Is It or Isn't It? Scientific Examination of F 614 Reveals the Truth

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CCI Newsletter, No. 27, June 2001

Is It or Isn't It? Scientific Examination of F 614 Reveals the Truth

by Marie-Claude Corbeil and Elizabeth Moffatt, Senior Conservation Scientists, Geneviève Sansoucy, Conservation Scientist, and Jeremy Powell, Senior Scientific Documentation Technologist, Analytical Research Laboratory

It is not often that CCI is asked to examine a painting that is considered to be a fake—especially a famous one—but such was the case with F 614.

F 614 is the number identifying the painting in the de la Faille catalogue, the first catalogue raisonné of van Gogh's œuvre. Soon after publication of the catalogue in 1928, scandal broke out when it was revealed that 33 of the listed paintings, including F 614, were suspect. These paintings had all been purchased from art dealer Otto Wacker, and the public prosecutor's office of Germany soon brought charges against him. The case known as "the Wacker affair"¹ opened on April 6, 1932.

Experts from many fields, including de la Faille himself, were called upon to testify. Although de la Faille had previously concluded that all 33 paintings were indeed forgeries, in his testimony at the trial he reconsidered this opinion and stated that five of the paintings, including F 614, were genuine. Most of the other witnesses declared all of the paintings to be fakes, but one believed that eight of them, again including F 614, were genuine. Otto Wacker was found guilty on April 19, 1932. But what about the paintings? Were they also guilty, or was there still a reasonable doubt about some of them, such as F 614?

It was with this question in mind that the current owners of the painting approached CCI. They were on a mission to determine once and for all if F 614 was a genuine van Gogh or a fake. Their quest for truth took them to Ottawa and Amsterdam, and was documented by Riverain Productions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program Witness.

The painting arrived at CCI in the summer of 2000. It depicts cypress trees, and closely resembles another van Gogh painting entitled Cypresses (F 613), dated June 1889, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other paintings depicting cypress trees, either as the main subject or as part of landscapes, are similarly dated to van Gogh's Saint-Rémy period (May 1889 to May 1890).

Once in the CCI laboratory F 614 was carefully examined first with the unaided eye and then with a stereo-microscope. It was radiographed and documented using various photographic techniques, and microscopic paint samples were removed for chemical analysis to determine the nature of the binder and pigments. The painting was then sent to the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Several observations suggested the painting was not by van Gogh, and test results brought to light various anomalies in the materials used to produce the painting, two of which were very significant.

First, the painting had been executed on a symmetrical, plain weave canvas (the number of threads being the same in the warp and weft directions), instead of the asymmetrical canvas typically used by van Gogh toward the end of his life. The original appearance of the canvas, which had been obscured by the painting's lining, was revealed by X-radiography.

Second, the paint's binding medium contained resin in addition to oil. The presence of a mixture of oil and resin was not, per se, anomalous; however, at the time of the scandal about a third of the paintings had been submitted to chemical analysis and resin had been found in the Wacker paintings but not in original van Goghs. Also, although very few binding medium analyses of van Gogh paintings have been reported in the modern conservation literature, those results have never shown the presence of resin.

The experts at the van Gogh Museum noted the anomaly regarding the canvas as soon as they saw the X-radiographs. With their vast knowledge of van Gogh's technique, they also discerned other aspects of the painting that indicated it was not his work.

Finally, all the pieces had come together. The story unfolded in the Witness documentary, from the Wacker trial in the early 1930s to the modern inquiries in the laboratories of CCI and the van Gogh Museum. The quest for truth had been successful and the deception revealed. F 614 was placed where it belonged, as part of the original group of 33 forgeries.

The painting remains part of one of the most famous art fraud cases. As such, and as an object of research for many years, it will always bear a special significance to its owners.

1. Details about the Wacker affair were taken from: Feilchenfeldt, W. "van Gogh Fakes: The Wacker Affair, with an Illustrated Catalogue of the Forgeries." Simiolus 19, 4 (1989), pp. 289-316.