The surprising secrets of busting art forgeries

Investigators in London are using innovative ways to determine a painting’s origins – from pigment analysis to building a Renaissance-era version of Facebook. Sophie Hardach reports.

In a discreet laboratory south of the River Thames, Nicholas Eastaugh and Jilleen Nadolny are trying to find out who might have created a 16th-Century mystery painting. Scholars have failed to agree on a plausible artist for the work, which was produced in Florence. So Eastaugh and Nadolny, two art investigators trying to bridge the gap between traditional scholarship and cutting-edge science, went for a less conventional approach.

“We created a social network – a Facebook of the early 16th Century,” says Eastaugh. “We were trying to see who was connected to who. For example, people were connected through the workshops where they trained, which influenced their choice of pigments and how they were used.”

Big data – large data sets that can be analysed to reveal patterns, links and trends – has transformed how we work, shop and socialise. Eastaugh believes it can also change the way we look at art. In the case of the mystery painting, the Renaissance ‘Facebook’ helped him and his colleagues identify potential candidates they had not considered before, though he does not want to give specific names to protect client confidentiality. (Nadolny and Eastaugh work with clients across the art world’s spectrum, from auction houses and museums to private owners).

A trained physicist, conservator and art historian, Eastaugh gained global fame for his role in unmasking a 16 million euro (£12 million) forgery scandal in Germany in 2010. His company Art Analysis & Research investigates around 200 paintings a year. But his deeper interest is in bringing a scientific, transparent approach to the art world – a world notorious for inside deals and the snap judgements of all-powerful connoisseurs.

“I’m a physicist. I like models,” says Eastaugh, who delights in pointing out the art scene’s hidden patterns. During our interview, he draws a series of peaks and troughs in the air to illustrate one of his recent discoveries: data analysis shows that high points in Europe’s creative output, such as the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age, have tended to occur in startlingly regular 130-year intervals.

Eastaugh and Nadolny’s data often comes in unusual forms. Tucked inside an unassuming set of drawers in their lab is one of Europe’s largest provenance pigment collections, gathered to help establish where a painting might have come from. Some 3,000 vials contain jewel-toned powders from every chapter of art history: white, yellow and blue from Pompeii, ancient Chinese “Han Blue”, Japanese glass pigments in a range of colours, a special white from Papua New Guinea. The investigators pore over old paint formulas, visit chemistry departments and collaborate with colleagues all over the world to build up a better understanding of how artists worked.

This in turn can directly link to present-day authentication efforts. Red pigment, for example, used to be so expensive that artists would boil cast-off garments to extract and recycle the red dye. As a result, bits of fibre can still be found in paintings by certain artists, including Titian. It is this complex web of information, rather than a single test, that leads to a final decision.

“It’s the data in context that allows you to see the larger picture,” says Nadolny, who like Eastaugh is a trained conservator. “If you put an ordinary scientist in front of a painting, it’s a disaster.”

In fact, art historians and scientists do not always see eye to eye. Thomas Hoving, the late director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, once wrote that the Met’s scientific tests were frequently at odds with non-scientific art expertise – what is known in the art world as connoisseurship – and that connoisseurship was usually the winner.

In 2010, Wolfgang Beltracchi was arrested and ultimately found to have forged at least 16 million euros (£12 million) worth of avant-garde paintings over the space of 25 years. The case remains one of the biggest forgery scandals in recent history. For decades, museums and auction houses failed to spot the fakes.

One Beltracchi forgery, sold as Red Painting with Horses by the German expressionist Heinrich Campendonk, fetched 2.4 million euros (£1.7 million) at auction in 2006 – a record price for a Campendonk, and one of the highest prices ever achieved on the German art market.

Eastaugh analysed the painting in 2008 and discovered that it contained titanium dioxide white. The pigment was not widely available in the 1910s, when the painting had allegedly been created. In fact, Eastaugh’s extensive pigment research led him to conclude that titanium white would not have been widely used by artists until the 1940s. He has since analysed at least eight more Beltracchis, and has grown to recognise the forger’s style. “We’re joined at the hip now,” he says with a smile.

Britain accounts for 65% of the European Union’s art and antiques market, according to the British Art Market Federation. In 2014, total sales hit £9 billion. Given the market’s size and global importance and the sophistication of anti-forgery techniques, it may be surprising that forgers in Britain can still be successful. But sellers have little incentive to question the authenticity of a work, while for buyers, the authentication process can be costly.

Clare Finn is a conservator in London who works with major institutions and auction houses. She says there is often simply not the budget to order an array of tests, from pigment analysis to X-rays, that would ensure the authenticity of each painting – and clients might not see the need for it, anyway, unless they already have doubts. Each individual pigment costs from £100 to £200 to be tested.

“It’s a bit like going to the doctor: you don’t have blood tests for everything,” Finn tells me in a South Kensington studio filled with the fumes from a freshly varnished Old Master. Dating and attributing a painting, she adds, is more complex than the public might think: “We don’t have a machine where you feed the painting in on one side, and it comes out on the other side with a ticket that says ‘Thursday afternoon in 1802’.”

Still, with advances in research and analysis, that machine may one day become a reality. Until then, Eastaugh is encouraging the public to question every signature and every museum label. At the end of my visit to his laboratory, I ask him why it ultimately matters whether a painting is real or fake. After all, Beltracchi’s forgeries remained popular with the public even after they were revealed.

“It’s our cultural heritage,” Eastaugh says after a pause. “There is this idea that you go to a museum and look at nice paintings. For us, it’s so much more. It connects us directly to other times, places and particular artists. Each painting can open up huge vistas into our collective past.”

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