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It is an unwelcome question, but an important one: did the National Gallery buy a £2.5m dud?
This has remained the suspicion of many experts since one of Britain’s premier cultural institutions acquired Samson and Delilah, a long-lost masterpiece by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, in 1980.
Forty-five years on, the debate has been stirred once again, with a petition launched calling for the National Gallery to honour its 1997 promise to stage a public debate on its authenticity.
This time, it’s not the front of the painting that’s under scrutiny – it’s the back of it.
The debate began soon after the National Gallery bought the biblical depiction, known to have been painted by the master around 1609 before being lost for centuries. For the gallery, it was a 17th-century jewel in its collection, the sort of work to which tourists would flock.
But some immediately began to question the brushwork (too clumsy), describing it as a brash 20th-century copy of the original – and these doubts have only intensified. Katarzyna Krzyżagórska-Pisarek, a Rubens scholar, described the Samson and Delilah as “highly problematic” and “oddly modern”.
And Christopher Wright, a leading specialist in 17th-century paintings, said the picture itself was simply “wrong”. He added: “It lacks Rubens’s subtlety. It has a beguiling, slush-and-splosh grandeur … All my instincts of knowing about old masters bring me to that observation. It’s not a 17th-century picture.”
Feelings run deep in the art world over the question of the painting’s origins. Michael Daley, the director of ArtWatch UK, has researched the painting extensively and claims to have uncovered a mountain of evidence against the Rubens attribution. He calls it “the biggest of all museum scandals” and “a top-down conspiracy to conceal a massive purchasing blunder that debases Rubens’s oeuvre”.
The latest twist in this enduring saga comes courtesy of remarks made – and then withdrawn – by Christopher Brown, a former curator of the National Gallery, who headed the Dutch and Flemish collections.
Speaking to the Guardian, Brown insisted the painting was authentic, but intriguingly, he also said it was the National Gallery that had attached a modern blockboard to the painting’s back.
This apparent admission has electrified the Rubens doubters once more.
The backs of pictures often carry as much history as the front. With Samson, the panel on which the painting was originally painted has been planed down and attached to a modern blockboard, covering up whatever was underneath.
Critics suspect that the original panel may have held crucial evidence relating to the date of the painting.
The doubters also think the picture’s traditional cradled support was removed at the time.
This would mean any clues to the Samson and Delilah’s origins and age – and therefore its authenticity – have disappeared. One piece of evidence on the panel might have been the makers’ monogram, the application of which was the done thing in 17th-century Antwerp. If a panel-maker’s mark had showed the panel to have been made later than around 1609, that would have shown that the painting was almost certainly a copy.
When the gallery acquired the painting in 1980, there was no talk of a blockboard – it was bought as a panel.
The gallery’s first public mention of the blockboard was in its 1983 technical bulletin report, with an earlier reference in its 1982 board minutes, when Brown was seeking permission to clean the painting.
That was after the gallery had owned it for two years and its timber expert, Anthony Reeve, had described it as one of three unproblematic panels.
The National Gallery said the painting’s back had been glued to a blockboard sheet “probably during the [20th] century”, adding in a 1990s exhibition catalogue: “The Samson and Delilah was planed down to a thickness of about 3mm and set into a new blockboard panel before it was acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 and so no trace of a panel maker’s mark can be found.”
However, an eminent art historian’s condition report before the 1980 auction stated that the panel was “excellently preserved” and measured between 25mm and 40mm in thickness.
And herein lies the mystery: who planed down the panel and glued it to modern blockboard, when did they do it and why? Several renowned experts have questioned the logic behind the decision, considering it had been described as being in good shape.
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Wright said: “The matter is of very great importance because the blockboard conceals the possible original evidence on the panel. When the picture appeared at Christie’s, it looked immaculate. If the panel had been insecure, it would have been obvious.”
When approached by the Guardian, Brown said it was the gallery that put on the blockboard – a brand-new admission from a former curator held in the utmost regard.
Brown said: “The present backing was put on by the National Gallery … It’s rather a thin panel. It’s undoubtedly been thinned down at a certain stage and it was really to strengthen the panel.”
However, after the Guardian approached the gallery for comment, Brown later changed his tune. He said: “The National Gallery says that the backboard was applied before its acquisition. I have no reason to disbelieve them, and am certainly not in a position to contradict them.”
In his original interview, he had argued that “the idea that the National Gallery is in some way concealing something is nonsense” and that “the great scholars of Rubens have, since 1980, congratulated me”.
Daley described Brown’s initial comments as “startling”, adding that he himself has “a 2002 correspondence with the gallery denying that this had been done by their restorers”.
The painting had been previously attributed to lesser hands, and has no history as a Rubens before 1929, when it was found by Ludwig Burchard, a German historian who, after his death in 1960, was found to have misattributed paintings for commercial gain.
Krzyżagórska-Pisarek has subsequently discovered that at least 75 works that Burchard attributed to Rubens have been officially demoted.
She described the Samson and Delilah as “just the tip of the iceberg”, noting “the harsh, uniform red of Delilah’s dress” and Samson’s muscled back, which she said was “anatomically incorrect”, as well as a “curious lack of craquelure” – fine cracks that would be expected on a 400-year-old painting.
She expressed frustration over the lack of debate, adding: “They don’t want a discussion because we’ve got arguments that are really impossible to answer. This cannot be the original Rubens.”
Amid all the uncertainty, two things are for sure: the provenance of the painting will continue to send the art world into a spin, with scholars and aesthetes across the world continuing to call for that public debate.
The National Gallery said: “Samson and Delilah has long been accepted as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens. Not one single Rubens specialist has doubted that the picture is by Rubens. Painted on wood panel in oil shortly after his return to Antwerp in 1608 and demonstrating all that the artist had learned in Italy, it is a work of the highest aesthetic quality.
“A full discussion of the panel was published by Joyce Plesters and David Bomford in the Gallery’s Technical Bulletin in 1983, when Christopher Brown was the Gallery’s curator responsible for the picture. Their findings remain valid, including their unequivocal statement that the panel was attached to a support before the picture was acquired by the National Gallery.”
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