Antiques Roadshow Van Dyck really IS a Van Dyck

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25539103

Father Jamie MacLeod brought an attractive man's portrait labeled "A. Van Dyck" to Antiques Roadshow last year.

Something about the face intrigued presenter Fiona Bruce, who had just been studying Van Dyck's oeuvre.

After a painstaking process of removing later layers of paint which had smoothed and prettified the composition, the painting was revealed. The man in the portrait had a highly finished face, but only a sketched-in ruff and a bit of dark background scribbled around the contours.

The newly revealed sketch was very similar to a known study for a now-destroyed Van Dyck group portrait.

Experts on Van Dyck have verified that the painting is indeed an authentic Van Dyck, possibly another study for the same painting.

Father MacLeod paid £400 for the painting at an antiques shop. Its current value is about £400,000, and Father MacLeod hopes to sell it and use the money to pay for new church bells as a memorial to the First World War.

Hanson said:

400K and he's out shopping for bells???

sheesh.

eta. I wonder who wrote 'A Van Dyke' on the painting? now there's a story....

Click to expand...

Well, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was sort of an aspirational thing, a bit of wishful thinking to identify whatever gungy old portrait you had lying around as hopefully something by whichever famous artist its style was closest to. It seems like just about every dark old portrait of a man in a ruff was labeled "Van Dyck." I think when Frans Hals was unfashionable some of his paintings might have been labeled "Van Dyck."

I've seen plenty of old paintings with laughable attributions on the little plaques in the frames.

Clearly the antique store that sold it assumed it was another of the thousands of vaguely seventeenth century European portraits which some past collector had labeled in a spirit of silly optimism. And perhaps they had. The overpainting was slick and probably meant to impress later tastes and to my eye did not look very like Van Dyck's style. It was only the face itself that was so well done.