involving Sotheby's and Mahon. In 1964 he bought a painting at a Sotheby's auction which had been listed as by Pietro Testa, a contemporary of Poussin. Mahon had thought it was probably actually by Poussin, and became convinced of this once he had had the painting cleaned and relined and an inscription was found which showed it had belonged to a major Poussin patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo. The painting was of the biblical scene of Rebecca at the well, the same subject as a painting owned by Sir Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute, Poussin expert, and, of course, ex-Soviet spy (not yet officially unmasked). Blunt believed his picture was the one owned by dal Pozzo, while Mahon went public with his view that Blunt's was a late painting dating from after dal Pozzo's death. The dispute became highly accrimonious and the two men were never reconciled, but it is now generally accepted that Mahon was right. (Mahon died in 2011, leaving his paintings to galleries in Britian, Ireland and Italy.)

    All this also reminds me that I heard a story from a former employee of an American art museum that during a visit from some experts on a particular Old Master to see some paintings held by the museum by that painter, the experts insisted that some of those paintings were not genuine. Nevertheless, the attributions were not changed. Public galleries may not need to consider the market value of their works (indeed, the market value becomes irrelevant, as the works are very unlikely to return to the market), but inaccurate attributions affect their reputations and thus potentially their ability to attract funding.

    Some may say that what matters is the quality of a painting rather than who painted it, but as long as some artists are held in higher esteem than others, and thus in greater demand, attribution will have a huge influence on price. All purely academic to most of us of course!