The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century 9781501726873

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THE DECEIVERS

THE DECEIVERS ~Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

[:]00 AVIVA BRIEFEL

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2006 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2006 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Briefel, Aviva. The Deceivers : art forgery and identity in the nineteenth century I Aviva Briefel. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-o-8014-4460-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: o-8014-4460-8 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Forgery in literature. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. 3· Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature. 4· Fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 5. Art-Forgeries-History-19th century. 6. Art and societyHistory-19th century. I. Title. PN3352.F67B75 2006 702' .874-dc22 2006006530 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of non wood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10987654321

To David

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1.

2. 3·

4· 5·

Introduction: The Golden Age of Forgery Imperfect Doubles: The Forger and the Copyist Intimate Detections: Connoisseurs, Forgers, and the Thing between Them Restorations: Cultural Authority and the Life of Objects Real Sons of Abraham: Jewish Art Dealers and the Traffic in Fakes Paste and Pearls: Drawing the Boundaries of Female Identity

ix 1 19 53 83 ll6

146

Conclusion: Magic Tricks

175

Notes Works Cited

181 217

Index

233

D

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to express my appreciation to those who have surrounded me through all stages of this project. First, I am grateful to my advisers for their generous support. I thank Philip Fisher for imparting his wisdom and unparalleled reading skills to me for the past several years. From our very first meeting, he taught me what it means to be a serious scholar. Jonah Siegel ushered me into academia by calling to tell me that I had been admitted to graduate school, and he has been a genuine guide and friend ever since. He never tires of giving me advice, and I hope he never will, because I intend to call him for the next several decades. I am greatly indebted to Barbara Johnson, who has inspired each page of this book. Ever since I had the honor to take her Persons and Things course at Harvard, I have been stirred to think about the often-subtle differences between the human and object worlds. I owe this project to her. I am also grateful to the many other wonderful scholars who have helped me in countless ways over the years. These include James Eli Adams, Nancy Armstrong, Lawrence Buell, Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Loesberg, Ellen Rooney, and Jennifer Scanlon, all of whom have been incredibly generous readers and mentors. I am fortunate to have found continuing support and friendship from my colleagues in the English Department at

Bowdoin College: Franklin Burroughs, David Collings, Peter Coviello, Mary Agnes Edsall, Celeste Goodridge, Ann Kibbie, Aaron Kitch, Belinda Kong, Daniel Moos, Elizabeth Muther, Marilyn Reizbaum, Anthony Walton, and William Watterson. It has been a great experience to learn from them (and laugh with them) on a daily basis. I am also grateful to Pamela Fletcher and Birgit Tautz, who have offered impressive and knowledgeable commentary on the project. Finally, I thank my students, many of whom are well on their way to becoming successful scholars. I derive a great deal of my inspiration from them. So much of the energy I have put into this project has come, both directly and indirectly, from my friends. Elisabeth Ford has been my partner in crime since our conversation over french fries and cigarettes at the Greenhouse in Harvard Square in 1995. To help me through this (and other) projects, she has read countless drafts, accompanied me on innumerable walks, and shared many, many fabulous meals. Monica Miller has blessed this book with her amazing reading skills (she has read certain parts far too many times) and her sisterly affection. I owe much to Sianne Ngai, with whom I coauthored my first article, and who has been a consistent source of personal and professional inspiration. Marilyn Reizbaum appears twice in these acknowledgments because she has done double duty as a mentor and as a close friend. I am extremely grateful for the many things she has taught me. The following friends have helped me in various ways throughout the writing process: Steven Gontarski, Jared Hohlt, Homay King, David Kurnick, Joshua Neuman, Mark Phillipson, Sascha Russell, Phoebe Tremalio-Slater, Carl Wennerlind, and Adam Zucker. Each of them deserves pages of gratitude. I also thank my editors at Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon, Teresa Jesionowski, Bernhard Kendler, and David Schur; my indexer, Kevin Millham; and the anonymous readers whose beneficial comments guided me through the last part of the project. I am thankful for the care with which they read the manuscript and for the sagacity of their observations. I could not have completed this book without financial and institutional support from a range of sources. These include the Faculty Research Fund and the Fletcher Family Research Grant from Bowdoin College, and the Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Mellon Summer Research Fellowship, Dexter Fellowship, and Prize Fellowship granted during my time at Harvard. I am grateful to the staffs at the various libraries where I researched this book, including Harvard's Widener, Schlesinger, Lamont, and Fine Arts libraries; the British Library; and Bowdoin's HawthorneLongfellow Library, including its Special Collections staff. I am extremely x Acknowledgments

grateful to the professional societies and meetings that gave me the opportunity to present various parts of my project and to receive priceless feedback: the "Fakes and Forgeries, Conmen and Counterfeits" conference (Durham, England, 2002), the Society for the Study of Narrative, the Modern Language Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the Textual Intersections Conference (Cardiff, Wales, 2001), and the Victorian Institute. I am particularly obliged to the members of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association for welcoming me into their fold and for helping me to refine this project. Last but not least, I thank Cynthia Johnson and Barbara Olmstead of the Bowdoin College English Department for the care and patience with which they have helped me with this book. I end these acknowledgments with the people who have influenced this book most profoundly. My parents, Marie and Robert Briefel, have modeled the perseverance required to complete all projects, great and small. Their continuing lessons and genuine affection lie at the heart of this one. I cannot sufficiently thank my husband, David Hecht, whom I met while writing this book, and whose presence has inspired me through its completion. His support-and wonderful editing skills-have helped me to improve the project drastically from its first conception. More important, he has made my life beyond the computer screen a much richer one. For this reason, and for countless others, I dedicate this book to him.

AvivA BRIEFEL Brunswick, Maine

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction The Golden Age of Forgery

Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion. It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture! He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? -Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Forgeries are objects that have declared their independence from humans. A fake version of the Mona Lisa is tied neither to the Old Master who allegedly painted it nor to the anonymous forger who is its actual producer. The first artist is a fiction that has been imposed on the canvas to increase its financial or aesthetic value, and the second a shadowy figure who can never lay claim to the painting if it is to be taken for the real thing. Oscar Wilde offers an allegorical account of the strange freedom of the fake

object in his description of Basil Hallward's encounter with the portrait of Dorian Gray, which he had originally painted. This portrait has transformed from the pleasing rendition of a beautiful young man to the disturbing image of an aging sinner whose every transgression is inscribed on the surface of his face. Basil responds to this transformed masterpiece with the same horror that an artist might experience in seeing a forgery of his work. The image has taken on a life of its own and teases its creator with his absent authorship. It is a duplicitous imitation of his artistry, an uncanny hybrid of familiar strokes and colors and unfamiliar alterations. Basil's signature, the most intimate of textual markings, adds to the trauma of his discovery by suggesting that his artistic and personal identities have been co-opted by an invisible hand. The fake obscures its human creator. At the same time, however, Dorian's portrait bears an irrefutable intimacy with the human. Its power to reflect its subject's "soul" -as Dorian himself puts it-exposes the painting as a hybrid of the human and the object. 1 While ordinary artworks accrue signs of aging and decay with the passage of time, the picture of Dorian Gray grows old like a person does. The evolution of changes in Dorian's identity replaces the cracks and stains that pervade aging objects or that have been artificially added by forgers to make a fake look like the real thing. Wilde never allows us to forget that the portrait's intimate link to the human depends on its spuriousness, on its detachment from its original producer. His allegorical representation of the forgery shows it to be an extremely powerful object, whose lack of a stable human source grants it an impressive authority in defining human selves. The Deceivers studies the impact of fake things on nineteenth-century notions of identity. Contemporary literary and artistic texts generated a rich rhetoric of forgery, constructing notions of personhood under the guise of imposing divisions between authentic and inauthentic objects. The forger, the copyist, the expert, the dealer, and the restorer emerged as concrete roles within the art world and as broader models of identity that readers could apply to themselves and to the culture at large. The artistic nature of these roles made them appear securely apolitical, whereas in fact they were linked to vocabularies of selfhood based on categories of gender, class, race, and nationality. Literary narratives seized the powerful rhetoric of fakes to tell their own stories about identity and to impose ideologically motivated hierarchies between types of persons. I focus on fictions written in England, France, and the United States, nations whose similar patterns of object acquisition and falsification in the nineteenth century led them to produce a plethora of discourses regarding the purity of their museums 2 The Deceivers

and private collections. They generated narratives that distinguished those who could successfully make, handle, or detect spurious things or selves from others whose identities (women, for example) prevented them from claiming authority over artistic and human forgeries. In what follows, I will argue that these narratives produced new models for understanding unstable and often unpredictable relationships between persons and things. The instability of fakes often ended up creating intractable selves. This book examines the identities, both authentic and fake, desired and despised, that emerged from the material culture of forgery.

All That Glitters Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics alike describe the 18oos as one of the "great" or "golden" ages of faking. 2 While the forgery of valuable artifacts had occurred since ancient times, the nineteenth century experienced an unprecedented increase in the production and dissemination of fakes. This rise was caused primarily by a heightened demand for artworks from the past to fill the needs of national museums and the desires of individual collectors. The aristocrat's private cabinet of curiosities gave way to the public museum as the preferred repository of artworks. The establishment of the Louvre (1793) in Paris, the National Gallery (1824) and the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) (1857) in London, and the Metropolitan Museum (1870) in New York, to name a few, catalyzed a frenzied traffic in artworks from such purveyors of authenticity as Italy, Greece, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as, in the case of England and France, from local sources. On a smaller scale, upper middle-class collectors sought to establish a prestige that they had not inherited through bloodlines by acquiring authentic artworks, especially those produced by Old Masters and other artists with recognizable names. The bourgeois fascination with old things led to what the Goncourt brothers in France termed "bricabracomania," an obsession with collecting for the sheer pleasure of collecting. 3 These national and local patterns of object acquisition encouraged the forger and the dishonest art dealer, both of whom filled a demand for artworks that could not be satisfied by authentic objects alone. The new openness of the culture of art aided them in this enterprise. Forgers assessed which objects and artists were currently valued the most and produced artworks that met the desired requirements. The dissemination of art jourThe Golden Age of Forgery 3

nals and other accessible publications provided them with the necessary information for making fakes, including images of originals and biographical details about the actual artists. The public culture of museums also contributed directly to the proliferation of fakes. As Barbara Black argues, although museums are intended to preserve and display original artworks, they also encourage the violation of these works: "In the museum the reverence for art quickly turns into a kind of irreverence that allows the museum crowd to imitate and copy at will. Although one may assume that the museum functions as the preserve of the unique work of art, it is more accurately the despoiler of originality and the arena of duplication." 4 Museums gave forgers access to original artworks and to accurate reproductions, as was the case with the Cast Courts in London's South Kensington Museum, established in the early 1870s to display famous statues from faraway places. 5 Forgeries take countless forms. They may consist of exact replicas of original artworks; after the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, rumors abounded that the subsequently recovered image was a fake and that the real one resided elsewhere. 6 Forgeries can also pose as the "newly discovered" creations of a renowned artist, as was the case with the number of spurious artworks assigned to the French painter Jean-Baptiste Corot, one of the most frequently forged artists of all time. Paul Desire Trouillebert was a prolific Co rot faker who attained a respectable degree of notoriety when the writer Alexandre Dumas, fils, purchased one of his "Corot" paintings in 1883. Dumas allegedly shook the forger's hand when he discovered how well Trouillebert had duped him. 7 Sometimes, forgeries are not tied to a single artist, but are presented as valuable anonymous finds from a particular historical period. This was the case with so-called Billys and Charleys, fake medieval badges created by two illiterate workmen, William Smith and Charles Eaton, who, beginning in 1857, claimed to have found the artifacts along the Thames. These badges were sold by a number of antique dealers; they are now valuable collectors' items. 8 Another popular method of faking is to turn genuinely old but valueless objects into revered originals through the addition of a signature (adding the name "Corot" to a landscape made by an anonymous artist, for instance) or other identifying markers. One such practice consists of transforming ordinary individuals on old portraits into famous historical figures. An 1846 article from the Art- Union warns, "The cavaliers of Elizabeth's reign, with their frills and oval-shaped heads, make passable Shaksperes [sic]; a priest of Charles I's reign will do for a Milton; any obscure general in armour, with a tolerable nose, can be converted into an Oliver Cromwell; and 4 The Deceivers

a red-haired, long- faced lady, with plenty of ruff, makes a Queen Elizabeth: but if it happens to be a pretty face, it is transformed into a Mary Queen of Scots." 9 Value can be added by affixing a coveted signature or imposing an equally desirable subject. Stories of the corruption of national and private collections by fake objects saturated newspapers and periodicals. These accounts trained their readers to suspect old artworks as potential forgeries. An 1861 Cornhill Magazine article on picture sales, for example, interrupts its description of the characters who typically populate such events with the troubling question, "The wonder is, where the pictures all come from-these endless 'old masters'?" 10 An 1890 essay from Blackwood's Magazine poses a similar question and offers a worrisome explanation for the surplus of artworks: "In these days we are puzzled, not so much by the number of bric-a-brac shops-the number of their patrons may explain that -but to divine how the dealers obtain their apparently inexhaustible stock. Where was it all in pre-aesthetic times? Perhaps the forger might give the most pertinent answer to this question." 11 Such warnings induce a form of paranoia, or "forgeritis," in their readers, a sense that no institution or collection is safe from the intrusion of forgery. 12 As the Magazine ofArt describes the situation in 1879, "There is hardly a large town that does not afford some melancholy instance of a rich man nearly or quite ruining himself by the purchase of manufactured 'Old Masters; which, when they come to be converted into money again, at a time of commercial depression perhaps, turn out to be worth something less than the canvas they are painted on .... The National Gallery itself has not wholly escaped the dangerous pitfalls which await the unwary, and sometimes even the wary, purchaser of works of art." 13 The anxiety that emerges around forgery reflects Eve Sedgwick's definition of paranoia as "anticipatory," leading to a heightened suspicion that operates around the idea that "There must be no bad surprises."14 Indeed, private collectors were frequently reminded that they had probably already fallen prey to the forger. One journalist delivered the far from reassuring injunction, "Look around you, good reader, in your little parlor, with its lovingly selected adornments-in your study, with its patiently gathered bibelots. I'll wager a hundred to one that not a single thing you have put there is genuine." 15 The fake seemed to possess an incontestable power as it pervaded private collections and lauded institutions alike. Despite these anxiety-inducing warnings, nineteenth-century discussions of forgery are far from unified. They display an ambivalence about faking that gives a new valence to descriptions of the period as a "golden The Golden Age of Forgery 5

age" of artistic deception; these descriptions suggest that there is something valuable about forgery despite its disruptive effects. From early in the century, critics were as willing to explore the benefits of forgery as they were eager to list its dangers. A pair of articles appearing in the London Times a month apart encapsulates this contradiction. The first, published on December 30, 1825, is written by an anonymous dealer who warns his readers about the quantity of fakes flooding England. He lists twelve rules for acquiring artworks, providing such practical advice as knowing when to suspect a dealer or auctioneer; not purchasing a picture that looks "as fresh as when it came from the easel," or one whose overly decrepit state conveys an artificial authenticity; and avoiding unrealistic bargains. 16 The next article, from February 1, 1826, advocates forgery by providing a pointby-point rejoinder to the dealer's twelve rules. In response to the first article's warning to mistrust Titians and Guidos advertised in auction catalogs, for example, the second argues that the sale of fake Old Masters should be considered a "mutual advantage" for the dealer and the buyer, as both end up getting what they want: money and a masterpiece of whose fraudulence the buyer is unaware. Against the first article's advice that dealers should be mistrusted, the second defends this group, claiming that deception is not necessarily a negative way of doing business and may, in fact, be crucial to the new economy of art. The author writes that "If lying and deceit are to be prohibited, we are come to a stand-still-the world and its concerns are at an end. This is a commercial country.... Without deceit, innocence would be deprived of its greatest honour; to be deceived is the test and glow of innocence." 17 This unconventional argument, couched in a humorous language that means business, defends the trade in fakes on the basis of its importance to a thriving market economy. Responding to the earlier article's plea for an end to deception, the second argues that without trickery, the art market would collapse. The scandal surrounding one of the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury's most infamous forgeries, the tiara of Saitapharnes, conveys the complicated status of the "golden" fake. In 1896, the Louvre spent two hundred thousand francs on a gold tiara that had allegedly belonged to a Scythian king. Shortly after this important purchase, critics began toquestion its authenticity. The German art expert Adolf Furtwangler wrote an article in the international journal Cosmopolis claiming that from his "first glance" at the object, he had assessed that it was a forgery-and not a very convincing one at that. 18 The French scholar Theodore Reinach responded with an angry essay in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that praised the unparalleled authenticity of the tiara and denounced Furtwangler as a flawed ex6 The Deceivers

