#museum of fine arts ghent

[royalty-nobility]

Portrait of Empress Josephine

Artist: Joseph Paelinck (Belgian, 1781-1839)

Date: c. 1807-1808

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

Joséphine de Beauharnais

Joséphine Bonaparte (23 June 1763 – 29 May 1814) was the first wife of Emperor Napoleon I and as such Empress of the French from 18 May 1804 until their marriage was annulled on 10 January 1810. As Napoleon's consort, she was also Queen of Italy from 26 May 1805 until the 1810 annulment. She is widely known as Joséphine de Beauharnais

[lionofchaeronea]

Allegory of Night, Léon Frédéric, 1891

[empirearchives]

Allegory of the Birth of the King of Rome, 1811

Ernest Joseph Bailly

Museum of Fine Arts Ghent

[lubentina]

Alfred Stevens (Belgian, 1823–1906)

Maria Magdalena [Sarah Bernhardt], 1887, Museum voor Schone Kunsten

Oil on canvas

[hildegardavon]

Charles Picqué, 1799-1869

Hebe, ca.1826, oil on canvas, 260x197 cm

Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium Inv. 1826-A

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Louis Maeterlinck (Belgian, 1846-1926) Cruel Love, 1889 Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

[mythologypaintings]

The Beautiful Anthia Leading her Companions into the Temple of Diana in Ephesus

Artist: Joseph Paelinck (Netherlandish, 1781-1839)

Date: c. 1820

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Museum of the Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Description

In The Beautiful Anthia Joseph Paelinck depicts an episode in an ancient Greek tale. During a parade in the temple of Artemis in Ephesus the proud warrior Abrocomeus met the beautiful Anthia. Eros, the god of love, was vexed by Abrocomeus’s indifference and contrived to make him fall passionately in love with the young woman. They married, but Eros’s revenge continued to persecute them. They were kidnapped by pirates, sold as slaves, separated from one another but eventually their love and fidelity helped them overcome their trials and tribulations. The story lends itself perfectly to propagating the nineteenth-century bourgeois moral values. The painting depicts the parade with Anthia in the centre and Abrocomeus to the right in his red coat. The theme, the balanced composition and the careful rendition contribute to making this painting an excellent example of the Classic ideal of Paelinck and other followers of Jacques-Louis David.

[canvasmirror]

Charles Picqué (Belgian, 1799-1869) • Self-Portrait • 1833 • Museum of Fine Art, Ghent, Belgium

Charles Picqué was a Belgian painter, lithographer and engraver known for his neo-classical and romantic works. He was distinguished in several fields: portraiture, landscape, still-life, sacred art and history painting. – Wikipedia

As I was looking into this artist I came upon this painting by him and was struck by the resemblance of the sitter to the artist's self-portrait. The tilt of the head, the facial features, as well as the right hand – the artist holding a brush, the woman her long hair.

Woman at her toilet • 1827

[eddy25960]

Louis Maeterlinck (Belgian, 1846-1926)

Cruel Love, 1889

Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

[beautiful-belgium]

Fernand Khnopff - Landscape at Fosset, between circa 1890 and circa 1895, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

[history-of-fashion]

1578 Adriaen Thomasz Key - Portrait of a man

(Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent)

[royalty-nobility]

Emperor Charles and His Mistress Johanna Van der Gheynst at the Cradle of their Daughter Margaret

Artist: Théodore-Joseph Canneel (Belgium 1817-1892)

Date: 1844

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Collection: Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium

Description

In this genre scene, Théodore Jozef Canneel gives us a romanticized picture of the emperor’s private life. In 1522, Johanna van der Gheynst, the daughter of a tapestry-weaver in the region of Oudenaarde, gave birth to a daughter who later became Margaret of Parma. Canneel’s work is sober, with an eye for detail, but unlike Henry Leys, his historic realism is always secondary to the story. In addition to portraits, historical work and genre scenes, Canneel also focused on monumental painting.

