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A Scarred Battlefield: forgery at work?

Questions are being asked whether a forger with a fondness for painting First World War aeroplanes has been at work.

Eighteen months ago A Scarred Battlefield, a fully attributed painting dated 1918 and signed Paul Nash, of the trenches at Ypres, appeared at a Wright Marshall auction in Cheshire and sold for £220,000, the third-highest price for a Nash at auction. But nothing has been heard about it since, and it does not appear on any auction database.

“It’s all confidential,” said auctioneer Nick Wright last week, declining to discuss whether the sale was completed or not. But a source close to the buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, has confirmed that, because questions emerged about the authenticity of the painting, a scientific analysis of the paint was undertaken after the auction which suggested it may not have been painted in 1918, so the sale was not completed.

The pre-sale publicity still on the auctioneer’s website states that the owner had inherited the painting from his grandfather, who died in 1982. The grandfather had a great love of World War art, it says, pointing to the fact that they had recently sold paintings by CRW Nevinson from the same collection. One sold for £42,000.

Works on Paper showcases early queer art

Curators for Tate’s forthcoming exhibition of Queer British Art looking for a prologue to their 1861 dateline might want to wander down to the Royal Geographical Society building overlooking Hyde Park this week where the annual Works on Paper fair is being staged. Here, private dealer Karen Taylor (formerly of Sotheby’s and Spinks) is unveiling an early example of lesbian subject matter which she discovered in a scrapbook assembled in the mid-19th century by Augusta Raymond-Barker of Fairford Park in Gloucestershire.  

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The watercolour of two ladies is signed by Lady Emily Dundas, a society lady of some repute. Taylor then identified the sitters as Eleanor Butler, the younger daughter of the Earl of Ormonde, and Sarah Ponsonby, the second cousin of the Earl of Bessborough, who lived together for 50 years in Plas Newydd (now a museum) in Llangollen, where they were known as “the Ladies of Llangollen”.

Here they formed a literary circle and were visited by Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Walter Scott who admired their “romantic friendship”. “They are known to English departments at universities all over the world because they wrote so many letters,” says Taylor. The watercolour is priced in the region of £15,000.

"Rogue" dealers in the spotlight

A new book by the prolific director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s, Philip Hook, puts dealers of the past under the spotlight. Rogues’ Gallery dishes the dirt on Lord Duveen, Paul Durand-Ruel and others, and then takes a look at Sotheby’s former Chairman, Peter Wilson. We all know that Sotheby’s and Christie’s are now trying to be dealers as well as auctioneers, so was Wilson the prototype? And is Hook saying that the auctioneers are rogues too? Frustratingly, none of Hook’s “rogues” are living and there may never be a sequel.