pert who had made serious attribution mistakes in the past. Reinach predicted that, given his incompetence, soon "the opinion of Mr. Furtwaengler in matters of authenticity would become irrelevant." 19 The debate subsided until, seven years later, a forger by the name of Elina Mayence boasted that he was the true creator of the tiara. Mayence's claim was discovered to be a lie, and he confessed, ''All that I said regarding the creation of the artwork was fabricated [forge]." 20 Rumors soon arose that a Russian Jew by the name of Israel Rouchomovsky was the true creator of the object. Experts became convinced of his authorship when he traveled to Paris and recreated part of the tiara before their very eyes. Once Rouchomovsky's role had been confirmed, the Louvre removed the tiara from public display. 21 The tiara affair garnered contradictory public reactions that pointed to a profound ambivalence about how to treat the fake. On the one hand, as evidenced by Reinach's irate reaction to Furtwangler, the possibility that the tiara might be forged posed a direct threat to France's reputation as a cultural power, a threat that was confirmed by the removal of the object from its prominent display in the Louvre. On the other hand, the case exposed a public fascination with the fake object, its forger, and with forgery in general that rivaled this fear. At both stages of the debate, in 1896 and then in 1903, France witnessed a proliferation of discourses about the tiara. Extending far beyond the parameters of the art world, it became the focus of newspaper headlines and dinner conversations, and the subject of popular songs; as one common refrain went, "It's the tiara, the tiara, the tiara I It's the tiara that we want!" 22 P. T. Barnum also wanted the tiara and offered a large sum for the object on the condition that its status as a fake would be guaranteedP The poet Guillaume Apollinaire joined the public debate in an editorial for the Revue Blanche that lamented the removal of the tiara from the Louvre and argued that what really mattered was its beauty, not its authenticity: "The minister of Fine Arts was severely lacking in intellect on this occasion: a beautiful art work that is worthy of being exhibited in a national museum should not have been removed from it:' 24 This celebration of the inauthentic was also witnessed in the commercial sphere, as merchants sold replicas of the tiara in the form of cufflinks, cups, and postcards. 25 The tiara had become a source of both national pride and national shame. Faking was, in fact, crucial to asserting the cultural authority of nations. In 1903, the same year as the climax of the tiara affair, the Italian senate passed a bill intended to preserve the artistic heritage of the country by limiting the export of its antiques. A group of Florentine dealers subseThe Golden Age of Forgery 7

quently wrote a letter to M. H. Spielmann, editor of the Magazine of Art, using fakes rather than authentic artworks to explain why this measure would be detrimental to their nation: The advocates of the Bill ignore the fact that everything (sold by them, the dealers) is not the product of the art of the past; that innumerable objects have lain for years, for centuries indeed, despised, dust-bitten, and worm-eaten, until he (the dealer) discovered them thus half destroyed, and restored them with his enlightened patience, supplying missing parts, polishing them up, completing them with fragments of other objects, and recomposing the whole in fashion so pleasing and artistic as to excite the fancy of the foreigner ... who pays for such work with chinking gold. And they do not consider that behind the shop of the dealer, in his back room, no unskilled workmen but real artists attend to the delicate task of reconstruction and restoration. Nor do they consider that these fifty and more Florentine dealers give work to over 1,ooo such artists, and arc a source of gain which percolates through the whole city. 26 This letter contains the remarkably candid admission that fakes are being produced throughout Florence. What is more, it makes the surprising claim that these fakes are central to maintaining the city's economic and cultural prestige. The letter represents forgers laboring from back rooms as spectral heroes ("real artists") trying to maintain the glory ofltaly in the eyes of the world. One of the best ways of achieving this goal, it suggests, is by swindling rapacious foreign collectors. From another perspective, forgeries were considered accurate indicators of cultures whose artistic heritage or superior resources made them worthy of being deceived. Not falling prey to the forger could have far more unsettling implications than being duped-it might designate a nation that was too destitute to be defrauded. The existence of fakes was material proof of cultural abundance, a confirmation of an extensive demand for luxury goods. Contemporary accounts acknowledged that national wealth could be measured through the presence of forgeries. In his 1888 treatise Art: A Commodity, for example, the American critic Sheridan Ford attributes the proliferation of forgeries in the United States to the country's prosperity: "There is so much wealth in the United States, the area is so vast, and the people so in need of amusement, that everything combines to make the country an easy prey to the wary speculators who come three thousand miles with anything in the way of a canvas they can lay their

8 The Deceivers

hands on." 27 While Ford also calls for a widespread change in consumer behavior to limit the dissemination of fakes, his argument is undermined by his proud endorsement of America's enviable wealth. However harmful they may otherwise be, the forger's deceptions broadcast the affluence of nations. Critics' ambivalence toward forgery emerges in their attribution of another positive aspect to the practice: its ability to prevent the art world from spiraling into an uncontrollable capitalist economy. As an 1879 article from the Magazine of Art asserts, "It is well, perhaps, that the hope of gain which any buyer of pictures may cherish should be counteracted by a corresponding chance of loss; for we would not wish to see the spirit of commerce invading with anything like system the realm of art." 28 This statement reflects the typical duality of representations of the fake during this period. While forgery indicates an art market gone awry, in which demand far outstrips supply, it also provides an antidote to this problem by restricting consumer behavior. Critics describe the ideal collector as being aware of the pitfalls pervading the market and realizing that he can decrease the production of fakes by becoming a discerning buyer. An 1875 article from the London Times suggests that instead of handbooks counseling readers on how to purchase china, a frequently forged object, there should be a "handbook which should teach them how not to buy. It is by far the more difficult art to master, but a judicious teacher might do some good if he only succeeded in instilling doubt into the purchaser's mind and thus occasionally staying his hand. Lavish and undiscriminating buyers do more than anything to encourage forgeries and if they could be taught that money alone will not give them what they want, this new demand of the imitative ingenuity of Straffordshire [china forgeries] might receive a much-needed check:' 29 The article advocates a negative form of consumption, in which restraint has as much power to regulate the economy as reckless buying has to infect it with fakes. The collector who has contributed to the increase in forgeries through his unruly acquisitions will in turn be tamed by them. This structure positions consumers and fraudulent objects within a self-regulating system, in which the unruly desires of buyers can be moderated by the artworks these desires helped to create. Fakes thereby provide the training required for their elimination. An article for Longwood's Magazine clarifies that ''As dogs must pass through their distemper, so an antiquary must have bought his forgeries before he can be regarded as thoroughly seasoned.... The fact of being occasionally taken in helps to sharpen the powers of observation, so that the existence

The Golden Age of Forgery 9

of forgeries can hardly be regarded as an unmixed evil." 30 The paradoxical status of a forgery as cultural disease and cure makes it both despised and necessary. In spite of the stated attempts of art experts to eliminate forgery, they hesitate to imagine a world without it. They express this ambivalence through discussions that depict the fake as an uncontrollable and ultimately ineradicable type of object. This conflict is evident in Paul Eudel's Le Truquage (Faking; 1884), an immensely popular study that exposes various methods of forgery production in elaborate detail. Despite its impressive size and overwhelming number of anecdotes, the book insists that it will never be able to cover all types of subterfuge. Eudel begins his text with the admonition, "When my last page shall be filled, there will remain a lot to say." 31 The expert's repeated insistence on his fallibility points to his marked reluctance to let go of the fake. In 1907, Eudel would confirm his warning by publishing a second imposing volume, Trues et truqueurs (Fakes and Fakers). This book begins with the ostensibly dispiriting news that since the publication of the first tome, "art forgery has continued to grow and to worsen;' and that despite the thoroughness of his new study, it will only have lifted the "corner of the veil." Eudelleaves his readers with a sense of helplessness as he suggests that knowledge will never fully prevent deception. This message complicates his frequent appeals for consumers to take charge and to cease giving "forgery its weapons." 32 He suggests that however adamant the collector's efforts, the fake will not disappear altogether. The French artist Corot appeared to share in the expert's reluctance to eliminate forgery. He allegedly contributed to the dissemination of fake Co rots by adding his own signature to them. He is supposed to have said at one point, "It takes so little for [a fake] to become a real Corot." 33 Likewise, in the twentieth century, Salvador Dali apparently signed thousands of blank sheets of paper-potential forgeries-on his deathbed. 34 Certain nineteenth-century critics went so far as to propose that forgeries should be treated in the same elevated manner as authentic artworks in private collections and museums. Alfred Trumble, the editor of the American journal the Collector, for instance, contradicts his "Programme and Pledge" (1889 ), in which he assures his readers that his publication will reject fakes of all kinds, with an article published a couple of months later advocating the practice of collecting frauds. Referring to a book connoisseur who consciously begins to collect forgeries, the article states, "After all, there is no reason why as much personal interest should not attach to the autographs of felons as to the tangible evidence of their felonies. If collec10 The Deceivers

torship is not altogether a matter of taste, what is?" 35 An article from the Art Journal (1906) furthers this suggestion by venturing, "In Paris the Musee St. Germain and the Museum of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers have their departments of fine forgeries. Our own museums might well follow an example that affords such practical instruction. Certainly we need not be so terribly ashamed when we are taken in." 36 These modest proposals convey an impulse to canonize the fake by granting it a status comparable to that of authentic artworks. In so doing, they bolster descriptions of the nineteenth century as a "golden age" of forgery. Although this gold is not genuine, it exerts a cultural influence that rivals the real thing.

Fictions of Forgery and Identity The vital position of forgery in nineteenth-century culture was manifest in the powerful vocabulary it generated for defining persons as well as things. Artistic texts developed complex taxonomies for classifying individuals based on their relationship to spurious objects. M. H. Spielmann separates the forgery profession into a number of individual roles, which correspond to different types of deception: the Dirtier (who ages canvases), the Monogrammist (who forges signatures), the Sealer (who validates pictures with a fake seal of approval), the Genealogist (who invents a lineage, or provenance, for artworks), the Name-Changer (who rechristens canvases to increase their value), the Blender (who draws elements from different artworks and combines them into a new whole), and so on. 37 These intricate subdivisions of the forger's craft suggest the impressive number of deceptive identities that emerged around the fake object. Collectors were also grouped according to elaborate classifications based on their susceptibility to fakes. Spielmann writes that "The hardened collector is of two kinds: he who is always on his guard-frequently exaggerating a proper lack of confidence-and he who, trusting to a naturally fine taste and good eye, is often lured by over self-confidence to his own undoing." He elaborates on his taxonomy to explain that specific kinds of forgers target specific collectors: "The less accomplished apply themselves successfully to the victimising of the man of little knowledge, while the princes of the disreputable profession are men of highly-developed ability, brilliant artists in their way, whose achievement is equalled only by their cunning, or by the cunning of those who act as their intermediaries." 38 The Golden Age of Forgery 11

Other accounts provide vivid and often comical descriptions of the types of collectors who would most likely be taken in by the forgery, particularly those whose wealth was matched by an equally impressive lack of knowledge. An 1875 article from Blackwood's Magazine caricatures a prosperous New York collector, Jefferson J, Q. Shoddy, who travels to Europe to acquire a valuable artwork. He meets an Italian prince, Comosechiama, who, having just lost his own fortune, seeks to sell a family heirloom. Shoddy is delighted with his purchase and identifies the value of the painting in the fact that it is "in such perfect preservation that you might think it had been painted last week. There ain't a crack on it, or a single spot that ain't as fresh as the day it was painted." The article positions its readers as experts who recognize that the perfect condition of the painting is a telltale sign of suspicious newness rather than longstanding value. Shoddy's wife's reaction to his purchase confirms the collector's disgraceful ignorance: "It's by Gheedo-so Shoddy says, but who knows which of those old Italians painted it? But it's a large picture, isn't it? and they say it's very old; and I'm sure Shoddy paid enough money for it to be A, No. 1." 39 According to her flawed logic, the price that a collector has invested in an artwork is sufficient proof of its worth. The Shoddys' cultural illiteracy becomes a source both of parodic humor and of reassurance for readers who pride themselves on not being as gullible as the couple. The article thus uses the uninformed collector as a negative example against which readers can define their own consumer identities. The identities that emerged around the fake extended beyond the parameters of the art world. Contemporary texts drew from the unexpected power of fakes to define human subjects by gender, class, race, and nationality. These terms were couched in a language that seemed to refer solely to the aesthetic sphere; the apparent distance of forgery from the political made it an effective tool for subtly imposing crucial differences in identity. As we will see, critics isolated the production of forgeries as work done only by men. They refused to acknowledge that women might participate in artistic crime and confined them to a restrictive honesty. In another context, I will demonstrate that artistic and literary texts also imposed a strict contrast between the forger, who came to embody a model of respectable artistry, and the Jewish dealer, who emerged as a scapegoat for the trade in fakes. These restrictions confirm the role forgery can play as an effective tool in constructing identities and imposing social hierarchies.'10 The versatile language of fakes was particularly useful in literary narra-

12 The Deceivers

tives, whose authors were constantly searching for new vocabularies of selfhood. Nineteenth-century fictions drew heavily from the object world in telling stories about humans, and fakes were crucial to these constructions. They occupy a central place in texts that explore the close connection between persons and things. Fakes appear both at the level of metaphor and as concrete elements of the plot; they are present in figurative portrayals of a character's spurious personality, as well as in concrete descriptions of the suspicious art objects cluttering fictional homes and museums. Forgery lends itself particularly well to narrative. The literary genre of the anecdote pervades discussions of the fake in art manuals from the nineteenth century to the present. 41 This compact genre provides miniature accounts of deception that act as warnings to prospective collectors: both of Eudel's groundbreaking manuals on forgery consist of extensive catalogs of anecdotes that describe multiple forms of deception. Anecdotes also convey fascinated-and often celebratory-accounts of particular forgers, as we will see in biographies of the Italian faker Giovanni Bastianini. Literary narratives expand the short plots of anecdotes into fictional accounts of the simultaneous danger and empowerment afforded by fakes, as well as of their central role in identifying types of persons. The narratives I examine in this book are written from positions of cultural dominance. I focus almost exclusively on literary and artistic texts from England, France, and the United States, nations whose wealth and desire to establish a cultural heritage made them particularly seductive targets for the forger. Generally, I do not examine reactions to these powerful discourses by countries, such as Italy and Greece, that were mined for artistic treasures and whose artists sometimes produced fakes to deceive tourists or foreign archaeologists and collectors. In addition, while I do discuss the work of certain female art critics, I mostly consider literary texts written by men. 42 My focus on dominant national and gender identities allows me to pay close attention to the authority enabled by discourses of the fake, an authority that these discourses claimed as the right of privileged individuals and societies. Instead of considering the counterdiscourses challenging these perspectives, I study the internal contradictions that emerge within the languages of power themselves and that reveal their flaws and discrepancies. Forgeries generate a simultaneously commanding and fallible form of discourse that ends up both perpetuating and undermining authorities. Each of this book's five chapters isolates a particular aspect of the in-

