[NEO-GOTHIC ILLUMINATION]. - Lot 23

[NEO-GOTHIC ILLUMINATION]. Hermit (Saint Anthony abbot?) distributing rosaries to elegant couples Oil, gouache and gold on wood panel France, 19th or early 20th century. Attributable to a Spanish forger, active in Paris around 1900-1930. Dimensions: 130 x 110 mm This small tableautin is painted in the "troubadour style" fashionable in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the spirit of the many copies of medieval models circulating at the time, popularized by works such as those by Paul Lacroix (le Bibliophile Jacob) or Ferdinand Seré containing chromolithographic reproductions of medieval costumes and scenes. Its style is reminiscent of works commonly associated with the "Spanish Forger", an artist unmasked by Belle da Costa Greene, curator of the Pierpont Morgan Library in the 1930s. The Spanish Forger is the conventional name given to a forger, painter and illuminator active in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, known for his numerous forgeries of medieval art, whose exact identity has yet to be established despite the pioneering work of William Voelkle. This tableautin does not appear in the reference work William Voelkle and Roger S. Wieck, The Spanish Forger, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978. The artist painted on detached sheets of parchment, old manuscripts that he supplemented with his works, or small wooden tableautins. This artist was unmasked by Bella da Costa Greene when she was asked to comment on a painting of the Marriage of Saint Ursula offered to the Metropolitan Museum, and she expressed the first doubts about its authenticity (now in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1988.125). Since then, works by the Spanish Forger have been collected and appreciated for their neo-Gothic charm. In 2009, London's Victoria and Albert Museum acquired five paintings by the Spanish Forger "for what they tell us about perceptions of the Middle Ages in the late nineteenth century".