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Brussels in the Rain Artist: Gustave Den Duyts (Belgian, 1850-1897) Date: unknown Genre: cityscape Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 26.9 cm (10.5 in) high x 38 cm (14.9 in) wide Location: Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK), Belgium

[justforbooks]

The new tool in the art of spotting forgeries: Artificial Intelligence

Instead of obsessing over materials, the new technique takes a hard look at the picture itself – specifically, the thousands of tiny individual strokes that compose it

In late March, a judge in Wiesbaden, Germany, found herself playing the uncomfortable role of art critic. On trial before her were two men accused of forging paintings by artists including Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, whose angular, abstract compositions can now go for eight-figure prices. The case had been in progress for three and a half years and was seen by many as a test. A successful prosecution could help end an epidemic of forgeries – so-called miracle pictures that appear from nowhere – that have been plaguing the market in avant-garde Russian art.

But as the trial reached its climax, it disintegrated into farce. One witness, arguably the world’s leading Malevich authority, argued that the paintings were unquestionably fakes. Another witness, whose credentials were equally impeccable, swore that they were authentic. In the end, the forgery indictments had to be dropped; the accused were convicted only on minor charges.

The judge was unimpressed. ��Ask 10 different art historians the same question and you get 10 different answers,” she told the New York Times. Adding a touch of bleak comedy to proceedings, it emerged that the warring experts were at the wrong end of a bad divorce.

It isn’t a comforting time for art historians. Weeks earlier, in January, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, was forced to pull 24 works supposedly by many of the same Russian artists – Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodcheko, Filonov – after the Art Newspaper published an exposé arguing they were all forged. Just days before, there was uproar when 21 paintings shown at a Modigliani exhibition in Genoa, Italy, were confiscated and labeled as fakes. Works that had been valued at millions of dollars were abruptly deemed worthless.

The market in old masters is also jittery after an alarming series of scandals – the greatest of which was that paintings handled by the respected collector Giuliano Ruffini were suspect. A Cranach, a Parmigiano, and a Frans Hals were all found to be forged; institutions including the Louvre had been fooled. The auction house Sotheby’s was forced to refund $10m for the Hals alone. Many experts are now reluctant to offer an opinion, in case they’re sued – which, of course, only intensifies the problem.

Adding fuel to the fire is another development: Wary of being caught, more and more forgers are copying works from the early to mid-20th century. It’s much easier to acquire authentic materials, for one thing, and modern paintings have rocketed in value in recent years.

For many in the industry, it is starting to look like a crisis. Little wonder that galleries and auction houses, desperate to protect themselves, have gone CSI. X-ray fluorescence can detect paint and pigment type; infrared reflectography and Raman spectroscopy can peer into a work’s inner layers and detect whether its very component molecules are authentic. Testing the chemistry of a flake of paint less than a millimeter wide can disclose deep secrets about where and, crucially, when it was made.

“It’s an arms race,” says Jennifer Mass, an authentication expert who runs the Delaware-based firm Scientific Analysis of Fine and Decorative Art. “Them against us.”

But what if you didn’t need to go to all that trouble? What if the forger’s handwriting was staring you in the face, if only you could see it? That’s the hope of researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who have pioneered a method that promises to turn art authentication on its head.

Instead of subjecting works to lengthy and hugely expensive materials analysis, hoping a forger has made a tiny slip – a stray fiber, varnish made using ingredients that wouldn’t have been available in 16th-century Venice – the new technique is so powerful that it doesn’t even need access to the original work: A digital photograph will do. Even more striking, this method is aided by artificial intelligence. A technology whose previous contributions to art history have consisted of some bizarre sub–Salvador Dalís might soon be able to make the tweed-wearing art valuers look like amateurs.

At least that’s the theory, says Ahmed Elgammal, PhD, whose team at Rutgers has developed the new process, which was made public late last year. “It is still very much under development; we are working all the time. But we think it will be a hugely valuable addition to the arsenal.”

That theory is certainly intriguing. Instead of obsessing over materials, the new technique takes a hard look at the picture itself: Specifically, the thousands of tiny individual strokes that compose it.

Every single gesture – shape, curvature, the velocity with which a brush- or pencil-stroke is applied – reveals something about the artist who made it. Together, they form a telltale fingerprint. Analyze enough works and build up a database, and the idea is that you can find every artist’s fingerprint. Add in a work you’re unsure about, and you’ll be able to tell in minutes whether it’s really a Matisse or if it was completed in a garage in Los Angeles last week. You wouldn’t even need the whole work; an image of one brushstroke could give the game away.

“Strokes capture unintentional process,” explains Elgammal. “The artist is focused on composition, physical movement, brushes – all those things. But the stroke is the telltale sign.”