The Golden Age of Forgery 13

tersection between narrative, forgery, and identity in the nineteenth century. The first two chapters focus on models of selfhood constructed through the language of fakes. Chapter 1, "Imperfect Doubles," concentrates on the figures of the male forger and the female copyist to trace the culture's investment in differentiating between those subjects who are capable of committing material forms of deception and those who are unable to negotiate categories of authenticity. I demonstrate that contemporary art criticism, visual artworks, and literary texts such as Henry James's The American (1877) elevated the forger into an unexpected model of middle-class identity while treating the female copyist as a pale imitation of the male figure; she could never commit artistic crimes. This strict division ensured that forgery remained an exclusively male activity. "Intimate Detections;' the second chapter, explores the gendered relationship between the forger, the art connoisseur, and the forged object. Contemporary texts constructed the forger who produced fakes and the expert who detected them as sharing a number of important similarities. They suggested that these male figures formed a homosocial alliance that was always on the verge of shifting into homoeroticism. Both literary and artistic discourses represented the fake object as female in order to mitigate the transgressive implications of the union between forgers and detectors. I examine aspects of this dynamic in writings by Freud, the nineteenth-century Italian connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, and the American art expert Bernard Berenson. I end the chapter with a reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." (1889/1893), a narrative that exposes both the desirability and the fragility of a male network formed around a forgery. The next two chapters take a broader perspective on the discourse of forgery by analyzing its construction of national identities. Chapter 3, "Restorations," examines this far-reaching influence by focusing on the role of artistic restoration in validating or undermining the cultural authority of nations. At its most extreme, restoration is equivalent to forgery, as it entails making spurious additions to original artworks. This dubious practice elicited discussions about the importance of object care in establishing national reputations. The first part of the chapter explores the precariousness of restoration by analyzing the debates following England's decision not to restore the so-called Elgin Marbles in the beginning of the century, the public outrage surrounding the National Gallery restorations in the 1840s and 1850s, and the scandal arising from the Metropolitan Museum's questionable repairs on its Cypriote collection in the 1870s and 188os. The second part discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun 14 The Deceivers

(1860) as a literary exploration of the ability of restoration to establish na-

tional prestige, particularly in the United States. Hawthorne tests whether America can lay claim to European cultural authority by taking care of its objects. The fourth chapter adopts a different perspective on national identity by focusing on the problem of racial intrusion into the trade of fakery. "Real Sons of Abraham" suggests that the Jewish dealer became a locus of anxiety about the commodification of the art world. Contemporary authors displaced the negative aspects of faking onto this figure, while recognizing the risks of giving him access to the fake. They imagined him using this powerful object to collapse social hierarchies and gain access to the consumer culture of art. George Du Maurier's best-selling 1894 novel, Trilby, offers a conflicted account of Jewish power in the art world. While it depicts an artistic community in which the Jewish dealer seems to have been excised or at least tamed, it also warns about his ability to regenerate into a far more dangerous form and seize control of the commodity culture of art. The novel heightens the reader's fears about the Jew's power over the fake by gendering the object in question as female, thus emphasizing the dealer's dual threat to commodity culture and to femininity. The final chapter of the book, "Paste and Pearls," discusses one particular area in which women, despite their exclusion from the culture of forgery, could take charge of the fake: in their bodily ornamentation. Paste jewelry provided an opportunity for women to assume the forger's deceptions. Fashion manuals explored the revolutionary potential of fake gems and their ability to grant women a power equivalent to the forger's. Literary texts from the second half of the nineteenth century sought to staunch these potential deceptions by using a vocabulary of real and fake gems to contain women within hermetic categories. Stories such as Guy de Maupassant's "Les Bijoux" (1883) and "La Parure" (1884), and Henry James's "Paste" (1899), form a body ofliterature that attempts to restrict female authority over forgery. The obstacles that these texts encounter along the way at once thwart their authors' attempts to define female identity through categories of authenticity and expose their own investment in faking. The chapter ends with a forward glance to George Cukor's film Gaslight (1944), a twentieth-century narrative that revisits earlier jewelry stories to broadcast their inadequacies in taming female identities. The golden age of fakes finds a second life on the silver screen.

The Golden Age of Forgery 15

Material Deceptions Forgeries expose the power of material objects to shape persons and cultures. But what kind of"material" are we dealing with here? I will be using the words fake and forgery to refer to concrete objects that fool their viewers either in terms of their authorship, the period in which they were produced, or, as in the case of fake gems, their physical composition. 43 More abstractly, I will be discussing fakes as objects that challenge the division between persons and things. From female fakes to restored objects that appear anthropomorphic to jewels that absorb the characteristics of their owners, forgeries rise above their status as inanimate objects. Their tendency to blur categories that we take for granted reflects the complex relations that we share with things. My purpose in this book is to examine the particular ways in which fakes claim bonds to the human. These bonds are quite different from those established by other categories of objects that we often humanize, such as fetishes and artifacts. From one perspective, the forgery does seem to have much in common with the fetish, an anthropomorphic object that stands in for an absent original. Freud's definition of the sexual fetish draws directly from a rhetoric of authenticity: he writes that the fetish "is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost." 44 The lace, fur, or leather that substitutes for the one and only penis has its corollary in the fake artwork that has taken over the lauded position of a revered original, a real Corot or Rembrandt. And yet, a crucial distinction between the fake and the fetish is the resistant materiality of the first, its refusal to allow the object to dissolve in its invocation of the human. The fake generates unsettling images of persons actually fusing with things, of humans who have turned into material objects themselves or who have become inextricably tied to a painting or statue. The fake never allows us to forget that it is both an object and a person. Fakes are also different from "truthful" historical artifacts that, ideally, provide concrete insights into a period and its literature. In his influential study Victorian Things, Asa Briggs refers to everyday Victorian objects as "emissaries" or "witnesses" that offer particular perspectives on the past. 45 According to this model, fakes would constitute "lying" emissaries. They violate the promise of straightforward objects to convey, in the words of one critic, "the beliefs of the individuals who commissioned, fabricated, purchased, or used them and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger society 16 The Deceivers

to which these individuals belonged." 46 Forgeries are devoid of the comforting, concrete proof that often comes from material traces of the past. They lack the ability of objects such as telegraph machines, telephones, and matches to tell clear stories (assuming that these stories can ever be told) about their invention, production, and use. A forgery of the Mona Lisa created in 1890, for instance, may communicate as little about the Renaissance as it does about the Victorian fin de siecle. However, fakes do tell us indirect narratives about their own-and, in some cases, about other-cultures. One of the main factors that betrays a forgery is its link to its own time period: in the words of one critic, "The forger's most powerful foe is time." 47 An image of Adam and Eve that is supposedly from the Renaissance reflects its Victorian provenance through the inclusion of fig leaves modestly covering the couple. The male and female figures on an "Etruscan" sarcophagus display clothing and bodily positions that resemble "Amorous Trippers on Brighton Beach." Sometimes, the betraying feature is a facial trait that is inextricably linked to a particular period, such as the typically Victorian faces-complete with mouths in the shape of cupid bows-found on one nineteenth-century forger's "medieval" illumination. The representations of Jesus on the renowned twentieth-century forger Hans Van Meegeren's fakes of Vermeer were similarly treacherous to their creator; they bore a close resemblance to Greta Garbo, who dominated film screens in the 1930s, the period in which he faked. 48 Such visual clues betray the fake as readily as the presence of artistic materials that did not exist at the time of the alleged production of the artwork. By focusing on the particular identities and narratives that emerge around art forgeries, I hope to encourage a new attention to specific types of objects in literary and cultural studies. Scholars have tended to collapse material things into a single category rather than to examine the particular perspectives that each of these things offers. 49 Fakes are especially useful because they embody the contradictions and complexities of objects. They are artistic palimpsests that present information through competing levels and layers. The fake expands conventional notions of artistic space and surfaces to include depths, areas concealed from the naked eye, and other unimagined dimensions of the object. Forgeries fragment our notion of the unified image by drawing attention to its details and hidden features; they teach us that "artworks have properties that are not perceptible (in a sense restricted to the exercise of the perceptual senses )."' 0 This characteristic of the fake contradicts Roland Barthes's notion of the disappointment that inevitably results from wanting to go beyond the surface The Golden Age of Forgery 17

of an artwork. In S/Z, he explains that "the idealistic principle which identifies secrecy with truth" entices us to go "into the model, beneath the statue, behind the canvas;' an impulse that leads to failure by discovering nothing. 5 1 The back of a painting and the areas beneath the surface level of paint are precisely the preferred sites of forgery detection. Texts on fakes describe countless instances in which old canvases with "worthless" images become the foundation for the forger's masterpieces, or of telling inscriptions existing on the other, supposedly less interesting side of the canvas. The twentieth-century forger Tom Keating played with the idea ofthe aesthetic depth of forgeries by writing revealing words-his name, the declaration "Fake;' "This is a fake;' or an obscenity-in lead paint detectable only by X-ray on the canvases of his forgeries. 5 2 The depth of fakes illustrates the physical and intellectual excavations that we must undertake to explore them. These excavations do not draw out the "truth" per se, but the profundity and complexity of fictions and lies. This is not to suggest that fakes will inevitably betray their true identities. On the contrary, it has become a commonplace in discussions of forgery that the best fakes are those that have yet to be detected and that continue to be taken for the real thing. The most coveted original might very well be the savviest fake. But the simultaneously expository and disfiguring power of fakes offers an important perspective on their centrality in defining nineteenth-century identities. The complexity of forgeries recalls Bill Brown's definition of :'things" as objects that bear a resistant relationship to humans: "The story of objects asserting themselves as things ... is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subjectobject relation." 53 Fakes shape and mirror human identities from a distance, favoring funhouse distortions over transparent visions. They reflect the parts of a culture that it is least willing to give up (the modesty of a fig leaf or the preference for certain facial traits), while relocating these things to unexpected contexts (a cupid-bow mouth on the face of a medieval woman). The story of the fake in the nineteenth century is one of subjects who depend on the objects that betray them, of humans who define themselves through things that lie.

18 The Deceivers

m

Imperfect Doubles The Forger and the Copyist

In the beginning of Louis Edmond Duranty's story"Bric-a-Brac" (1881), the renowned collector Monsieur Gallo is de Ginac is frustrated to

find that he has yet again been duped by a forgery. He discovers that the Rouen plate he has just purchased is a clever fraud. After shattering the deceptive object, he launches into the following diatribe: "Forgery is a thing, I would almost say a being, which is incomprehensible, mysterious, fantastic, and completely ungraspable. What is the true goal of the forger? Where does he nest, where does he work? Most of the time, we have no idea. Does he seek to make money? That hasn't been proven. On the contrary, he almost always spends a lot of time and money in forging a beautiful object and incurs a loss when he sells it. Honest imitation, with regular and abundant production, provides much better benefits. I would venture that the forger harbors some kind of depravation or sickness! ... He has an impulse that I would call a parody of taste in art. Why does he experience a secret and profound joy at duping people, at generating enigmas to which he only has the solution? On my honor, there must be a Mephistophelean spirit in all of this!" 1

Monsieur Gallois's invective against the forger is not purely dismissive. Scattered within his depictions of the figure as a depraved villain or madman are hints of a fascinated admiration. He sees the forger as an enigmatic individual whose actions cannot be explained according to a conventional language of criminality; Gallois's attempts to decipher the figure dissolve into a series of questions and elusive characterizations. The forger's inscrutability is epitomized by his decision to pursue an art form that is not financially advantageous, an act that the materialist Gallais simply cannot comprehend. The end of the narrative otters an explanation for his preoccupation with the forger and his motives: we learn along with him that the culprit is his own son, who produces fakes to tame the frenzied collecting in which his father and his colleagues engage. Gallais's reaction to this momentous discovery is one of admiration rather than anger-he removes his hat in deference to his otlspring. The forger was the unexpectedly admired progeny of the nineteenthcentury culture of art. He emerged as an unlikely model of middle-class selfhood, embodying the bourgeois ideals of industriousness, education, and thrift. More than this, he offered an example for living in a capitalist society without being contaminated by it. Although his artistic productions met a market demand, he escaped the charge of base materialism. Representations of the forger were rigorously gendered; he was always male. It is no coincidence that the forger of Duranty's story emerges out of a patriarchal lineage of fathers and sons. The forger embodied a set of prized masculine values that had to be guarded from female intrusion. Contemporary literary, artistic, and journalistic texts constructed the figure of the female copyist to guard the parameters of faking. They depicted the copyist as the forger's imperfect double; while their work methods were often the same, they were separated by a world of difference. These texts trained their readers to recognize an essential distinction between the figures, which prevented them from fusing. The forger projected an ideal image of masculinity that had to be carefully monitored and protected.

Above the law It is tempting to view the forger as a countercultural opponent to capitalist systems of art. This is how he has been read by recent critics who describe him as a quasi-revolutionary figure having the power to subvert traditional art forms and institutional structures. In The Fake, Sandor 20 The Deceivers

Radn6ti argues that forgery is "the democratic satire and parody of the aristocracy of art;' which challenges an increasingly alienating and mercenary art world through the "implicit criticism of copying." 2 Other critics focus on forgery as a radical production whose dismissal of traditional categories of originality produces a subversive new art form. As Nick Groom writes in The Forger's Shadow, forgery is "a way of making, that is a practised craft as opposed to a capitalist production ... a form of inspiration, and ... the catalyst in intellectual revolutions in history, biography, and authorship." 3 While forgery does have the power to challenge conventional notions of art, it does so only by reinforcing capitalist structures. The forger represents a form of controlled transgression that seems to challenge middle-class ideologies but actually makes them stronger. He embodies the type of productive deception that John Kucich discusses in The Power of Lies:" [Victorian] middle-class culture, too often reduced to an ahistorical flatness and homogeneity, depended precisely on internal instability, incoherence, and stratification, instantiated by a symbolic logic of transgression, to produce and maintain its claims to cultural authority." 4 The forger's simultaneous challenge to and confirmation of bourgeois values reconciles artistic crime within a broader middle-class agenda. The nineteenth-century forger was not considered a serious criminal. He was treated as an incidental transgressor whose forgeries did not reflect a general immorality-he would never murder or steal. In Le Truquage, Eudel assures his readers that the forger may be trusted in any circumstance outside the art world: "In everyday life, he is of a painstaking honesty. One could trust him with one's wallet. He would return it untouched!'5 The law confirmed popular conceptions of the forger's contained deviance. In contrast to the coining of money or the forging of legal documents, which in England was punishable by death until1832, the production of fake artworks could incur only a minor penalty. 6 Similarly, France lacked legislation to punish art forgery until1895. 7 The disparity in laws against art forgery and other forms of faking suggests that artistic transgression was considered a containable offense in the nineteenth century; art forgery would not affect major political or financial institutions. The Art Journal, which consistently described itself as battling forgeries from the front line, complained about this double standard in an 1854 article: Why the forgery of a name to a bill of exchange should render a man amenable to the criminal law, and yet the forgery of an artist's name, accompanied by a dishonest imitation of his style, should only be a Imperfect Doubles 21

matter of enquiry at common law, seems to require some explanation. The injury done to society and to the Fine Arts, and indeed to our national character, by the absence of any statutable punishment for this latter class of forgeries, is far more extensive and irreparable than can be well conceived by any but artists themselves, or by public journalists like ourselves, whose duty it is to guard with vigilance the interests of artists, and of Art itself, against encroachment.:-; The journal counters the prevailing idea that the art forger should be treated differently than other categories of counterfeiters. It argues for the straightforward criminalization of a figure who poses a direct threat to the art world. The Art Journal's complaints against the forger overlook the fact that contemporary representations often construct him as an artist in his own right. The willingness to consider the forger a legitimate artist was not exclusive to the nineteenth century, but dates to a long tradition that treated faking as the first step toward original artistry. The history of art is full of anecdotes of famous artists, including Michelangelo, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto, who partook in acts of forgery. 9 In his Italian Painters (1568), which was widely read in the nineteenth century, Giorgio Vasari recounts that the young Michelangelo forged Old Master drawings, smoking and staining them to give them an authentic appearance. The emerging artist later fashioned a statue of the sleeping Cupid, which Lorenzo di Medici allegedly encouraged him to pass off as an ancient artifact. Vasari argues that the believability of this forgery was a major factor in establishing Michelangelo's rep uta tio n. 10 Nineteenth-century readers were fascinated by these origin stories and continued to link spurious productions with genuine craftsmanship. As J. C. Robinson, director of the South Kensington Museum from 1852 to 1869, wistfully expressed, "If this particular Cupid could now be identified, it would probably be worth more than the most beautiful, genuine, antique work of its kind which Italian soil still enshrouds." 11 Another popular narrative about Michelangelo's emergence through forgery is told by critics such as Eudel. The story goes that after making a bust of the goddess Ceres, breaking off its arm, and burying it, Michelangelo informed a group of archeologists that he had discovered an ancient statue, which, upon examination, they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. As they were admiring their find, Michelangelo produced the broken arm, showed that it fit the amputated body perfectly, and declared himself its true creator. This seductive narrative designates forgery as a crucial first step in the construction of a genuine artistic identity. 12 22 The Deceivers

