Month: September 2013

Advertising is big in sports, as in most fields–getting noticed, exuding glam. But sometimes it seems counterproductive. As in the case of these immense and immensely expensive America’s Cup boats.   The Emirates boat is in the worst shape, larded with advertising from head to halyard, but both Emirates and Oracle are so visually muddled…

“Sunset at Montmajour” certainly looks like the work of Vincent Van Gogh, but when in the early 20th Century it was dismissed as a fake, its owner stuck it in the attic. There it sat for the next sixty years. Now it’s out, and after two years of learned study it’s acclaimed as the genuine…

                      The estimable George Stubbs (1724-1806) made his reputation on his paintings of horses. Many of these feature what was known as a “rubbing-down house,” an interesting background detail common to the environment of upper-class horses. Except that in Stubb’s work the house is often…

  We learn, sometimes, in the most unexpected places—in this case, from the memoir of Eric Hebborn, a saucy and unapologetic forger of old master drawings.* His art education, in England in the ‘50s, was of the most academic sort, and his first job was in the workshop of an art restorer where “restoration” could…