The paper Elgammal and his colleagues November 13, 2017 examined 300 authentic drawings by Picasso, Matisse, Egon Schiele, and a number of other artists and broke them down into more than 80,000 strokes. Machine-learning techniques refined the data set for each artist; forgers were then commissioned to produce a batch of fakes. To put the algorithm though its paces, the forgeries were fed into the system. When analyzing individual strokes, it was over 70% accurate; when whole drawings were examined, the success rate increased to over 80% . (The researchers claim 100% accuracy “in most settings.”)

The researchers are so confident that they included images of originals and fakes alongside each other in the published paper, daring so-called experts to make up their own minds. (Reader, I scored dismally.) One of Elgammal’s colleagues, Dutch painting conservator Milko den Leeuw, compares it to the way we recognize family members: They look similar, but we’re just not sure why. “Take identical twins,” he says. “Outsiders can’t separate them, but the parents can. How does that work? It’s the same with a work of art. Why do I recognize that this is a Picasso and that isn’t?”

The idea of fingerprinting artists via their strokes actually dates back to the 1950s and a technique developed by Dutch art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig. Van Dantzig called his approach “pictology”, arguing that because every work of art is a product of the human hand, and every hand is different, it should be possible to identify authorship using these telltale strokes.

The problem, though, was that there was too much data. Even a simple drawing contains hundreds or even thousands of strokes, all of which needed to be examined by the human eye and catalogued. Multiply that by every work, and you see how impractical it was.

“It just wasn’t possible to test it,” says den Leeuw, who first became aware of pictology as a student. “I saw many attempts, but mostly it ended in ideas that would never be.”

But can AI now do what humans failed to, and give an art historian’s trained eye some sort of scientific basis? “Exactly,” says den Leeuw. “Very often it’s a gut feeling. We’re trying to unpick the mystery.”

Though Mass says she’s unlikely to throw out her fluorescence gun just yet, she admits to being impressed. “A lot of people in the field are excited by AI It’s not a magic bullet, but it’ll be another tool. And it’s really valuable when you’re dealing with a sophisticated forger who’s got everything else right – paint, paper, filler, all the materials.”

There are issues. So far, the system has been tested mainly on drawings from a handful of artists and a brief time period. Paintings, which generally contain thousands more strokes, are a tougher challenge; older paintings, which might contain numerous layers of restoration or overpainting, are tougher still. “It’s challenging, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do it,” Elgammal says. “I’m confident.”

What about style, though, particularly where an artist changes over time? Think of Picasso’s wildly varying periods – blue, African, cubist, classical – or how in the 1920s Malevich abandoned the elemental abstraction of his black squares for figurative portraits that could almost have been painted by Cézanne (pressure from Stalin was partly responsible).

Another expert, Charles R Johnson, who teaches computational art history at Cornell, is less persuaded – not so much by the AI as by the assumptions that lie behind it. “A big problem is that strokes are rarely individualized,” he says. “Overlap is difficult to unravel. Plus, one must understand the artist’s style changes over their career in order to make a judgment.”

In addition, Johnson argues, many artist’s brushwork is essentially invisible, making it impossible to unpick; it might be better to focus computer analysis on assessing canvases or paper, which can be more rigorously verified. “I remain quite skeptical,” he says.

Elgammal and den Leeuw concede there’s a way to go. Currently they’re working on impressionist paintings – infinitely more complex than Schiele and Picasso line drawings – and hope to publish the results next year. Even with the drawings, the machine can’t yet be left to learn on its own; often the algorithms require human tweaking to make sure the right features are being examined. Artists whose output isn’t large enough to create a reliable data set are also a challenge.

Asking Elgammal if he’s worried about being sued. He laughs, slightly nervously. “That’s something I think about.”

It’s a reasonable question, particularly pressing given the number of fakes that are circulating: What if your database accidentally becomes contaminated? Many people argue that the art market is hopelessly corrupt – so much so that some economists doubt whether calling it a “market” is even fair. Could the algorithm become skewed and go rogue?

“It’s like any system,” Mass agrees. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Does she think that’s a possibility? How many fakes are out there? “Put it this way,” Mass says, “when I go into auction houses – maybe not the big ones, but smaller, local ones – I think ‘buyer beware.’ It might be between 50 and 70% .”