Nineteenth-century forgers were no less likely than their esteemed predecessors to be deemed true artists. Critics created a hierarchy of talent in discussing forgers, differentiating those whose art could be dismissed as hackwork from others who displayed true creative talent. Robinson, for example, writes that "It is hardly necessary to say that art frauds are of every kind and degree of flagrancy, from the most vulgar barefaced shams, such as are likely to impose only on the merest dabbler in the collecting line, to the infinitely subtle and profoundly calculated efforts, I had almost said of genius:' 13 It is this latter category, the forger-genius, that critics extolled. One of the most notable examples of this figure was Giovanni Bastianini, whom the art critic Max Friedlander dubbed one of the "aristocrats" of forgery. 14 Under the direction of the dealer Giovanni Freppa, Bastianini produced a series of sculptures that appeared to originate from the Renaissance. In 1864, Freppa sold a Bastianini-produced terra cotta bust of the poet Benivieni to a French collector, who in turn sold it to the Louvre at a considerable price. Angered that they had not been given a share of the earnings, both the dealer and the forger tried to expose the artwork as a modern copy. Freppa published a letter in a December 1867 issue of the Chronique des Arts, claiming that the Benivieni bust had been made by the young Bastianini three years earlier and that it was modeled after a tobacco factory worker by the name of Giuseppe Bonaiuti. The directors of the Louvre and other central figures of the Parisian art world reacted to this news with disbelief, even when Bastianini himself confessed to having made the artwork. To prove his authorship, the sculptor accepted a challenge by Count de Nieuwekerke, director of the Imperial Museums in Paris, that he would pay the artist fifteen thousand francs if he could make an identical bust. Bastianini's untimely death at the age of thirty-eight prevented him from proving his craftsmanship. After experts had determined that the bust was, in fact, Bastianini's work, the Louvre removed it from its public position. In the space of a few years, however, Bastianini came to be recognized as an artist in his own right: London's South Kensington Museum purchased his bust of Savonarola as a legitimate work in 1896. 15 Bastianini's contemporaries were unwilling to acknowledge that he might have produced his fakes with an intention to deceive. M. H. Spielmann describes the sculptor as an "arch-forger-half innocent at that, nevertheless." 16 His ambiguous reference to Bastianini's fractional innocence reflects a generalized insistence on absolving him of criminality. Nineteenth-century accounts depict Bastianini's alleged victimization by the dealer Freppa in a language of overpowering sentimentality that invites sympathetic readings. Note the following excerpt from the Magazine ofArt: Imperfect Doubles 23

He was now installed in Freppa's dingy workshop ... bound as a galley-slave to his bench. All facilities for work were indeed given him, and he could now mould his ideas in clay, or chisel them in marble, to the joy of his soul; but not for his own profit or fame were these things to be made. For him the pittance of two francs a day-for Freppa, the antiquarian, was the credit of discovering treasures of ancient art, for Freppa the money of rich collectors. And as a slaveowner so feeds his human machines as to extract from the thew and sinew the utmost amount of labour profitable to himself, always stopping short of developing a power in his victim which might lead to rebellion, so Freppa, with well-calculated prudence, having acquired for himself this living artist brain, began to feed it in order to stimulate its creative power. 17 This is a heartbreaking story of oppressed artistry, a fable of what happens when the love of money takes over true talent. The article uses a bizarre combination of gothic and slave imagery to describe the dealer as a mad scientist who has possessed Bastianini's brain for his own dark purposes. 18 The art critic Alexandre Foresi, who had purchased one of the forger's fakes (a bust of Lucrezia Donati) and was one of his most adamant supporters, stresses the pathos of the Bastianini case in his 1868 study of forgery, Tour de Babel. Foresi's rendition of the events is peppered with apostrophes, hyperboles, and exclamations about the mistreatment of Bastianini: "Poor Bastianini! As I write these lines, it is ten o'clock, which should be the time of your lunch. You don't have any oysters, right? Or steak, chops, Bordeaux wine, Roquefort cheese, peaches from Montreuil. ... Only a piece of bread, green beans seasoned with bad oil and vinegar, and a glass of adulterated wine, that's your lunch. Dear God! This meal is proportionate to the 350 francs that your Benivieni put in your purse." 1LJ Bastianini himself seized this effective sentimental rhetoric to justify his work. In a letter to Foresi, he wrote, "I committed a crime towards art; but it isn't a crime to earn one's bread:' 20 These melodramatic renditions of the forger's oppression were soon met with equally emotional accounts of his untimely death. To emphasize the fact that the artist "died poor and his funeral was humble;' an 1868 Times obituary recounts that only two candles were carried in his funeral cortege, and that the young boys who generally trail such processions to gather leftover wax were disappointed by the scant offerings; they"followed the mournful convoy, whistling and hooting. Whether the police at last interfered I am not informed." 21 The article's mention of a possible police intervention to protect the meager sanctity ofBastianini's 24 The Deceivers

funeral confirms the legitimacy of the artist. The police in the story of the forger seeks not to arrest him but to ensure his commemoration. As Bastianini's legend suggests, nineteenth-century artistic discourses displaced the possibility of the forger's guilt onto the figure of the dealer. He was viewed as the true criminal of the art trade. During this period there were a number of lawsuits brought against dealers by collectors who claimed they had been sold fraudulent works. In the case of Mordaunt v. Palmer (1869), for example, a plaintiff sued a dealer for selling him paintings that the latter had dishonestly labeled with the names of famous artists. The dealer, who lost the case, argued that it was common practice to identify works as belonging to the style of a renowned artist, which did not necessarily imply that they had been made by the artist himself. 22 The dishonesty of dealers assumed exaggerated proportions in the popular imagination, as they became the preferred scapegoats for artistic deception; in addition to fooling the public, they would also take advantage of young artists by forcefully turning them into forgers. Journals were full of stories of young men commissioned by dealers to make "honest" copies (copies that did not pretend to be originals) of old artworks, which the artists would later find hanging in museums or in private collections as the real thing. One typical narrative focuses on a dealer who refuses to purchase the original work of a young artist and commissions him to reproduce a valuable painting instead. Once the artist finishes the copy, the dealer asks him to sign it: "The artist thereupon most indignantly told his employer that he would sooner destroy his copy than lend his hand to what appeared to him no better than a forgery; but the dealer thought that, after all, this would not signify, as he could get it done elsewhere." Years later, the artist finds his copy on the walls of an English country house. As it turns out, a relative of the owners had exchanged a real seventeenth-century portrait for the dealer's copy to pay his debts. The story progressively displaces the responsibility for the fake away from the forger, until he becomes the innocent bystander to his own victimization. 23 This willingness to exonerate the forger and to blame the dealer stemmed from the figures' embodiment of conflicting models for living in a capitalist society. The dealer's dishonesty represented the very characteristic from which the middle class wanted to distance itself: a debased and corrupt materialism. The dealer was thought to reduce artworks to vulgar commodities, and his fraudulent transactions reeked of financially motivated deceit. While nineteenth-century critics acknowledged the importance of money to social advancement, they cautioned against treating material gain as the main objective of industry. In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle faImperfect Doubles 25

mously looks forward to a time in which "Mammon" will cease to rule England, and in which "To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master only the second."24 Likewise, Samuel Smiles devotes a portion of his middle-class manual Self-Help (1859) to warning readers about the negative effects of seeking wealth through dishonest means: "Money, earned by screwing, cheating, and overreaching, may for a time dazzle the eyes of the unthinking; butthe bubbles blown by unscrupulous rogues, when full-blown, usually glitter only to burst." 25 Given his alleged immoral devotion to money, the dealer confirmed the worst suspicions about the fraudulence that could emerge from excessive materialism. 26 The forger, on the other hand, represented a form of labor removed from the acquisitive aspects of capitalism. As Duranty's Gallais inferred, financial remuneration did not seem to be the forger's primary motive. The renowned American art connoisseur Bernard Berenson expanded on the idea of forgers' relative financial disinterest in a 1903letter to the Times: "A few hundred francs will satisfy their [Italian forgers'] happy-go-lucky natures, for the adventurous, dare-devil spirit of the Renaissance is still alive in them. And for all born forgers (the born forger is scarcely less common than the born artist) forging is its own reward." 27 Berenson treats the forger as a figure whose love of art, not money, com pels him to make counterfeit objects. According to such writers, noble forgers like Bastianini are inspired by an aesthetic impulse, which dealers reign in and defile by subsuming it within financial channels. Even when forgers were willing deceivers and did benefit from the fruits of their labor, contemporary representations exonerated them from pecuniary interest. They constructed forgers as models of what it meant to participate in capitalism without being contaminated by vulgar materialism. Representations of the forger often depict him as an unlikely middleclass hero. Even \vhen they revile the destructive aspects of his work, they describe him in terms befitting a bourgeois professional or a respectable artist. An 1867 article from All the Year Round about the forger Edward Simpson, a.k.a. Flint Jack, a.k.a. the Prince of Counterfeiters, has more in common with the exemplary middle-class success stories of Smiles's SelfHelp than with the sensational and often lurid criminal biographies found in the Newgate Calendar. 28 The article begins, in typical Smilesian fashion, with an account of the first part of Flint Jack's life, including preliminary flashes of insight that forecast what he will eventually become. We read of his early interest in fossils, of his determination, and of his beneficial frugality: "He never wasted money on any conveyance, unless when he had a 26 The Deceivers

river or the sea to cross:' The text describes his discovery of how to fake prehistoric artifacts as a "Eureka!" moment in which his diligence finally leads to desired results: "The long wished-for secret was discovered!" 29 He displays a resourcefulness in gathering materials and producing fake flints that recalls Smiles's discussion of an artist named James Sharples. Sharples painstakingly built the materials he needed for his paintings-" He made his own easel and palette, palette-knife, and paint-chest" -and worked assiduously toward the completion of his masterpiece (titled, ironically, The Forge). 30 Jack's diligence extends to his intellectual labor; he educates himself with a rigorous study of antiquities, "visiting museums, and obtaining access to private collections." 31 His self-instruction allows for the cultivation that is an essential part of the forger's identity. According to one critic, the forger is "the most cultured criminal in the world;' as he "must combine all the graces of a polished man of the world with a bespectacled academician's knowledge of the past." 32 By the end of his life, Jack has achieved another middle-class fantasy: fame. We learn that "At Devizes (where he sold both fossils and forged flints to the museum), Jack was deemed so remarkable a being that he was solicited to sit for his first portrait. His cartes accordingly were freely sold as photographs of 'The Old Antiquarian."' 33 Jack succeeds in attaining the ultimate status of a Smilesian hero: he is now an object of emulation. It is perhaps to attain a comparable reverence that in 1903 Elina Mayence lied about having forged the tiara of Saitapharnes. He belonged to a culture in which the forger could become a celebrity. Literary narratives also constructed the forger as a figure of bourgeois exemplarity. Frank Softly, the hero of Wilkie Collins's 1856 novella A Rogue's Life, begins his adventures by introducing himself as a model to his readers, an original after which they may fashion their behavior: "I am an example of some of the workings of the social system of this illustrious country on the individual native, during the early part of the present century; and, if I may say so without unbecoming vanity, I should like to quote myself for the edification of my countrymen:' The production of Old Masters and false currency allows him to attain the social and domestic respectability that ends up making him like everyone else; in the last lines of his fictional autobiography, he states that as a "rich and reputable man," he is "no longer interesting-! am only respectable like yourselves. It is time to say 'Good-bye."' 34 Softly portrays his normalization as the expected result of his creation of fakes. In fact, it is in the studio where he is hired to forge Old Masters that he meets the woman he will marry, after saving her from her tyrannical father, a producer of false coins. On the road to the traImperfect Doubles 27

ditional conclusion of marriage, Softly will inhabit the role of the forger in multiple ways, engaging in the production, aging, and sale of fake artworks, as well as partaking in the spurious restoration of paintings. Although he is punished for his transgressions-he is sent to a penal colony in Australia-this chastisement results from his coining of money, not from his production of fake paintings. By contrasting these two forms of faking, Collins participates in the period's treatment of art forgery as a relatively benign crime. The novel further legitimizes faking by deploying rhetoric commonly found in defenses of the forger. In convincing him to forge, Softly's friend Dick argues that faking can benefit society as a whole: "The sphere of the Old Master is enlarged, the collector is delighted, the picture-dealer is enriched, and the neglected modern artist claps a joyful hand on a well-filled pocket." Softly recalls this rousing speech with the proud declaration, "I burned with a noble ambition to extend the sphere of the Old Masters." 35 These humorous declamations magnify contemporary acknowledgments of the beneficial aspects of forgery. In Collins's novel, the exploitative Jewish dealer Ishmael Pickup is the one responsible for degrading the "noble" profession to the state of a vulgar trade. It would be misleading to suggest that accounts of the art forger were univocal in their praise. Even the most enthusiastic texts interrupt their presentations of the faker as a middle-class icon with forceful-and often forced-rejections of the figure and his work. The article on "Flint Jack," for example, punctuates its Smilesian narrative with emphatic criticisms of its subject. The end of the text reads, "But what a waste of ability! What might not this man have done for science had he only taken the same pains in assisting as he did in leading it astray! ... But, in truth, the absence of all moral feeling, the insensibility to shame, the unconsciousness which he displayed of the existence of such a thing as personal honour, make one suspect that he is scarcely responsible for his actions."-" 6 Given the narrative of exemplarity that precedes it, the passage reads more like amandatory public service announcement than a sincere criticism of the forger. Even this abrupt shift in tone retains an element of protectiveness, as the text blames Jack's crimes on an inherent degeneracy; like an artist with a dishonest dealer, he just cannot help it. Literary narratives join in these forced disavowals. Collins interrupts his account of Softly's initiation into the forger's art with an extensive disquisition on the fortunate decline of the forgery trade since the time in which his book is set. While it seems aimed at faking in general, this passage settles on the art dealer as the main culprit of forgery: "I have been informed that, since the time of which I am 28 The Deceivers

writing, the business of gentlemen of Mr. Pickup's class has rather fallen of£."37 Strikingly, these disavowals were a central part of the laudatory discourses that emerged around the forger. By repudiating him, literary and artistic texts ensured his role as a site of identification. They provided their readers with a cover under which they could model themselves after the forger without having to acknowledge this identification publicly. These disavowals were linked to another form of cover-up deployed in contemporary discussions of faking: the refutation of the forger's responsibility. Writers described the forger's position as one of accidental criminality and generated narratives that emphasized his incognizance in carrying out his work. The faker's unconsciousness allowed him to profit from the financial and social benefits of his craft while detaching him from the negative associations that such a craft might raise. This pattern of passivity and profit allowed middle-class readers to fantasize about using questionable means to reap the benefits of capitalism without being held accountable for their actions. Henry Carl Schiller's story "Who Painted the Great Murillo de la Merced?" (Blackwood's, 1870) is as much about the dramatic events surrounding the creation of a forgery as it is an endorsement of the forger's innocence. The narrator is an established artist who looks back on an incident during his youth in which he was commissioned by a Jewish couple to produce a painting ofJohn the Baptist and Salome. He finds himself implicated in what looks to be a serious crime; one of his models is a decapitated human head. Following the completion of the painting, the artist is paid generously and told never to share his experiences with anyone. Several years later, he has become an established middle-class gentleman with an exemplary wife, a respectable wardrobe, and a son at Rugby. To his complete shock, he rediscovers his Salome painting, which now holds the place of honor as a genuine Murillo in the home of a reputable collector. The artist pursues the couple who had commissioned the artwork, and he is relieved to find that although he had unwittingly collaborated in the creation of a forgery, he was not accessory to a greater crime. The decapitated head had belonged to the victim of a scything accident, not of a murder. Once he has cleared this story about his past, the narrator can end his account as an authentically innocent man. The artist's story is replete with evidence of his blamelessness; he is a passive participant in his own forgery narrative. From the moment he receives the commission, he slips into a state of incognizance that often verges on unconsciousness. The veiled Jewish woman who hires him warns Imperfect Doubles 29

him in a heavy Dutch accent, "Vhen you 'as done dis picture-meint!you forgits eet-you moos know nothing of eet. Eef efer you see eet, you nefare zay you baint eet. Eet is lee-tle secret. Vee makes our pargain mit you for our lee-tle secret." She later follows this caution with a note ordering him, "REMEMBER YOUR WORD-HONOUR. FORGET EVERYTHING-SILENCE." The artist is blindfolded ("A dark cloth was thrown over my head") to conceal the location where he will be producing his fake. The night after he begins working, he falls into a wine- and tobacco-induced sleep that blurs his senses and memory: "I am unable to recollect any succeeding circumstances, till, on the following morning, I started up from heavy sleep, wide awake, with an aching head, a feverish trickling through all my veins, and a feeling of remorse oppressing me as for some vague crime I had committed:' The possibility of crime appears as a dream residue rather than a waking event. Although the artist does eventually recall his curious circumstance and is later made aware of what he has done, the narrative continues to dismiss his criminality as pure fantasy. His discovery that no one had been harmed during the making of the painting extends metonymically to his forgery, which also loses any trace of illegality. Rather than an incriminating piece of evidence, it becomes a sign of the artist's talent and a justification of his middle-class success. By the end of the story, the narrator frees himself from any remaining culpability by proudly declaring himself the creator of the painting: "I here assert my claim to be the painter 'oF THE GREAT MURILLO DE LA MERCED."' 3 8

