Identifying Unknown Artists
A Photo Archive Changed My Life
A photo archive changed my life. In 2012, in the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery, I came across a photograph of a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie which had never been reproduced. The portrait showed Charles wearing the Order of the Garter—it was definitely of him—but no attribution was given. Who was it by? The only additional information was written on the back, giving the portrait’s location—“Gosford House”, home of the Earls of Wemyss near Edinburgh—and the size, 10 x 8 inches.
That single black and white photo began a chain of events which resulted in the portrait being acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as a work by Allan Ramsay, the pre-eminent Scottish portrait artist of the mid-eighteenth century, and the only known oil portrait of Charles painted from life in Scotland. It also led to my moving to Scotland, and meeting my wife, Ishbel, who directed a BBC television programme about the painting’s discovery.
It’s a story which demonstrates the unique value of photo archives. When the photograph of the Gosford portrait was taken, probably in the 1950s or 1960s, the full history and importance of the painting was unknown. Some might have been tempted not to bother recording the existence of such a small and unusual image by an unknown artist. But thanks to the diligence of the archivists at the National Portrait Gallery, it was filed among the hundreds of other portraits of Charles in the hope that someone, one day, would be able to complete the puzzle.
The First Time
I remember seeing the photograph for the first time, with an almost instant flicker of recognition that I was in fact looking at a painting by Ramsay. One of the frustrating things about connoisseurship—the process of having a reasonable idea of who created a painting just by looking at it—is that it’s almost impossible to describe the neurological process of how that visual recognition works. For a discipline which strives (sometimes, in my view, too hard) to be more like a science than a humanity, someone saying, “that’s by Ramsay just because I think it is”, seems maddeningly woolly, and has contributed to many of the negative perceptions around connoisseurship among art historians. (Luckily, my eureka moment of initial recognition was backed up by documentary evidence, technical analysis, and wider scholarly consensus.)
In Defence of Connoisseurship
And yet it is largely thanks to connoisseurship that photo archives first began to be assembled, back in art history’s equivalent of the Old Testament. In the beginning, there first had to be done the sorting and sifting of many thousands of unattributed and wrongly attributed artworks into something resembling cohesive epochs and oeuvres. Despite the heroic efforts of the likes of George Vertue with his notebooks in the eighteenth century and Sir George Scharf with his pencil sketches in the nineteenth century, this was a task which could only meaningfully be done after the advent of photography. Twin this twentieth-century advance with the Solander box, and thus was born the photographic archive so many art historians love.
Fig. 1
Solander box, as used in photographic archives.
Happily, connoisseurship has recovered some of its reputation over the last decade or so. Thanks to the wider availability of high-resolution digital images, recording artworks around the world in detail and numbers as never before, we are in a new golden age for connoisseurship. And now, the digitisation of photo archives such as the PMC’s will allow wider audiences to research the history of an object’s attribution, condition and provenance as never before. As I found, you never quite know where the journey of discovery will end.