Rival solutions are coming down the road. Some have proposed using blockchain technology to guarantee provenance – the history of who has owned a work. Others have called for much greater transparency. Everyone agrees that the system is broken; some kind of fix is urgent.

Of course, there are big philosophical questions here. When someone goes to the effort of finding exactly the right 17th-century canvas, dons an antique smock, and paints a near-flawless Franz Hals, it should perhaps make us reconsider what we mean by the words “real” or “fake”, let alone the title of “artist”. Yet the irony is inescapable. It is hard to think of something more human than art, the definition of our self-expression as a species. But when it comes down to it, humans aren’t actually that good at separating forged and authentic in a painting that has all the hallmarks of, say, a Caravaggio but is merely a stunt double. Relying on our eyes, we simply can’t tell one twin from the other. We might even ask: Why do we care?

Forget cars that pilot themselves or Alexa teaching herself to sound less like the robot she is – AI seems to understand the secrets of artistic genius better than we do ourselves.

The irony is that, while machines might not yet might be able to make good art, they are getting eerily good at appreciating it. “Yes, it’s true,” he says thoughtfully. “When it comes to very complex combinations of things, humans are really not so good.” He laughs. “We make too many mistakes.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[dutch-and-flemish-painters]

Jacques-Albert Senave - View of the pont Rouge and the tips of the islands of Saint-Louis and the Cité - 1791

oil on canvas, height: 73 cm (28.7 in); width: 92 cm (36.2 in)

Musée Carnavalet, city of Paris, Musée de la Ville de Paris

Jacques-Albert Senave (1758–1823) was a Flemish painter mainly active in Paris during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is known for his genre scenes, history paintings, landscapes, city views, market scenes and portraits.

He was born as the son of a baker on 12 September 1758 in Lo, then in the Austrian Netherlands. He began his artistic training with the encouragement of Mr. Hennekin, a canon at the abbey of his native town who had seen his drawings. The canon egged on his parents to send him to study at the academy in Dunkirk. As his family was poor, he was sent to a baker in Dunkirk whom he was to assist in the bakery during the day, so that he could practice his art at the academy in the evenings. As gradually he had to spend more time working in the bakery, his art studies suffered and he returned to live with his parents. He was able to resume his studies in Dunkirk with the financial support of a Mr. Truit who was one of his teachers at the academy. After graduating from the academy of Dunkirk he followed Mr. Truit to Saint-Omer where the latter had been appointed a teacher at the local school of drawing. After a year in Saint-Omer, Mr. Hennekin procured for him a commission to decorate a pavilion in his hometown Lo which Mr. Hennekin (who was also an architect) had designed for a local family.

The money earned from this commission allowed Senave to travel to Paris in 1780. Here he continued his studies at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture for a few months until his money ran out. He returned to his hometown where he worked on local commissions for religious institutions and local dignitaries. Through contacts of his patron the abbot Hennekin he was admitted as a student in the academy of Ypres. In Ypres he was also introduced to prominent art lovers. The bishop of Ypres Felix Josephus Hubertus de Wavrans became his patron. Senave painted portraits and other subjects for the bishop.

His earnings allowed him to return to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris where he obtained third prize in drawing and later second prize in life drawing. In Paris he also received training from his fellow Flemish painter Joseph-Benoît Suvée. He started to sell small genre paintings in the Flemish style which earned him some success. He married and had a son who followed in his father's footsteps and became a painter. The son died at age 22 and as a result of the grief over this early death, the wife of Senave died not long after.

He developed an interest in poetry and wrote poems in French and Dutch. He regularly contributed his paintings to the Salons in Paris.

After donating to the Painting Academy of Ypres a painting depicting Rembrandt in his workshop (destroyed during World War I), Senave was appointed Honorary Director of the Academy in 1821. His donated work formed the beginning of the art collection of the City Museum of Ypres. He also received the honor of being made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Fine Arts and Literature of Ghent. In his later years his right side was paralyzed and he learned to draw with his left hand. However, he could no longer paint. He later married a second time with the woman who took care of him during his final years.

Senave died in Paris in 1823.

[hildegardavon]

Joseph Stallaert, 1825-1903

Polyxena sacrificed on Achilles' pyre, 1875, oil on panel, 77.5x57.5 cm

Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium Inv. 1877-E