It has been a little more than two months since the Dulwich Picture Gallery, England’s oldest public art gallery, challenged the public to “spot the fake,” after replacing one of the Old Masters in its collection with a counterfeit, painted in China. The gallery has now revealed the fake.
On February 10, the gallery replaced Jean-Honore Fragonard’s 18th Century work Young Woman with a $120 (£70) hand painted counterfeit, produced in China. And there it hung, a fake among the 270 Old Masters.
Thousands of visitors came, studying each painting intently, whispering among themselves, trying to spot any little thing that would give them a clue to the fake. Chief curator Dr Xavier Bray said the number of visitors actually quadrupled during the past two months.
But out of the several thousand people who cast a vote, only 10 percent were able to guess the right painting as being the fake. ITV news reported that Bray said, “Never before have I seen so many people actively looking at each painting. Now Fragonard’s portrait of a young woman has returned to the gallery walls and hangs alongside its modern companion.”
Conceptual artist Doug Fishbone is credited with coming up with such an original idea of choosing a painting and then commissioning a copy from one of the many exporters of handmade oil paintings in China. The exhibition was entitled “Made in China,” and its purpose was to make people think of the way they look at, perceive and value a masterpiece.
Bray commented that if was actually fun to see that many people would walk right on by the fake, completely oblivious of it, but he was also impressed that so many people were able to pick it out as being a fake. “In the end it was in a very obvious place so most people would just walk past oblivious, which would always make me giggle.”
Bray added, some of the key giveaways to the trained eye were the lack of warmth in the background and the use of modern acrylic pigments. Talking about the young woman’s face in the counterfeit painting, Bray said the expression on her face was “lacking psychology, just empty and flat.”
Fragonard’s portrait has been returned to its rightful place in the gallery, and is being exhibited along side the counterfeit portrait so visitors can see and compare the differences in the original and the fake. Bray adds, “The visual exercise of comparing and contrasting will demonstrate how exciting it is to engage with an original work of art, but also marvel at the skill of a modern copyist working 5,000 miles away.”
