The national gallery ‘masterpiece' that's 91% likely to be a fake

Yahoo

26-02-2025

On the second floor of the National Gallery hangs a prized painting that, when it changed hands in 1980, was bought for a record sum. The original Samson and Delilah was painted by the 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens around 1609; it was a commission from his close friend and patron Nicolaas II Rockox, the mayor of Antwerp, to hang above his fireplace. It is now seemingly in pride of place in the gallery on Trafalgar Square in London. However, some art historians argue this is not a long-lost Rubens masterpiece at all – contending instead that it is an extraordinarily expensive fake.
The question of its authenticity is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the art world. Around 1641, the painting disappeared, before mysteriously resurfacing in Paris nearly three centuries later, in 1929. A German scholar named Ludwig Burchard – now discredited as he was found to have misattributed works for commercial gain – declared it was the real deal, the missing Rubens' masterpiece that had been lost to history. Then, in 1980, the National Gallery purchased the piece in an auction at Christie's for £2.5 million (a bargain by today's standards, but at that time, a record-breaking price).
It depicts the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah, in which Samson's hair is cut to reduce his superhuman strength. Some critics argue that just as Samson is betrayed by his Philistine lover as he lies sleeping in her lap, the National Gallery blindly handed over a record-breaking sum of public money for a facsimile.
This week, the debate over the painting's authenticity has been reignited ahead of the publication of a book on the subject with the no-nonsense title NG6461: The Fake Rubens. For its author, the Greek painter and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis, this is the culmination of a career's worth of research on the mystery of the Rubens' authenticity.
In 1992, when Doxiadis was a mature student at the Wimbledon School of Art, she visited the National Gallery and was immediately struck by the colour and craftsmanship of the painting, which she believes is inconsistent with Rubens' other work, such as The Raising of the Cross, which dates from 1610/11. Doxiadis, along with two fellow students, submitted a report to the Gallery setting out what they claimed was evidence that the prized painting is a copy. The arguments contained in it have persisted to this day. 'The execution seemed crude, the colour unsubtle and uncharacteristic of Rubens' palette,' the report said. 'The tonal values were incorrect in relation to the light sources. The handling of the paint was very crude, the draughtsmanship was poor and there was weakness in the depiction of textures.'
There were whispers from then on. Those who question the painting's authenticity have built on these arguments. The painting that hangs in the National Gallery differs from eyewitness reproductions from the period, they say. It is deeply unusual for the artist – although many scholars contest this – and too garishly coloured, they argue. There are five soldiers in the doorway, rather than three, as shown in contemporaneous reproductions such as a c.1613 engraving made by the Dutch printmaker Jacob Matham. One is even staring directly at the viewer. Could this even be a hint as to the identity of its creator? And what happened to Samson's left foot which, in the painting hung in the Gallery, has no toes? They appear in a Frans Francken the Younger's painting Supper at the House of Burgomaster Rockox, showing Ruben's work hanging in the spot its owner intended.
In a 1997 article for the Sunday Times, art critic Waldemar Januszczak came to a strident conclusion on the painting's origins. 'The one thing all we doubters agree on is that the painting bought by the gallery for a staggering sum in 1980 is not by Rubens,' he wrote. He has since, reportedly, changed his mind. The same year, tired of deflecting questions on the subject, the National Gallery issued a press release hoping to offer evidence of the painting's legitimacy: 'Every technical test carried out to date has yielded results consistent with the date of about 1609 and the attribution to Rubens.' To settle the score once and for all, perhaps, the Gallery said it would host a public debate on the subject – a debate that never took place.
Speculation bubbled under the surface for decades until, in 2021, an authentication test conducted by a Swiss company called Art Recognition seemed to prove once and for all that the painting is fake. It used AI analysis to compare Samson and Delilah with other Rubens' paintings and concluded that it was 91 per cent likely to be a copy. Dr Carina Popovici, who carried out the study, said at the time: 'The results are quite astonishing… Every patch, every single square, came out as fake, with more than 90 per cent probability.' There is even a campaign group founded by Doxiadis, called 'In Rubens' Name,' which is calling for the National Gallery to apologise and 'admit an honest mistake'.
Doxiadis, now 78, said that on that fateful visit to the National Gallery, she knew something was wrong with the painting 'at first glance'. So much so, in fact, that she has dedicated her career to proving the Rubens scholars – who almost unanimously believe it is authentic – wrong. She has even alleged that, at a dinner party in Athens, a former National Gallery trustee told her he wanted 'the truth' about the artwork to come out.
'It has been a long time – 40 years – since I first saw the fake painting,' she says. 'There is a famous art historian called Max Jakob Friedländer, who said the first impression is the most important, and I believe in first impressions when you are someone who's trained to see.' She is emphatic: 'Everything is wrong about [the painting.] It's bad technique, bad colour. It is artless – there's no craftsmanship.'
But it is not just the National Gallery who refuses to challenge the orthodoxy on the subject, she argues. The Rubenianum, a centre and archive dedicated to the study of Rubens located within the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, has always maintained that the Gallery's Samson and Delilah 'is the lost Rubens… even though there is no proof whatsoever,' according to Doxiadis. To entertain any other possibility would be impossible, as 'Rubens is for Belgium what the Acropolis is for Greece.'
Many scholars, however, disagree entirely, regarding this recurrent debate as less of a mystery and more of a 'storm in a teacup'. '[Doxiadis] – who, by the way, has mostly published on ancient Greco-Roman artwork rather than the 17th century – had a hunch the quality of the picture wasn't good enough, but I think there are some misunderstandings about the painting,' says Dr Adam Busiakiewicz, an art historian who specialises in the Old Masters. 'It was made at a specific point in his career when he had spent a lot of time in Italy,' he adds, and his style had been influenced by the great Renaissance works he saw on his travels. For one, he says, 'the comparisons that are made between [Rubens other] paintings are comparing paintings made decades apart.'
'He's an artist that changes his style throughout his career… Art historians who specialise in paintings like Rubens' can track these changes. I would also say that when you work for an auction house like I have, when you start to see paintings en masse, you understand that copies have a dead quality that is nothing like a masterpiece. It's very easy to spot a 20th century copy – the pigments will feel different, and you don't see any of that here,' he continues. It is, without a shadow of doubt, 'a 17th century painting.'
A spokesman for the National Gallery said: 'Samson and Delilah has long been accepted by leading Rubens scholars as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens. Painted on wood panel in oil shortly after his return to Antwerp in 1608 and demonstrating all that the artist had learned in Italy, it is a work of the highest aesthetic quality. A technical examination of the picture was presented in an article in the National Gallery's Technical Bulletin in 1983. The findings remain valid.'
If Doxiadis' theory – a blunder of this magnitude at the highest echelons of the British art world regarding one of the world's most revered artists and most valuable paintings – was proved true, the repercussions would be seismic.
More likely, though, is that its authenticity – or not – will remain a subject of debate, if not just a riveting story. Doxiadis herself is a mystery – a whistleblower regarded by much of the art establishment as a heretic. As confident as she may be, Busiakiewicz argues that Samson and Delilah could be in no one except Rubens' hand. 'It is a really stonking great picture,' he says. 'The textures, the sumptuous drapery, the muscular back – no one except Rubens could have painted that.'
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