Pierre Grassou, the title character of Honore de Balzac's 1840 short story, displays a similar pattern of unconscious success, or successful unconsciousness. A poor artist who has trouble selling and exhibiting original work, he is commissioned by the Jewish dealer Elias Magus to paint scenes that are in high demand: "interiors ... an anatomy lesson, a landscape." Grassou works "like a galley-slave" for the dealer, whose "diabolical expression" he is too na"ive to notice. When he finds that his own paintings, prominently displayed in the dealer's window, have mysteriously aged, he imagines that he is the victim of a "strange hallucination" rather than an accessory to a forgery scheme. Magus has, of course, modified Grassou's canvases to make them look like the real thing. The young artist's innocent guilt will soon be crucial to bringing him middle-class success. Grassou finally figures out what has happened when he sees his forgeries on the walls of a wealthy collector, whose daughter is of particular interest to the artist. When he confesses his involuntary forgeries to the young woman's father, the wealthy man is thrilled by Grassou's mimetic talent: "If you can prove that ... I shall double my daughter's dowry. For, in that case, you are 30 The Deceivers

Rubens, Rembrandt, Terburg and Titian!" Once he has claimed authorship of his forgeries, Grassou spends the rest of his life in a comfortable bourgeois enclave. 39 These narratives of disavowal metaphorize an essential aspect of the forger's identity: his anonymity. As Susan Stewart writes, in contrast to the plagiarist, who puts himself on a pedestal by claiming someone else's work as his own, the forger "makes a claim for the authenticity of a document rather than for the authenticity of himself or herself as a site of production."40 The art forger must repress his own identity so that his paintings can be taken for genuine Da Vincis or Michelangelos. It is only when his work has been deemed fake that he can emerge from behind the canvas and don the laurels of his art. Narratives such as "Who Painted the Great Murillo de la Merced?" and "Pierre Grassou" translate this necessary aspect of the forger's selt11ood into intricate accounts of his blamelessness. In these texts, not only does the forger disappear from the rest of the world, he disappears from himself as well. He only returns to consciousness or self-awareness when he has been absolved of the imputation of crime and can be rewarded for his efforts. Significantly, the narrator of Schiller's piece temporarily awakens in the middle of the story when he begins to reap the benefits of his work. After receiving money for his painting, he announces, "I was never in my life more happily wide awake than while counting over those two hundred and ten beautiful, ponderous sovereigns." 41 He does not display another intense arousal until, absolved of any criminal responsibility, he can proudly assert himself as the painter of the Murillo. These two instances of awareness link the accrual of well-earned money to the production of a legitimate picture. The convenient division of incognizance and self-awareness makes the forger particularly appealing to his middle-class readers. He represents an idealized identity in which reputations, fortunes, and social status may be earned by dubious means without being tarnished by them. The forger achieves fame by experiencing a crucial period of invisibility. Schiller's narrator, Flint Jack, and Grassou all build their reputations by first going through a phase in which their identities are effaced. Their narratives collapse the attainment of fame with its antithesis: the absolute erasure of identity. Like Michelangelo, who needs to hide himself behind the Greek sculptor Praxiteles before he can assert himself as an original creator, these artists must immerse themselves in anonymity before they can emerge as the real thing. This trajectory guarantees a model of selthood in which the pursuit of fame or material reward can never be the overt motive of artistry and diligence. Celebrity can only be attained once it has been repressed. Imperfect Doubles 31

When the means have been attributed to a nebulous identity, the end reward can be gleaned without the burden of guilt.

Why Have There Been No (Great) Women Forgers? Whenever I see Emily Mary Osborn's 1857 painting Nameless and Friendless (Figure 1), I fantasize that the woman whose artwork is about to be turned down by an art dealer will go home and produce a forgery. Given the difficulty that nineteenth -century women had in selling their artworks, faking would seem to represent a viable outlet for their financial needs or their artistic impulses. And yet, contemporary texts refused to acknowledge that women might fake. The model of middle-class identity that the forger represented was exclusively male. During my time researching this project, I have not come across any substantial references to nineteenthcentury female forgers. 42 This is not to say, of course, that there were no female forgers, but that they were denied a representational presence. While we might attribute this omission to a reluctance to portray female artists in general, contemporary texts did at least recognize the existence of this demographic, if only in limited ways. In drawing from the title of Linda Nochlin's famous essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971), I have thus had to qualify her qualifier; nineteenth-century critics were unwilling to recognize either great or mediocre female forgers. These critics went to great lengths to preserve the image of the forger as a projection of middle-class masculinity. The bourgeois attributes that the forger embodied were themselves deeply gendered. In his introduction to SeiFHelp, Peter Sinnema writes that the middle-class characteristics prized by Smiles were intended specifically for a male audience: "The very terms that enable men to court social promotion-'energetic action', 'individual valour and heroism', 'proper performance of the duties and business of life', to select just a few examples-are themselves exclusive, comprising a muscular parlance that baffles women's participation in the kind of self-advocacy publicized by Smiles." 43 Forgery narratives reproduced these exclusions both in their privileging of characteristics that the period refused to link to women as well as in their gendered representations of the forger and his entourage. As evidenced in texts such as A Rogue's Life and "Pierre Grassou;' woman is the reward that comes with faking, the human marker of the forger's entrance into a middle-class existence. She displays a profound ignorance of 32 The Deceivers

Figure 1. Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless. 1857. Oil on canvas. Private collection/ Bridgeman Art Library.

faking that prevents her from claiming an active role in the profession. This ignorance is markedly different from the forger's unconsciousness, which facilitates his productive transgressions. While his incognizance is an essential part of his identity, hers is pure oblivion. Mark Twain's vignette "The Capitoline Venus" (1869) illustrates the fo rgery narrative's active exclusion of women. The text presents a typical account of a young man who gains middle-class success (wife included) through the production of a fake. Here is the story: A sculptor is warned by his prospective father-in-law that unless he can raise fifty thousand dollars, he will be prevented from marrying the man's daughter. On the brink of despair, the sculptor consults his friend John Smith, who announces that he has found a way to help him. Without explaining his plan, John smashes the nose, hands, and legs of the sculptor's masterpiece, an allegory of America, and takes the statue away. Six months later, the artist unexpectedly comes into possession of an extravagant sum of money because an ancient statue of Venus was discovered buried in a plot of land that John had purchased for him. The story gives us the simple task of putting its pieces together: John had transformed the statue of America into a longImperfect Doubles 33

lost Roman goddess. 44 When he first attains success and wins his future wife, the artist displays the productive cluelessness of the forger: "Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved-but I'll swear I don't know why nor how!" Several years later, however, when the married couple visits the Roman Capitol and sees the now-famous statue, he comes into full cognizance of the events and embraces his role as its creator: "Dearest Mary, this is the most celebrated statue in the world. This is the renowned 'Capitoline Venus' you've heard so much about .... The day before I last stood here, ten happy years ago, I wasn't a rich man-bless your soul, I hadn't a cent. And yet I had a good deal to do with making Rome mistress of this grandest work of ancient art the world contains." The artist proudly claims both his craftsmanship and his financial reward. Mary, on the other hand, maintains a stable level of ignorance throughout. The end of the story confirms that she has never been apprised of her husband's role in his success; she admires the statue like any other tourist who takes it for the real thing. Twain links her cluelessness to her gender by bringing in her maternal function at the end of the story. After her husband praises both himself and his friend for his success ("Ingenious Smith!-gifted Smith!-noble Smith!"), he tells Mary, "Hark! Do you know what that wheeze means? Mary, that cub has got the whooping-cough. Will you never learn to take care of the children!" His reproach closes the story by drawing Mary back into the biological imperative of motherhood (a role in which she apparently does not excel) rather than allowing her to participate in the world of forgery. Twain insists that faking is an affair that is best kept between men. 45 The resistance of nineteenth-century discourses to representing women forgers reflects a widespread anxiety about female deception. In The Power of Lies, Kucich suggests that while literary and cultural discourses figured women as inherently dishonest, they were reluctant to attribute them (as well as other socially or racially disempowered groups) the ability to deploy deception in strategic ways. Knowing how and when to lie-as well as being able to control the consequences of the lie-indicated the "sophistication" and "prestige" of a privileged middle-class group. 46 This privatization of the lie begins to explain the omission of the female forger; forgery is a refined and highly effective form of lying. It is a materialization of the lie, the transformation of a rhetorical act into a concrete, exchangeable, and sellable object. To allow women to participate in forgery would invite the dangerous admission that they were capable of partaking in the masculine activities of artistic production and distribution and of disseminating their material lies to the culture at large. The distinction that 34 The Deceivers

Kathleen De Grave poses between the con man and the con woman in nineteenth-century America in her book Swindler, Spy, Rebel can be applied to the culture of art forgery during the same period. She writes, "Typically, the confidence man has something to sell-a lame horse, swampland, snake oil, or stock in a nonexistent company. The confidence he raises is twofold: confidence in himself and confidence in the product he is selling. The confidence woman, on the other hand, usually has no product but an image of herself." Woman can use her own body to deceive others through masquerade-by using cosmetics, wearing costumes, going through various acts of racial or social passing-but she cannot transfer this deceptiveness onto a material object that can be detached from her and released into the world at large. De Grave attributes the rarity of representations of women deceitfully using commodities as part of a culture that wanted to exclude them from capitalist exchangeY Nineteenth-century writers were likewise concerned that women would use the fake object not only to preempt male-defined categories of art but also to claim the social position that such a preemption would entail. There was one activity associated with women that threatened to come very close to forgery: copying. Forgery and copying often consist of the identical process of replicating an original; as Hillel Schwartz writes, "Forgery is but the extreme of copying." 48 The language of ethics is generally used to differentiate the "honest" copy from the "guilty" forgery. According to Walter Kennick, forgery belongs to the "language of the morality of art. Forgery is something of which a person is guilty, whereas simply copying or painting in the manner of someone is not." 49 An "honest" copy looks like the original without trying to take its place; it acknowledges its status as copy. Copies have traditionally been used in art instruction as well as to disseminate artworks to those who do not have access to the real thing. Forgeries, on the other hand, are often aged, signed, or manipulated in various ways so that they will appear to be long-lost originals. Although copying was not exclusively women's work during this period, it came to be identified as a female activity. The repetitive, uncreative labor that it often entailed concurred with the widespread belief in women's limited creativity and in their suitability for servile work. In contrast to their male counterparts, whose copying was perceived as one step on the road to developing a distinctive style, female copyists were encouraged to confine themselves to exact replication. 5° John Ruskin advocated copying as an ideal form of artistry for women in a complimentary letter to a graduate of the Royal Female School of Art in London. Stressing the usefulness Imperfect Doubles 35

of her copies of Turner to the artistic community, he writes, "I hope you will persevere in this work. Many women are now supporting themselves by frivolous and useless art; I trust you may have the happiness of obtaining livelihood in a more honourable way by aiding in true educational efforts, and placing within the reach of the general public some means of gaining better knowledge of the noblest art." 51 The female copyist became a popular figure in both visual and literary representations. Visits to the Louvre in contemporary narratives would almost guarantee an encounter with the demoiselles a copier, the young women who crowded the museum's halls with their canvases and easels. While the French government granted three times more commissions to male than female copyists in the period between 1859 and 1868, women received the most attention in contemporary representations of the museum. 52 The female copyist's labor was not only repetitive, but also strictly legal. Her works were rigorously honest and could not slip into the category of forgery. This is a telling restriction, given the heightened awareness during this period of the ease with which copies could be taken for the real thing. Nineteenth-century discourses often used the terms copy and forgery interchangeably in their discussions of artistic crime. There were several ways in which a copy could become a fake: through the sale of an "honest" copy by a dishonest dealer, through a misreading of the copy as an original by a collector, or through the artist's own deception in presenting his work. 5 3 As the Art Journal warns in an 1854 article, "It needs no ghost to show that pictures have always been copied more extensively for deceit than for artistic improvement." 54 In a similar vein, an 1879 article on copyists in All the Year Round begins with a question asked in many discussions on the subject: What happens to the number of copies produced in the National Gallery and other museums? The article offers one possibility when it tells the story of a male copyist who made a perfect replica of a painting, replaced the original with his copy, and walked out of the museum with the real thing. He had managed to "disconnect the old master from the wooden stretcher to which it was nailed, and attach it to a brand-new canvas which he had brought for the purpose." 55 Strict rules were instated in various museums to hinder forgery: reproductions had to differ in size from originals, all copies had to be registered with the museum, they needed to be stamped with an identifying mark, and they could not include the original artist's signature. 5 6 One critic describes the uncomfortable experience of trying to draw or paint in the Louvre given the culture of surveillance that existed there. He complains that the "pictorial police," or gnrdiens, aggressively prevented any form of artistic transgression: "A 36 The Deceivers

despicable habit of cloth slippers enables them [guards] to approach with a stealth and speed which it is impossible to evade, and the most furtive sketch is invariably detected and interrupted before more than a fragmentary outline has been jotted down." 5 7 Despite these strict regulations, the copy was always at risk of assuming a second life as a fake. The female copyist came close to mirroring the activities of the forger but never crossed the line into artistic deception. Contemporary representations constructed the copyist with the forger in mind. She was his imperfect double, a poor copy of the significance he had assumed in the culture at large. By representing the female copyist's essential differences from the forger, nineteenth-century discourses imposed a strict barrier between the figures. They gave the copyist embodiment and visibility that prevented her from slipping into the forger's powerful anonymity. By focusing on her striking physical appearance, they encouraged their readers to keep an eye on her so that she could never achieve the invisibility of her counterpart. The constant watching of the female copyist provided an ideologically motivated authority parallel to the surveillance imposed on the copyist by museum or government administrations. Inasmuch as nineteenth-century readers were taught to differentiate genuine from fake objects, they were also asked to distinguish the forger from his inauthentic imitation, the copyist.

