Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Art Detectives”
Sometimes, if I wait long enough, solutions to portrait puzzles reveal themselves even when I’ve forgotten about them. It’s been about ten years since I first saw the portrait of Dinah Ayers Trigg (Mrs. Shubael Allen). I wondered then about the strange little hat she wore. George Caleb Bingham painted her in the spring, 1835. In 1859, he painted her granddaughter, Miss Annie Allen. Those …
George L. Stout, conservator with Harvard’s Fogg Museum of Art in the 1920s, first articulated the three-legged stool approach to art authentication when connoisseurship alone was the standard. Questioning a connoisseur’s opinion, “was as naughty as inquiring about the digestive system of an opera singer…it wasn’t proper. And that was very good for the trade.”((Patricia Failing, “Artists Moral Rights in …
