This video was produced by Art Access & Research for the “And There Was Light” exhibition which opened in Gothenburg, Sweden on the 20th of March. It is an insight into Peter Paul Biro’s approach to the use of fingerprint evidence in the process of attributing works to their artists.
The sale of a work by Rembrandt reached a record price for the artist in Christie’s December sales. The work, Portrait of a Man, Half-length, With His Arms Akimbo (1658) sold for £20.2m. The painting, from a private collection, has not been seen in public since 1970. Our involvement with the project came when Dr. Eastaugh was asked by Christies to prepare a scientific study of the painting prior to auction. The value of the study can be seen in the fact that the report was included in it’s entirety in the auction catalogue.
Portrait of a Man, Half-length, With His Arms Akimbo
This sale has garnered a great deal of press attention and a selection of articles on it are linked below:
- The New York Times
- BBC News
- Daily Telegraph
- The Times
We are pleased to announce our newest colleague, technical art historian Dr. Jilleen Nadolny. Dr. Nadolny comes to us from the University of Oslo’s Department of Conservation where she was Associate Professor, specialising in technical art history, scientific analysis of cultural historical materials, conservation history and ethics. She will be working in these areas for AA&R’s clients. A more complete biography can be found here.
We have added a page to our Techniques and Equipment section with pictures of our lab equipment.
A picture of our positioning scanner.
In response to the massive attention the discovery of the potential new Leonardo has prompted Art Access & Research is publishing a press release to highlight the important work performed on this project by our Director of Forensic Studies, Peter Paul Biro.
The discovery of a fingerprint by Paul Biro, Art Access & Research’s Director of Forensic Studies has lead to the first attribution of a work of art to Leonardo da Vinci in over a century. The print, believed to be from the index or middle finger was found on the drawing (a portrait on vellum called La Bella Principessa) and matched to a fingerprint from Leonardo’s St Jerome in the Vatican. The work of Paul Biro is highlighted in an article in today’s London Times.
“Mr Biro has pioneered the use of fingerprint technology to help to resolve art authentication disputes… The fingerprint corresponds to the tip of the index or middle finger, and is “highly comparable” to one on Leonardo’s St Jerome in the Vatican. Importantly, St Jerome is an early work from a time when Leonardo was not known to have employed assistants, making it likely that it is his fingerprint.”
This find, first reported in the Antiques Trade Gazette has now been written about on the BBC News site, in the Guardian, the Telegraph, The Australian and many others.
Dr. Eastaugh was featured in an article on forgeries in the modern Russian art market.
One of the problems is that Russian works do not have the same documentation – proving their history from their first sale onwards – as many Western paintings from the same era, said Dr Nicholas Eastaugh, whose Art Access and Research company uses the latest scientific techniques to examine the materials used in paintings.
“I’ve been doing a lot of work on Russian art over the last two years, and there are a lot of fakes around,” said Dr Eastaugh. “People are trying to buy their national heritage. The key works are from 1910 to the 1920s. There was a lot of chaos. Many works were destroyed afterwards or sent to remote provinces, which means documentation is poor. So looking into the history is problematic.”
If you would like to see more about AA&R services for authenticity, then look here.
AA&R is pleased to announce Dr. Eastaugh is giving a keynote adress at the ICON Painting Group Conference 2009, SEEING FURTHER; An Overview of Advances in Digital imaging and Investigations:
As a fundamental element of technical examination, scientific imaging has helped conservators to better understand objects for many years. This conference will explore a number of traditional and cutting-edge, digital imaging techniques that are currently being used and developed in the field of imaging science and their applications in paintings’ conservation.
AA&R are supporting the conference which is being held at the Wallace Collection in London on Friday 24th April.
Two of Art Access & Research’s founders have been interviewed for an article in the New Scientist.
This is what the New Scientist had to say:
Distinguishing a genuine artwork from a forgery can be worth millions. Art detectives Peter Paul Biró and Nicholas Eastaugh analyse pigments, fingerprints and DNA to tell you who painted your family heirloom, and when. The art world loves to loathe them, but as the pair explain to Laura Spinney, it can’t live without them