Keep an Eye on That Girl The female copyist is always watched. Whenever she sets foot in a museum, eyes divert from Old Master paintings and other objets d'art to scrutinize her every move. The literature of the period is full of characters who find themselves drawn to the figure despite the many other diversions offered by the museum. The rowdy working-class party who invades the Louvre in Emile Zola's L'Assommoir (1877) is transfixed by the demoiselles a copier: "What interested them most were the copyists, who had set up their easels in front of everyone and were painting away without embarrassment. They were particularly struck by one old lady, at the top of a high ladder, using a large brush across the delicate sky of a vast canvas." 5 8 In the first pages of Henry James's The American, published the same year as Zola's novel, a more subdued but only slightly more cultured Christopher Newman becomes engrossed by the copyists working in the Salon Carre of the Louvre: "He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at Imperfect Doubles 37

Figure 2 . George Du Maurier, "Among the Old Masters," from Trilby, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 88 (Jan. 1894): 173.

all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces."5 9 Early on in our intraduction to Little Billee, the artist protagonist of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894), we discover him to be a voracious viewer of female copyists. Despite the artistic treasures that surround him in the Louvre, "He looked at the people who looked at the pictures, instead of at the pictures themselves; especially at the people who copied them, the sometimes charming young lady painters."60 The accompanying illustration compels the reader to partake in Little Billee's admiration; the copyist looms in the foreground and produces a symmetry between our gaze and the young artist's (Figure 2). Likewise, Winslow Homer's engraving Art-Students and Copyists in the Louvre Gallery, Paris (1868) trains its viewers to identify the demoiselles a copier as the most rewarding spectacle in the museum (Figure 3). The extreme visibility of the female copyist bars her from the forger's invisibility. As I discussed above, the forger's success as both perpetrator of the fraud and middle-class icon depends on his anonymity. By disappearing behind his productions, he guarantees that they will be taken for the

Figure 3· Winslow Homer, Art-Students and Copyists in the Louvre Gallery, Paris. 1868. Wood engraving on paper. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, Museum and College Purchase, Hamlin, Quinby, and Special Funds. Imperfect Doubles 39

real thing and absolves himself of the responsibility for his subsequent achievement. The female copyist's conspicuousness, on the other hand, places her at the center of a relentless spotlight that prevents her from committing artistic crimes. Literary texts obsessively record her appearance as if to reassure readers that she will never slip out of their purview. Nathaniel Hawthorne's American copyist Hilda in The Marble Faun (186o) becomes the center of attention in Rome's magnificent art galleries: All the Anglo-Saxon denizens of Rome, by this time, knew Hilda by sight. Unconsciously, the poor child became one of the spectacles of the Eternal City, and was often pointed out to strangers, sitting at her easel among the wild-bearded young men, the white-haired old ones, and the shabbily dressed, painfully plain women, who make up the throng of copyists. The old Custodes knew her well, and watched over her as their own child. Sometimes, a young artist, instead of going on with a copy of the picture before which he had placed his easel, would enrich his canvas with an original portrait of Hilda at her work. Hilda outshines the original masterpieces that abound in the Italian capital. The passage is striking for its focus on the number of people whose gaze she attracts, including the male copyists who cease to reproduce masterpieces in order to represent her instead. Hilda's status as an absorbing artwork is confirmed by Hawthorne's subsequent description of her as endowed with a "gentle picturesqueness," which makes her appear "like an inhabitant of picture-land." 61 Depictions of the copyist go to extremes to deny her the facelessness of the forger. They present her as either strikingly attractive, remarkably ugly, or aggressively nondescript: in the above passage from The Marble Faun, Hawthorne refers to female copyists as "painfully plain." Caricatures were the preferred medium for representing the figure, as they magnified her already noticeable features. When the young painter Anatole in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's novel Manette Salorrzon (1867) enters the Louvre, he is met with the pathetic spectacle of starving-yet ever-persistent-copyists. He notices "women with orange complexions, wearing sleevless dresses, with grey bibs on their chests and their glasses on the back of their heads, perched on ladders covered in green serge to modestly conceal their skinny legs, unhappy porcelain painters with tired eyes, grimacing in their attempts to copy Titian's Entombment of Christ with a magnifying glass." 62 The absurd appearance of these decrepit women on pedestals (a common structure in accounts that seek to showcase the copyist's visibil40 The Deceivers

ity) overshadows the grandeur of the canvases they try to copy. Neither the reader nor the museum public can overlook these grotesque eyesores. The female copyist cannot perpetrate the subtle transgressions of her male counterpart, who casually walks out of the museum with the original masterpiece instead of the copy. Female copyists are incapable of performing the "time-traveling" feats of the forger. The successful forger can exist in two periods at once, assuming the identity of a Renaissance artist while his feet are solidly planted in the nineteenth century. Accounts of the female copyist, on the other hand, intently date her by focusing on her age. Hers is a temporally marked body that resists any attempts to deviate from the present. One of the most common representations of the copyist is of an older woman who tries to assume a youthful identity. A comic piece by Louis Leroy from the journal L'Art (1880) features an aging copyist who dresses and comports herself as when she was a "young, pretty, shy, and blonde" girl. As one observer describes her, she is now an "old monster, who wears a childish blonde wig. I am charmed by her comic aspect! Having once been a student of Eugene Deveria, she was loved by all the Romantics of the period. Built like a plank-with the bosom fashions of yesteryear-she has religiously preserved her lack of curves. From all sides there is nothing, nothing, nothing! She copies Greuze's Broken Jug and imagines that she sees herself in the mirror." 63 This description is accompanied by a caricature that delineates the monstrous discrepancy between the fantasy of her youth and the reality of her body (Figure 4). She is a vulgar anachronism, a grotesque hybrid of disparate fashions and selves. Her body is material proof of her inability to rediscover the past through her art. 64 The copyist's artistic productions further distance her from the forger: her work is as incongruous as she is. One of the preferred means of dismissing the copyist is to deride her supposedly limited talent. This denigration assures us that her work will never be taken for the real thing while further drawing our attention to the pervasiveness of her body. In his article from L'Art, Leroy highlights the ineptness of women who "soil canvases under the pretext of making copies." The copyists in his article are dreadful artists. One woman adds an extra toe to her copy of Rubens's Marie de Medicis, another forgets to include the ear of a figure from an Ingres original, while a third makes her copy even darker and more inscrutable than a faded Old Master. 65 Male artists who have been watching them all along t1ock to the copyists to fix their defective drawings. The ludicrous images the women produce highlight their equally grotesque bodies. The following description from an 1890 Art Journal article on the Imperfect Doubles 41

Figure 4. Paul Renouard, Louvre Copyist, in Louis Leroy, "Les Pensionnaires du Louvre," L'Art I (1880): 184. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

Parisian copyist draws our attention to the link between the absurdity of her painting and the absurdity of her person: This special example was a small depressed lady, above whose anxious face towered waveringly a tall funereal hat, much overweighted by a fortuitous decoration of bows. A hampering black mantle 42 The Deceivers

grudgingly permitted her little fat red hands and arms to emerge from among its heavy folds, and its jetted fringe swept the colours on a palette not much bigger than a postage stamp. Though copying a life-sized Murillo on a large canvas, she used a brush that matched the palette in size; but the difficulty of covering the canvas was obviated by a steady dabbing action, which-on the principle of the coral insect-slowly but surely deposited a solid mud-like coating over the canvas. 66 The article figures the copyist's work as a negative production: the more she daubs at her canvas, the less she creates. This artistic erasure contrasts with the description of the woman, which renders her as preposterous as a character from Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. The accompanying drawing conveys the ridiculousness of the figure and the invisibility of her work; we cannot see what she is painting (Figure s). Significantly, the sketch confirms the idea, presented in the verbal description, that a large part of her absurdity comes out of a failure to conceal herself. The garb of anonymity she has donned only makes her more painfully obvious. In light of the period's investment in the forger's invisibility, the copyist's failed concealment conveys her distance from this lauded figure. She appears as a parodic reversal of the forger's ability to hide himself and expose his work. Even when the female copyist is competent and she does manage to replicate the original faithfully, she cannot occupy the esteemed place of the forger. The most admired forgers of the past two centuries are those who create "original" fakes rather than exact copies of already existing works. As the art critic Leonard B. Meyer writes, "The great forgers have not been mere copyists. They have tried ... to become so familiar with the style of the master, his way of thinking, that they can actually paint or compose as he did. Thus, though their vision is not original, their works of art are, in a sense, creations." 67 Indeed, Bastianini's success derived in large part from his ability to craft new Renaissance sculptures that looked as if they had emerged from the past. In the words of one critic, Bastianini belongs to those "few gifted beings who seem to have actually imbibed the artistic qualities of Renaissance art to such an extent as to have attained a new and genuine personality-modern in date but old and faithful to the past in creative conception. In this case, imitation becoming creative, as we have said, it rises to the rank of real art." 68 Male copyists with the aspiration of eventually turning into original artists were also expected to avoid servile imitations. According to Paul Duro, the French Academy encourImperfect Doubles 43

Figure 5· E. OE. Somerville, Louvre Copyist, "Paris Copyists," Art ]ournal6 (1890): 266. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

aged its male students "to develop true originality through a temporary subservience to the model, without ever falling into base imitation." 69 Representations of the female copyist do not allow her to partake of this creative mimicry. If she is as skilled as Hawthorne's Hilda, she becomes a picturesque emblem of a woman's devotion to her Old Masters. The copyist's physical and artistic differences from the forger prevent her from assuming his paradigmatic role as a middle-class icon. She displays neither his productive diligence nor his ability to climb the social ladder through his controlled transgression. When, in James's The American, Newman commissions a series of copies from the demoiselle a copier Noemie Nioche and later asks her if she has been "industrious;' she responds with words that would never cross the forger's lips: "No, I have done nothing:' 70 Her unwillingness to undertake the task forfeits her claim to the dowry Newman had promised her in exchange for the paintings. Unlike Balzac's Pierre Grassou, whose fakes earn him a double reward from his prospective father-in-law, Noemie's (absent) copies do not bring her anything that remotely resembles middle-class status. Far from being a bourgeois icon, the female copyist is a negative example of what may happen to a woman once she deviates from the norms of bourgeois femininity. As the Art Journal ponders regarding aging women who work in the museum, "It would be interesting to ascertain what caused the first Bohemian stirrings to agitate their decorous bosoms, and induced them to leave homes, of whose quiet propriety their appearance is sufficient evidence, for the cold publicity of the big galleries." The article does not speculate further about the social and psychological motives of the copyists' work; it offers their visual appearance as proof enough of their outlandishness. It represents them as residing at the center of an impenetrable circle to which the reader can never belong. Copyists "unite on common ground in contemptuous dislike of the outside world. Dislike is perhaps rather too strong a word for the attitude they assume towards those who look at pictures without copying them. Their most positive antipathies are reserved for their natural foes, the gardiens: they merely despise the public." 71 Isolated from the outside world, copyists exist in a claustrophobic and hermetic space. They are thus also closed off from the crimes of the forger, which generate both sympathy and admiration. When the copyist does open herself to the outside world, she compromises her respectability. She is a consummate flirt who invites attention and flaunts her visibility. James's Noemie engages in elaborate "performances" to attract Newman's attention: "As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her Imperfect Doubles 45

admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins" (7). Noemie's teasing looks reveal that she knows how to perform the role of the copyist, which entails making herself pleasing to men. Stereotypes of the copyist's performativity led many contemporary accounts to refer to her as an actress and to members of her profession as self-conscious performers: the Art Journal asserts that copyists merely "pose as artists before the general public:' 72 The copyist also engages in elaborate masquerades. This idea is underscored by an article describing an aging copyist who tries to conceal her flaws by wearing the heavy makeup of a stage actress: her extravagant adornment "makes her recognizable from one end of the grand gallery to the other." 73 Such comments not only undermine the legitimacy of the copyist's art but also confirm that she has a transgressive identity, based on her pervasive visibility, that further removes her from bourgeois decorum. In a widely cited article from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (186o ), Leon Lagrange suggests that the visual arts allow a woman to express herself artistically without compromising her reputation: "Her body is sacred; no one will lift the veil that conceals her face; no one will shout for her to show herself.... But the most important aspect that differentiates the female artist or engraver from musicians or singers is that she will be able to lead a forgotten and shadowy existence, she will never have to identify herself in public, she will never have to appear in the eyes of the world, while still gleaning from the fine arts sufficient resources to honor her life." 7 ' 1 The female copyist shatters this image of respectable female artistry as she displays the dangerous visibility of the actress. Her suggestive performances reveal that she is more of a showgirl than a painter. Representations of the copyist displace the criminality that is absent from her work onto her body. She harbors a disruptive sexuality, anchored in her physical self, that substitutes for the crime of turning copies into forgeries. When she is not aggressively unattractive or past her prime, the copyist is a loose young woman who tries to lure wealthy men who visit the museum. Rumors of her availability pervade contemporary texts. In an 1844 article from the journal L'Art, Champfleury instructs his readers how to pick up young women at the Louvre: "Copy the painting that is closest to the young lady's; borrow cadmium or cobalt from the beloved object, who can hardly refuse; correct the odious mess of colors that the young artist calls painting (the young artist always receives such advice with plea46 The Deceivers

sure); speak of Old Masters in such a way that it is necessary to continue the conversation on the street once the Louvre closes." 75 The artist Marie Bashkirtseff complained about the negative effect that rumors of the copyist's promiscuity had on her art: "Curse it all, it is this that makes me gnash my teeth to think I am a woman! I'll get myself a bourgeois dress and a wig, and make myself so ugly, that I shall be as free as a man. It is this sort of liberty that I need, and without it I can never hope to do anything of note:' 76 Bashkirtseff failed to realize that disguising herself as an ugly woman would not free her from the stereotype of the copyist's pervasive visibility; she would merely elicit disgusted rather than desiring gazes. The nineteenth-century copyist was trapped within the confines of her ostentatious body. Noemie Nioche typifies the copyist's disruptive physicality. James makes this female character into an amalgamation of contemporary stereotypes about the demoiselle a copier. Noemie is a terrible artist (she admits that she paints "like a cat" [54]), is excessively physical, and only works in the Louvre to attract men. Her decision to become a copyist was based on the visibility offered by the profession; as her father explains, "She likes to see the world, and to be seen. She says, herself, that she can't work in the dark. With her appearance it is very natural" (49). Noemie's appearance is the subject of many discussions between the novel's male characters. The young aristocrat Valentin emphatically describes her as being "very remarkable" (132), an expression that evokes the French remarquer (to notice).77 Her sexualized visibility leads her to disrupt middle-class norms of acceptable behavior. She exploits her aging father, who carries her materials around the museum and takes on the role of her procurer. The mistreated parental figure who is made to abet the copyist in her sexual misdeeds is a common trope in nineteenth-century accounts. One article describes a young woman who drags her mother to the museum so that she will (spuriously) signify her respectability. She treats the older woman like a "mule" who hauls her art supplies while the daughter walks out of the museum with a shady Russian prince. 78 Such representations corroborate the female copyist's distance from a respectable bourgeois identity. The dejected parent, who, like Noemie's father, can "sit and watch her, but ... can do nothing" (127), is the sure sign of a subverted social hierarchy. James discreetly introduces the forger as a counterpoint to Noemie's brand of showy artistry. The faker haunts the narrative as a specter of what the female copyist can never become. Following his initial interaction with Noemie, Newman encounters his old friend Tristram, who, although he has lived in Paris for six years, has never set foot in the Louvre before this Imperfect Doubles 47

