Real or Fake #2

Wednesday, 1 November 2023. Newsletter 2.

Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.

In 1988 one of these drawings was acquired by a prominent American institution. It was acknowledged to be a preparatory study for an etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. It is a fabulous fantastical design. The only problem was that another drawing of exact same motif already existed in a Danish institution. This second drawing had entered the museum in 1969 via the dealer Hans Calmann and the Ny Carlsberg Foundation. It was also catalogued as a preparatory study for the same Piranesi engraving. Through comparison and the emergence of this second work scholars smelt a rat.

Although the claims of forgery were debated in the early 1990s, it is generally accepted that the drawing is neither a second preparatory work by Piranesi, nor a copy after the first drawing, but a genuine fake (if you’ll pardon the paradox). But which is which? For a bonus point: name the infamous forger.

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The original, of course, is on the left (the higher image if you are viewing on mobile). It is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum, L.A. (inv. no.: 88.GB.18).

Bonus Point: The second drawing, acquired by the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no.: KKS1969-147), in 1969, came under further scrutiny when the master forger Eric Hebborn claimed the work for his own in his 1991 autobiography “Drawn to Trouble”. Although Hebborn’s own claims to authorship received scrutiny at the time the work’s inauthenticity was more readily accepted.