The artistic genius that blazed forth from the Low Countries in the 17th century is a common patrimony for the modern states of Belgium, the Netherlands — and indeed Britain, given that painters like Rubens and Van Dyck also flourished at England’s court. But there, some art-lovers would say, the commonality ends. In the study and presentation of great paintings, Dutch institutions have now become models of fresh and self-critical thinking, while in Belgium, a spirit of defensiveness, introversion and group-think makes it hard to give conventional wisdom a well-deserved kicking. Unfortunately Britain often leans in the Belgian direction.
That isn’t, of course, meant to be a rude generalisation about the individuals who practise art scholarship in London, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Rather it’s a statement about the contrasting house cultures in the three countries — a contrast that has grown even starker this summer as one of the hottest arguments in Old Master history reignites. It concerns a painting that is presented by London’s National Gallery as the original depiction by Rubens of a steamy Old Testament love-scene, featuring Samson and Delilah. It was auctioned by Christie’s in 1980, shortly after emerging from the vaults of a Belgian bank. Supporters call the painting a work of seductive genius; critics call it a sloppy copy of a canvas that was undoubtedly created in 1609 but was probably lost after its owner, the mayor of Antwerp, died in 1640.
Before surrendering to Delilah’s wiles, consider the commendable lesson in open-mindedness that is now being set by curators in the Netherlands. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is one of the finest small art museums in the world — and in a show running till mid-July, it invites visitors to view three famous paintings which were formerly thought to be works of Rembrandt; and then to read a detailed explanation of why two of them probably aren’t by the master and the third is borderline. The process of perpetual re-examination will go on, the curators stress. Rembrandt research never ends. In a similar spirit, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam recently invited the public to follow in real time as it subjected its most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, to a lengthy scientific examination.
When Ernst van de Wetering, the world’s best-known scholar of Rembrandt, died in 2021, obituarists noted that in the Dutchman’s lifetime, and in some measure thanks to him, the number of authenticated Rembrandt paintings had fallen from nearly 624 to just 340. He wasn’t merely a nay-sayer; he upgraded some paintings while downgrading others. And the Dutchman never worked alone, he was a member of, and eventually chaired, a Rembrandt Research Project in which scholarly devotees of the master perpetually compared notes, and argued loudly, about the scope of the oeuvre. Some see this Dutch spirit of creative contention as a legacy of the Nazi occupation, and the subsequent, agonised arguments over who had collaborated; the national psyche somehow absorbed the idea that supposedly eminent figures could make terrible mistakes, and that no individual should be seen as infallible.
Unfortunately, this glasnost and humility is less evident in Belgium, the homeland of Peter Paul Rubens. Ask Katarzyna Krzyzagorska-Pisarek, a Polish-British scholar who knows the Low Countries. In her doctoral research, she compared the Rembrandt Research Project with the nearest Belgian equivalent: an ongoing effort by the Centrum Rubenianum, a research centre in Antwerp, to assemble a definitive catalogue of Rubens’ work. The catalogue is known as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard — in deference to a German who was the most famous, if not the most reliable, Rubens scholar of the mid-20th century. The Dutch project was vastly broader in the range of evidence it considered, Pisarek found. More important, she identified at least 75 instances of works credited to Rubens by Burchard which had proved to be mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. The Belgian authority had very quietly acknowledged these mistakes, but it did nothing to draw this fact to the world’s attention, and it persists in revering Burchard’s legacy. Pisarek found the Rubenianum equally unreceptive to public dialogue when she urged them, citing a huge body of evidence, to rehabilitate a couple of important paintings which in her view had been wrongly degraded.
How does all this relate to the re-emerging dispute over Samson and Delilah, a work acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million, the biggest amount that a UK public collection had paid for a single canvas? Well, it was Burchard who identified the now-contested painting, which emerged in 1929 in a studio in Paris, as a very-long-lost Rubens; and on that matter, Belgium’s art authorities insist that Burchard was right.
So the London Gallery, faced with a crescendo of challenging voices — raising issues of provenance, palette, composition and the painting’s physical structure — has confidently relied on the Rubenianum to shout down people who contest its 1980 purchase. And indeed, the Belgian art authorities have obligingly done so with a rudeness that outdoes the bitchiest of British art critics. People who question the painting are simply “a small group of flat earth-minded conspiracy theorists who make their money by denying all the facts”, declared the Rubenianum’s (German-born) chairman Nils Buttner when I consulted him about the issue. Bert Watteeuw, director of Antwerp’s Rubenshuis museum, responded with a petulant ad hominem (or ad feminam) outburst when asked by a Belgian reporter about a new book by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an art historian of Greek and Flemish descent, which carefully lays out the sceptical case. “Who is this woman to say those things?” (In fact, Doxiadis has been in vigorous and contentious interaction with the Rubenianum. almost from the year, 1981, when Watteeuw was born.)