moment. After a few exchanges, the men embark on a discussion of artistic authenticity: "It's a pity you were not here a few minutes ago. I have just bought a picture. You might have put the thing through for me." "Bought a picture?" said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round at the walls. "Why, do they sell them?" "I mean a copy." "Oh, I see. These;' said Mr. Tristram, nodding at the Titians and Vandykes, "these, I suppose, are originals?" "I hope so," cried Newman. "I don't want a copy of a copy." ''Ah;' said Mr. Tristram, mysteriously, "you can never tell. They imitate, you know, so deucedly well. It's like the jewellers, with their false stones. Go into the Palais Royal, there; you see 'Imitation' on half the windows. The law obliges them to stick it on, you know; but you can't tell the things apart." (16-17) Tristram describes Paris as a place in which forgery is always on the verge of taking over the real. Without the intervention of the law, consumers would be unable to differentiate imitation stones from authentic ones or forged paintings from genuine Old Masters. Although we might suspect Tristram's warning as a sign of his limited artistic knowledge, it does coincide with contemporary representations of the forger. Tristram echoes the type of general information about the figure to which anyone who read newspapers and magazines would have had access in the nineteenth century. His quasi-reverent observation, "They imitate, you know, so deucedly well," reproduces the cautious praise commonly found in such accounts. Although he has avoided museums, Tristram is aware of the forger's versatility and of his ability to penetrate the most sacred of cultural institutions. Implicit in his comment is that in order to fake successfully, the forger must remain an unobtrusive presence in the museum. His power lies in his invisibility, in the adeptness with which he can hide behind his artistic productions so that they can be taken for the real thing.7 9 Noemie, on the other hand, cannot be separated from her bad copies. When Newman first sees the coquettish demoiselle, he is "guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking)" (7). Once he begins his interactions with Noemie, however, Newman's aesthetic ignorance seems to lie on a solid foundation of good sense. His conflation of the female copyist and 48 The Deceivers

her painting is less of an artistic faux pas than an accurate assessment of how she should be perceived. Although the subject of her copy is far different from herself-it is a Madonna-Noemie soon confirms her proximity to the image by tarnishing the Virgin's cheek with a "rosy blotch" (9 ). This gaudy addition heralds the merging of the copyist with her productions that will extend throughout the narrative. Noemie's transformation of the Virgin into a whore crystallizes the subtext of her transaction with her customer, Newman. His first word to her, "Combien?" (How much?), suggests that she is as much for sale as is her copy. Their ensuing conversation bears the unmistakable form of a negotiation between a prostitute and her client. 80 When she offers him the painting for two thousand francs, Newman protests, "For a copy, isn't that a good deal?'' to which she replies suggestively, "But my copy has remarkable qualities; it is worth nothing less" (8). The rest of the narrative confirms our assumptions about Noemie's status as a prostitute. As Newman later warns his friend Valentin, who is blinded by the copyist's charms (and who can blame him?), "You are too good to go and get your throat cut for a prostitute" (217). Noemie's rapid transformation into an exchangeable object marks her increasing proximity to her copies. When Newman sees her for the last time, she has been acquired by a British lord, who keeps both her and her pathetic father dressed in the latest fashions. The narrator's observation that "the front of her dress was a wonderful work of art" (314) suggests that Noemie has fully transformed into an objet d'art herself. Noemie's transgressive identity sets her apart from the forger's controlled deceptions. She takes on an epidemic criminality that proliferates outside the boundaries of her canvas. Her delinquency exceeds her role as a prostitute; the narrative is intent on inflating her deviance to ever greater proportions. After Valentin describes Noemie as a woman who is "intelligent, determined, ambitious, unscrupulous, capable of looking at a man strangled without changing colour;' Newman responds, "It's a fine list of attractions ... they would serve as a police-detective's description of a favourite criminal" (182). The American had already found out that Noemie was past reform when she did not produce the copies commissioned from her in exchange for her dowry. The copyist cannot be confined to a stable bourgeois existence. As the narrative progresses, she continues to earn the title of criminal. The novel holds her responsible for Valentin's death as he engages in a fatal duel over her. If the forger's criminality is confined to his canvas, Noemie's exists everywhere except in the artwork itself. The narrative moves toward purging itself of the female copyist and Imperfect Doubles 49

neutralizing any danger she may pose. It begins by disposing of her artworks, the objects that (their poor quality aside) might bring her close to the forger. Frustrated with her work, Noemie defaces one of her copies with a red cross and refers to her vandalism as the "sign of the truth" (131). This appraisal endows the object with a confining legitimacy that sets it apart from the forger's spurious productions. The painting is permanently marked by the sign of its inability to fool anyone. Overtaken by his infatuation with the copyist, Valentin exclaims, "I like it better that way than as it was before .... Now it is more interesting. It tells a story" (132). The story is one of failed artistry and of the elimination of any possible threat emerging from the copyist's productions. The ruined painting has its narrative double in the erasure of Noemie from the plot at the end of the novel. As Noemie is inextricably tied to her artistic productions, the eradication of her copy is equivalent to her own erasure. The last time he sees Noemie, Newman thinks of her as an "odious blot upon the face of nature; he wanted to put her out of his sight" (310 ). He gets his wish when her father's prediction that Newman will soon read about her marriage with the British lord in the newspapers proves false. James ends the chapter by reassuring us that the copyist will not be commemorated: "To this day, though the newspapers form his principal reading, his eyes have not been arrested by any paragraph forming a sequel to this announcement" (315). The text imposes its own cross on Nocmie. Unlike the forger, who attains fame after the fact, both the copyist and her artworks vanish into nothingness. Newman surpasses Noemie in learning how to negotiate the copy at the end of the narrative. Although his copy is a written note instead of a visual image, the novel designates a link between the two forms of reproduction by using them to frame the narrative. Noemie's terrible copies from the beginning of the text give way to Newman's useful copy of the note that the late Monsieur de Bellegarde had composed to warn of his wife's intentions to murder him. The American deploys this missive to revenge himself for this woman and her son's successful attempts to bar him from marrying her daughter, Madame de Cintre. While at the start of the narrative James seems to ridicule Newman's nouveau-riche vulgarity by revealing that the American "often admired the copy much more than the original" (5), at the end of the text he confirms that copies can be worthy substitutes for the real thing. 81 When he first sees the note, Madame de Bellegarde's son accuses Newman of having produced a forgery; the next time they meet, however, the son has changed his mind: "'You will be surprised to learn that we think your little document is-a' -and he held back his word a 50 The Deceivers

moment-'is genuine'" (299). This change gives Newman's copy the weight and scope that Noemie's images lack in the narrative: it is a copy that earns the title both of forgery and of original. This dual association makes it a much more potent production than anything Noemie could ever create. While Newman eventually gives up on his plans of revenge and decides to break his ties with Europe altogether, his brief foray into transgressive copying leads him to embody the invisible forger of the narrative. He gives life to the shady figure who haunts the Louvre. James's novel adheres to a tradition intent on contrasting the forger and the copyist as imperfect doubles. The opposition of these figures safeguards forgery as a privileged male role that is immune from female intrusion. In so doing, it displaces categories of authenticity that are usually reserved for inanimate artworks onto their human producers. 82 This opposition creates an indirect relationship between the authenticity of the producer and his or her productions. The female copyist in The American and in other contemporary texts is an inauthentic version of the forger, even though (and, in fact, because) she can only produce legitimate works. The forger, in turn, bears an authentic identity that contrasts with the spuriousness of his art. This indirect relationship reveals the nineteenth-century belief in the potential of forgery to construct legitimate identities. The forging of objects extends to the forging of selves that take on the import of originals. The copyist's work, on the other hand, can only palely emulate the forger's, and will inevitably be cast aside as-to use Newman's expression-the "copy of a copy." The inauthenticity of the female copyist is directly linked to the spuriousness traditionally ascribed to women when they become objects of the male gaze. In her essay "Womanliness as a Masquerade" (1929 ), Joan Riviere notoriously conflates a strategy that a woman may use to deflect suspicion about her power-masquerading as a "real" woman through markedly feminine hairstyles, clothing, or makeup-with the idea that woman is nothing other than this strategy. In what is perhaps the most cited passage of this essay, Riviere writes, "The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the 'masquerade'. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing." 83 As several critics have argued, this passage suggests that there is nothing to woman other than the masquerade. She is all appearance. In Mary Ann Doane's words, masquerade "constitutes an acknowledgment that it is femininity itself which is constructed as mask-as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity." 84 Nineteenth-century depictions of the copyist anticipate Imperfect Doubles 51

this definition by contending that she consists exclusively of her appearance, that there is nothing behind her facade. This fact, compounded with her position as a pale imitation of the forger, mires her in absolute fakeness. Because she is a forgery herself, she is unable to produce a fake; she is the fake. 85 The status of woman as fake-or, as we shall see, of the fake as woman-is central to contemporary discussions of inauthenticity. The forged object is a female thing.

52 The Deceivers

Intimate Detections Connoisseurs, Forgers, and the Thing between Them

In an article for Household Words titled "To Think, or Be Thought For?" (September 13, 1856), Wilkie Collins complains about the elitism of art expertise. He describes a recent controversy over the National Gallery's purchase of an alleged Bellini painting, which ignited disputes between art experts who confirmed its authenticity and others who viewed it as an incontestable fraud. Collins argues that such exclusive debates obstruct laypersons' independent judgments of artworks, a right that they should claim as their own: "If anything I can say here will help, in the smallest degree, towards encouraging intelligent people of any rank to turn a deaf ear to everything that critics, connoisseurs, lecturers, and compilers of guidebooks can say to them, to trust entirely to their own common sense when they are looking at pictures, and to express their opinions boldly, without the slightest reference to any precedents whatever, I shall have exactly achieved the object with which I now apply myself to the writing of this paper." 1 Collins's demand for the democratization of connoisseurship appears in the same year and in the same journal as his serialized novella A Rogue's Life, which offers the forger as a model of middle-class identity. Taken together, these two texts present connoisseurship and faking as viable options for readers of the bourgeois publication: they can adopt ei-

ther the measured judgments of the expert who identifies fakes or the controlled transgressions of the forger. Connoisseurship in the second half of the nineteenth century joined forgery as an appealing model of selfhood for men both inside and outside the art world. The two disciplines shared structural and ideological similarities that challenged the binary oppositions in which we might expect to find them. Contemporary texts represented the new connoisseurship as a space ofhomosocial union and transgression, which fostered illicit relations between men. While these relations ostensibly centered on artistic crime, the rhetoric used to describe experts' misdeeds evoked improper male intimacies. To attenuate the threat of homoerotic desire, art manuals and literary narratives gendered the forgery as an irresistible woman having the power to normalize male relations. I end this chapter with a reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," a narrative that tries to reclaim expertise as a homoerotic discipline.

Profiling the Expert Collins's invective expresses a familiar criticism of the connoisseur: that he is something of a snob. This view extends to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when art expertise shifted from a type of knowledge claimed by artists to one that was the exclusive domain of amateurs and collectors. 2 The French term connoisseur (now connaisseur in French), coined in 1714, evoked the aristocratic privilege of a person who had sufficient means, leisure, and education (including a thorough knowledge of Europe through the Grand Tour) to offer appreciations and attributions.3 While certain art experts, including Jonathan Richardson in his "Art of Criticism" (1719 ), suggested that anyone could partake in judging works once he had learned the proper skills, connoisseurship retained its reputation of exclusivity well into the nineteenth century. 4 George Walter Thornbury depicts the typical expert in an 1859 article for Household Words detailing his visit to Seville's Merced museum. Thornbury brings along a German acquaintance, Herr Schwartzenlicht, who displays an alienating pretension: he would "put on a grand, patronising, and encouraging air, stroke his Judas beard, visibly swell and become larger and higher, with the intense desire of imparting information to a zealous but ignorant picture-seeker." Thornbury decides that the best way to view the gallery is by abandoning his companion. As he defiantly writes, 54 The Deceivers

"I obstinately examine everything he despises, and keep my back carefully turned to him; for, of all bores, a learned bore, and 'an authority; is the most intolerable." 5 Thornbury follows Collins in declaring his independence from the connoisseur. In the words of a contemporary critic, connoisseurship underwent a "complete revolution" in the second half of the nineteenth century. This perceived change was a shift from an "unlearned" expertise to the systematic method of attribution developed by the Italian patriot, physician, and art expert Giovanni Morelli. 6 Beginning with a series of articles published in Germany in 1874-76, Morelli argued that artworks in major European collections had been gravely misattributed, due in large part to uninformed connoisseurs and museum directors. He devised an elaborate method of connoisseurship that depended on paying close attention to the formal properties of artworks rather than relying on external factors such as certificates of authenticity or narratives of provenance. The "Morellian method;' as it came to be called, drew attention to the details of artworks as the most revealing markers of authorship. Whereas the essential aspects of a composition could be readily imitated, the less central elements (fingernails, earlobes, folds of drapery) reflected an individual and thus less iterable style? The forger, copyist, or apprentice could not easily replicate these masterly touches. The prominent American critic Bernard Berenson claimed the Morellian method as the basis of his scholarship. In The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (1902), for example, he argues that while different historical periods value particular shapes and expressions of the mouth ("it is almost as correct to speak of the mouth in fashion in such and such a generation as of the dress in vogue at the same period"), they disregard the ear, which remains a marginal and consistent feature; "What poet of the Renaissance indited a sonnet to his mistress's ear?" 8 The status of the ear as a supposedly insignificant detail makes it an effective indicator of individual aesthetic style. The Morellian method galvanized the sphere of connoisseurship both through its innovative techniques and through what these techniques implied: that art expertise need not be the domain of a select few. Like forgery, connoisseurship transformed into a viable model of identity for men outside the art world. Morelli's most famous work, Italian Painters (1890-91), portrays expertise as a skill that can be transmitted from one man to another. The text centers on a paradigm of male friendship that acknowledges a link between the professional sphere of connoisseurship and everyday relations between men. In the book, Morelli adopts the persona of Ivan Lermolieff, an "ignorant and simple 'son of the Steppe"' who meets Intimate Detections 55

an older art connoisseur outside the Pitti gallery. 9 This gentleman teaches him a new form of attribution by taking him through Florence's most reputed collections. The connoisseur and the young Russian embark on a Socratic dialogue through which Lermolieff-and, by extension, the reader-comes to understand the superiority of the new method compared to other forms of attribution. The interaction between Lermolieff and his instructor emphasizes the openness of connoisseurship, the fact that it can be adopted by any man who learns its methods. As the teacher explains, "Of what use are lectures on the history of art if not to make us think and see for ourselves; to teach us how to distinguish true from false, important from worthless?" He later reiterates, "I feel convinced that, with application and perseverance, a man of ability may attain to a good deal. Every kind of study takes time, and our most precious endowments are not a free gift of the gods, but must be won through toil and sacrifice:' The master's words are confirmed when Lermolieff finds that he, too, can perform attributions in major European galleries, a skill that he imparts to his readers, "young students of art." 10 Contemporary critics described Morelli's work as transforming connoisseurship from an aristocratic to a democratic method of analyzing artworks. Its systematic approach invited those who had studied its techniques to perform their own attributions. Jocelyn Ffoulkes, the English translator of Italian Painters, affirmed, "Signor Morelli, by means of his experimental system, has opened up a royal road to the study of Italian art, whereby even beginners may hope to attain to a certain amount of proficiency in distinguishing one master from another. This road is open to all." 11 This inclusiveness stemmed from the fact that the new method incorporated skills that would already be familiar to a middle-class, professional readership. As Lady Eastlake writes anonymously in an 1891 obituary for Morelli: "What is technically called connoisseurship requires a wide range of intellectual qualifications; something of the astuteness of the lawyer, the diagnosis of the physician, and the research of the antiquary and historian: all combined in an art which most of us are practising every day, more or less consciously, the art of comparison. Connoisseurship is a modern profession, because a modern necessity." 12 Morelli's system went beyond the specialized domain of the art world to mirror routine aspects of middle-class life. The central importance it placed on the detail aligned it with art forms and methods of analysis that had become central to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie: the realist novel, the detective story, and the everyday activity of closely reading bodies for markers of identity. Its focus on scrutinizing persons for hidden signs also brought it close to the 56 The Deceivers

emerging field of psychoanalysis. Freud refers directly to Morelli at the beginning of his 1914 essay"The Moses of Michelangelo": "It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis:' He prefaces his use of the Morellian method by disavowing his knowledge of art through the modest confession: "I may say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman .... I am unable rightly to appreciate many of the methods used and the effects obtained in art." 13 Freud's insistence on his amateur status suggests that we, too, can try our detections at home. The transformation of expertise had widespread ramifications for the detection of forgeries. Although the Morellian system was not intended exclusively for forgery detection-it was also used to attribute artworks of unknown authorship, to differentiate copies that had been mistaken for originals, and to identify works that had been produced by apprentices rather than masters-the art expert came to be viewed as a detective of the fake. As Max Friedlander writes, "In face of the disguise, the affectation and hypocrisy which defile art, the connoisseur becomes a criminologist." 14 If anyone could partake in attribution, then anyone could assume the responsibility of detecting forgeries. The mere act of purchasing a book or magazine and reading about expertise entailed a direct participation in the fight against fakes. M. H. Spielmann turned the participatory encouragement of the new connoisseurship into a savvy marketing strategy to promote his periodical, the Magazine ofArt, in which he published a multipart series on fakes: "It is said that the reason why M. Eudel's book of revelations called 'Le Truquage' is now so rare is because these men [dishonest dealers] instantly bought up every copy on which they could lay hands. Let them try to buy up THE MAGAZINE OF ART!" 15 Spielmann acknowledges that the expansion of forgery and of connoisseurship offers viable roles for the public when he suggests that his readers are either perpetrators of, or guardians against, artistic crime. He issues a consumer challenge that makes his audience active participants in the fight against fakes. The conspiracy view propounded by Spielmann turns everyday consumer activities into viable forms of connoisseurship. The democratization of expertise elicited mixed responses. At one extreme, Morelli's supporters pronounced him the "greatest connoisseur in Europe" and imagined the utopian art world that could emerge from the widespread adoption of his method. They anticipated an era in which the public would "more easily learn to know a painter's special style, and, after a time, could themselves, without the help of art critics, detect if an imposter had been foisted upon us." 16 At the other extreme, Morelli's critics Intimate Detections 57

described his method as precipitating an aesthetic anarchy in which anyone might claim the title of expert and besiege revered artw·orks. The following verse from "Ballad of the New Art Criticism;' published in an 1896 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, summarizes this critique: Morelli's struck such reasoning dead And, measuring nose and ear and hand Plain man no more holds art in dread, The modern critic's in the landY The "plain man" who ceases to be mystified by artworks has the power to wreak havoc within the walls of the museum. In a similar strain, the art critic Charles Whibley presents the dark side of the new connoisseurship in an 1894 article in the Nineteenth Century, when he writes that Morelli's "method is the anthropometry (so to say) of art criticism; he has applied the Bertillon system to pictures, and a child may practise it after his own fashion." 18 Whibley imagines a hostile and ignorant public eager to pounce on valued artworks and declare them worthless. Comparing the Morellian method to Alphonse Bertillon's system of identifying felons through their physical features, he betrays his fear about the widespread criminalization of artworks. Wilhelm Bode, the director of the Berlin Museum and one of Morelli's most outspoken critics, delivered an equally pessimistic view. In a piece published after the expert's death, in which he notoriously refers to him as a "quack doctor;' Bode complains that Morelli has encouraged everyone to "patrol the picture galleries" and challenge the opinion of esteemed directors: "The impression made on many helpless friends and critics of art by the propounding of such an universal mode for discovering the true authorship of pictures can be well imagined." 19 Both Whibley and Bode portray public collections as the victims of pseudo-connoisseurs who are ready to deploy their charts and rulers against national treasures. Critiques that focus on the damage that the new connoisseurship inflicted on art galleries bear a striking resemblance to arguments about the destructive aspects of forgery. Ironically, while one of the central goals of expertise was to identify fakes, it could end up inflicting as much damage on private and national collections as faking itself. Connoisseurship had the power to expose lauded treasures as frauds; until it is detected, a forgery is as prestigious as the real thing. 20 Whibley acknowledges the atlront of expertise to national treasures when he writes that Morelli "has played havoc with the museums of Europe, and enjoyed the solid satisfaction of seeing the results of his own discovery." 21 The democratization of con58 The Deceivers

noisseurship threatens artworks by encouraging the ordinary museum visitor to consider each painting a potential felony. Paul Bourget would narrate the nefarious aspects of the practice in La Dame qui a perdu son peintre (1910), a novella about a community of collectors whose precious possessions are threatened by connoisseurship. One collector enviously tells the narrator, who is unfamiliar with modern methods of attribution, "You can calmly admire artworks that please you without the demon of criticism whispering in your ear, 'Are you really sure that this painting is authentic?'" When the narrator learns more about the "Methode," he imagines "that a shudder of fear shook all the paintings and all the frescos of all of Milan's museums and churches." 22 Bourget describes the period before Morellian expertise as a Golden Age in which artworks, including forgeries, could remain blissfully undetected. The threat that forgery and connoisseurship posed to valued collections was only one of the similarities that critics identified between them. These two disciplines had a number of points in common that threatened to erode the barrier keeping them apart. They both necessitated an in-depth training in art history, a minute attention to details, a sense of discipline, and a knowledge of material culture. These similarities are based on the fact that both the forger and the expert must anticipate the other's moves in order to evade or apprehend him. Their mirroring follows Eve Sedgwick's explication of the "symmetrical" relationships that emerge in paranoid systems: "It sets a thief (and if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; 'it takes one to know one."' 23 Accordingly, Spielmann refers to the forger as a "connoisseur of extraordinary ability and taste," while Berenson explains that "A perfect critical knowledge of art is necessary in order to falsify works of art successfully. The falsifiers are in effect critics who have not resigned themselves to their expository profession, but have gone on as far as feigned creation." 24 Tf both fields shared a set of interchangeable characteristics, there was nothing to prevent men from becoming both forgers and detectors. This was the case with the late nineteenth-century forger Louis Marcy, who ultimately abandoned his practice of making fake medieval and Renaissance artifacts to debunk forgeries in the art market as founder of the French journal Le Connaisseur. 25 Freud's essay "The Moses of Michelangelo" plays with the fluid distinction between forger and connoisseur. Before analyzing Michelangelo's statue through the Morellian method, Freud draws our attention to this expert's personal history of imposture. The analyst describes his surprise at discovering that Morelli had behaved as something of a forger himself Intimate Detections 59

by adopting the anonymity that was central to this figure's identity (or lack thereof). He had published much of his work under a Russian pseudonym and anagram of his name, Ivan Lermolieff, and had listed Johannes Schwarze, a German paraphrase of Giovanni Morelli, as its translator. 26 Freud suggests that an important link between psychoanalysis and connoisseurship is their tendency to excavate "secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations:' 27 Freud's abrupt transition from Morelli's deception to the similarities between forgery detection and psychoanalysis suggests that the concealment of the investigator's identity is another feature shared by both disciplines. Recalling Morelli's disguise, Freud had published "The Moses of Michelangelo" anonymously in his periodical, Imago. In a letter of January 16, 1914, to Ernest Jones, he cryptically explained his motive for not signing the essay: "Why disgrace Moses by putting my name to it? It is a fun [sic] and perhaps no bad one." 28 Morelli also attributed his use of a pseudonym to his desire to play a joke, in this case on the art connoisseurs of Germany and Italy, by taking on the identity of a simple Russian who ends up bettering renowned art critics. 29 For both Freud and Morelli, the truest connoisseur is the one who forges himself. Freud's attention to the details of Michelangelo's Moses alternates between the close readings of the connoisseur and the dubious reconstructions of the forger. Rather than basing his analysis on the original statue, he presents a substitute version of it, or what David Wagenknecht has termed a "false or counterfeit simulacrum," which he uses "as a source in place of the originative genius which otherwise the essay quite shamelessly promotes." 3 ° Freud focuses his discussion on a version of the statue created "from the hand" of an anonymous artist, which outlines the stages of his own hypothesis (Figure 6). 31 He transforms the statue from an immobile object into a virtual automaton, a machine that enacts the stages of biblical rage. As Susan Stewart writes, an automaton is a seemingly selfsufficient object that "repeats and thereby displaces the position of its author." 32 Freud's ostensible purpose of discovering Michelangelo's intention is complicated by a series of maneuvers that ends up effacing the artist's status as creator. The analyst straddles the positions of faker and connoisseur, thus occupying both sides of the law. 33 The dissolution of the boundary between forgers and experts is visible in nineteenth-century representations where each antagonist supports the other's enterprise. In both of his monumental studies of faking, Eudel counteracts his concern that "in warning the dupes" he "will enlighten the rogues" with specific instructions on how to produce fakes. Referring to 60 The Deceivers

Figure 6. Selected illustrations from Sigmund Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo." "Der Moses des Michelangelo," Imago (1914): 29. Courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College: from Hollis #003327363.

forged drawings, for example, he writes, "Do you want the recipe? I won't keep it a secret.... Buy, for a few francs at the Braun shop, a charcoal reproduction of a Puvis de Chavanne print, for instance. Sand down the background to remove the cloudy hue blurring the white of the paper. Retrace those lines that have been slightly erased. Apply a few accents of gouache, to spice up certain parts, and mount the result on good quality Bristol board. The amateurs will lick their fingers:' 34 Eudel steps out of his position as expert to take on the guise of a forger who proudly shares his deceptive methods. His description anticipates the twentieth-century faker Eric Hebborn, who in The Art Forger's Handbook (1997) reveals the secrets of his craft in minute detail. If the expert can help the forger, so can the forger help the expert. Referring to the illicit production of Old Masters in an April1903letter to the Times, Berenson writes, "My Italian friends addicted to this practice [forgery] are constantly bringing me fresh specimens of their skill, hoping to wring from me the confession that this time, at last, I could not, left to myself, have followed their doublings." 35 Bourget's La Dame qui a perdu son peintre features a reformed forger who, in discovering that a painting authenticated by an expert is actually a fake that Intimate Detections 61

he himself had created, does all he can to protect the expert from the humiliation of his poor judgment. He morellizes his own painting to prove to the stubborn connoisseur that it is fake: he draws attention to telling details of the portrait's mouth and eyes, pointing out "major sign[s] of forgery:' 36 Under the new expertise, the forger and the connoisseur are partners in crime.

Certain Restrictions May Apply Connoisseurship shared another important feature with forgery: it was a male discipline. Despite its promise of inclusiveness, art expertise was closed off from equal participation by women. Assuredly, connoisseurship was less draconian than forgery in its gendered exclusions. Nineteenthcentury female art critics, such as Anna Jameson, Lady Eastlake, and Mary Smith Costelloe, participated in public discussions about connoisseurship and its methods. While Jameson offered attributions in her studies of English galleries in the early 1840s, both Eastlake and Costelloe (who married Berenson in 1900) wrote influential articles about Morelli and the new connoisseurship. 37 Still, there were several social and ideological obstacles that impeded women from claiming a central place in the profession. Ann Bermingham argues that in the eighteenth century, when connoisseurship had shifted from an activity performed by artists to one claimed by amateurs, women's training in artistic accomplishments such as painting and music barred them from the abstract thought of the connoisseur. 3 K Nineteenth-century women lacked the economic and social independence required of experts. They were excluded from jobs in museums, were rarely in command of the resources needed to support their work as independent scholars, and were denied the social authority required to challenge male attributions. 39 The world of experts was just out of the reach of women. In Italian Painters, Morelli carefully guards his profession against female intrusion. The harmonious interchange between Lermolieff and his mentor, who eventually come to speak the same language, contrasts with his interactions with the women who appear in the text. He uses two female figures to delimit the boundaries of the new connoisseurship. The first, who appears in a scene at the Doria- Pamfili gallery at the end of the first volume, ventures an attribution of a painting by Raphael with which Lermolieff concurs. His reaction to her correct judgment acknowledges the possibility of woman's involvement in expertise while subtly establishing 62 The Deceivers

its limits. The text suggests that there is an essential difference between the woman's unsystematic methods and Lermolieff's legitimate science. The young lady tells him, "I am delighted ... that you appear to approve, and even to confirm, my opinion, which is of course only the result of my own individual impressions, while you appear to be studying art as a connoisseur. Women, as a rule, I think, only measure works of art from the standpoint of their own feelings." Lermolieff responds, "And for this reason ... the opinion of a cultivated woman often approaches the truth more nearly than that of a pedantic art -critic. ... Women have one immense advantage over us, they come to this study unbiased by prejudice or preconceived theories." Lermolieff suggests that women's attributions are based on female intuition rather than on the methodical approach advocated by his new system. Although, as we will see, connoisseurs often do acknowledge the role of intuition in their work, they never treat it as the main factor in their assessments, but as that special something that sets them apart from armchair experts. Lermolieff also implies that the legacy of the new expertise cannot be dispatched through female channels. The last line of the volume emphasizes the woman's abrupt disappearance-"And with a slight bow she disappeared" -a vanishing act that precludes the possibility of clear transmission. 40 The woman who appears in the second volume confirms that the theory has not been passed down a female chain. Elisa von Blasewitz, whom Lermolieff encounters while visiting the Dresden Gallery, is the antithesis of a modern connoisseur. She aggressively rejects the Morellian method, relying instead on other critics' canonical attributions, and refuses to examine the object itself. Her German nationality, arrogance, and commitment to outdated techniques aligns her with the Berlin Museum director Wilhelm Bode, one of the main targets of Morelli's attack against the old guard. By using a woman to signify his competitor, Morelli links femininity to an anachronistic system that cannot be reconciled with the new methodY Women were not the only ones to be kept on the margins of the new connoisseurship. The discipline was far less democratic than advertised. It developed a nebulous set of qualifications for what kinds of individuals could fully partake in it. These qualifications depended on a system of "distinction;' to use Pierre Bourdieu's term, which required not only education and social standing, but an indefinable je ne sais quai that distinguished the connoisseur from other men. As Bourdieu suggests, education alone is insufficient in the field of expertise: "The competence of the 'connoisseur', an unconscious mastery of the instruments of appropriation Intimate Detections 63

which derives from slow familiarization and is the basis of familiarity with works, is an 'art,' a practical mastery which, like an art of thinking or an art of living, cannot be transmitted solely by precept or prescription." 42 Although Morelli seems to invite all male readers to participate in the new connoisseurship, he acknowledges an inherent difference between those men who properly use his methods and those who only pretend to. His preface to Italian Painters contains a disclaimer that modifies the ensuing narrative of free transmission: "Among those who study art we find that there are some who have eyes to see, and others whom the most powerful of glasses would not benefit in the slightest degree, because there are practically two kinds of sight-physical and mental. The first is that of the public at large, and writers on art have at all times traded on the boundless credulity of this class; the second belongs to a very few intelligent and unprejudiced artists and students of art." 43 Morelli suggests that the true art critic possesses an abstract quality shared by few others, yet he fails to elucidate what this quality might be. In other contexts, he specifies that it is a "gift of divination" and of"nature" that cannot be learned through study alone. 44 These vague references guarantee a versatile set of standards for determining who can enter the field. Their lack of specificity follows the tautological logic that to be a good expert, one already needs to be a good expert. The connoisseur's difference was an essential part of his physical as well as his intellectual identity. Contemporary texts alluded to the somatic reactions the expert would undergo during his attributions. In a series of caricatures for Punch, George Du Maurier parodies experts' claims that they experience art differently from everyday individuals. One of these caricatures depicts the recurring character Prigsby, who informs the owner of a painting, "Oh, no! Pardon me! It is not a Bollicelli. Before a Botticelli I am mute!" (Figure 7). 45 Thomas Hoving, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum from 1967 to 1977, acknowledges this type of reaction in referring to an innate "sixth or seventh sense;' which he describes as a "pull in the gut or a warning cry from a voice deep inside them;' as one of experts' most powerful tools. He writes that Berenson experienced a related symptom: "In one court case, ... Berenson was able to say only that his stomach felt wrong. He had a curious ringing in his ears. He was struck by a momentary depression. Or he felt woozy and off balance." 46 These physical reactions suggest that while several may try their hands at expertise, only a few possess the essential instinct that guarantees correct attributions. Lady Grace in Henry James's novel The Outcry (1911) rightly qualifies Hugh

64 The Deceivers

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