“People who question the painting are simply ‘a small group of flat earth-minded conspiracy theorists’.”
On 9 May, the National Gallery suddenly seemed to be taking at least a step in a more emollient, indeed Dutchward, direction when it quietly e-published, for those who knew where to look, a multi-authored 25,000-word pronouncement on the disputed painting. It still affirmed the work’s authenticity but implicitly acknowledged that the sceptics had raised some serious points, including the painting’s poor provenance chain and highly idiosyncratic colour scheme. Amidst all the verbiage, many issues were only partially addressed, as Pisarek points out: for example, the problem posed by contemporary copies of Rubens’ original work which differ from the Gallery’s acquisition. Still, the huge outpouring amounted to a big and welcome change of presentational tactics from the previous stance of Sphinx-like silence or “ask the Belgians”.
On one matter, though, the Gallery seems to be digging in its heels. One of the disputed work’s oddest features is that (as all agree) the artwork itself has been planed down to a few millimetres and then stuck onto a cheapish pink blockboard. The Gallery’s curators have always insisted (and they emphatically repeat in their latest pronouncement) that the tawdry blockboard was slammed on well before the work arrived in Trafalgar Square in mid-summer 1980. Yet an ever-growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests that the painting was still resting on a much thicker, older wooden panel when it left Belgium; and its short stay at Christie’s would hardly have sufficed for this massive modification.
In an article for The Guardian published on 15 June, Dalya Alberge quotes an eminent curator as initially admitting and then denying that the blockboard was added at the Gallery. The curator, Christopher Brown, ought to know what he is talking about. As he has recalled in a public lecture, he was put in charge of the Gallery’s Dutch and Flemish treasures in 1971, when he was just 23. Young Brown then had to bite his lip while his boss, the Gallery director Sir Michael Levey, made a terrible mistake by failing to recognise an authentic Rembrandt which a British peer was trying to dispose of. So if anyone remembers what was going in the Gallery in 1980, it should be Brown. Meanwhile a veteran of art investigation, Michael Daley, published online a 16-page essay which meticulously lays out all the evidence that the older back was intact when the work arrived in London.
Why does this blockboard issue matter so much? First because if it emerges that the Gallery has been less than frank with the public about the timing of this draconian intervention, then everything else the Gallery says about the contested painting will lose credibility. Second, as Daley suggests, hard questions arise about the motives for the intervention. The older wooden back would certainly have contained invaluable clues about the dating, and treatment over the years, of the contested work. With the discarding of the older back, important evidence was lost. Might those facts be connected?
As it happens, one of the whistle-blowers on this sensitive point was a Belgian banker, Jan Bosselaers — a director of the defunct Kredietbank in whose vaults the painting was stored. He provided Doxiadis with written and photographic testimony to the effect that the painting’s old back was still in place when it left Belgium: this evidence was only authorised for release after his death. (This was not Bosselaers’ only end-of-life bombshell: he also revealed, very shortly before passing away in 2015, that the bank had once been in negotiation with the possessors of the country’s greatest missing art treasure: a section of a 14th-century altar-piece which was stolen in 1934.)
If bankers in secretive Belgium can become truth-tellers, at least on their death-beds, might members of Britain’s cliquey art establishment who know about this affair clear their consciences while they still have the chance? One thing emerges clearly from the latest revelations by Daley and Alberge. Individuals who had sight and knowledge of the Gallery’s contested painting, after its arrival in London, have not yet told the full story. We can affirm that with confidence because the various things those individuals did say, back in the Eighties and even very recently, are utterly confused and contradictory. Those multiple confusions and contradictions are laid out in intricate detail by Daley’s latest posting.
As for the Gallery’s recent long pronouncement, its flaws would be forgivable if it had been offered, in good faith, as the start of a constructive and open-ended debate. In fact the Gallery still shows little appetite for debate, or any sort of give-and-take, with the public. When I asked, very courteously, for a comment on how scientific knowledge about the contested painting had moved on as a result of recent investigations, I received no reply. The good thing is that a debate is starting anyway. Art critic Jonathan Jones has stepped in with a passionate defence of the contested painting on aesthetic grounds, as though the sceptics’ case rested on aesthetics rather than hard-and-fast facts about events and testimonies in the late 20th century. He entirely misses the sceptics’ point — but at least a conversation has begun.
Let’s hope it is a Dutch-style discussion, worthy of the land of Erasmus and Spinoza, because British art is long overdue for a puff of fresh Netherlandish air. At the time the contested picture was acquired in 1980, London’s art establishment was even smaller, more introverted and less accountable for its mistakes than it is now: perhaps unintentionally, Brown’s lecture offered a glimpse of that world. Partly because of that defect, London has lost some ground to other cities like New York and Paris as a hub for art expertise and commerce. However late in the day, a bit more openness about that mysterious canvas in Trafalgar Square might do wonders to shore up London’s reputation.
