Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)

Trois Crayons Newsletter, December 2024

Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.

Drawing inspiration from a recent article in The Art Newspaper on the topic of Old Master forgeries and their uses—an excellent read penned by last month’s exhibition reviewer, J. Cabelle Ahn—this month’s ‘Real or Fake’ delves into a fascinating tale of (mis)fortune and unreliable narrators.

In 1960, one of these two drawings was exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as a work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Two years later, the drawing was included in a four-volume compendium titled Great Drawings of All Time, and in 1971, it entered the Met’s permanent collection.

The appearance of a second, almost identical drawing on the London art market in 1962 raised suspicions. In 1956, Alexandre Ananoff, the astronaut-turned-art historian, advanced the claim that Fragonard created line-for-line copies of his own drawings, offering an explanation for the existence of duplicate works. Could this be one such example, or is something more nefarious at play?

• ANSWER

  The original, of course, is the upper image.

  Upper image: Jean Honoré Fragonard, The Sultan, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no.: 2008.437

  Lower image: After Jean Honoré Fragonard, The Sultan, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972.118.213

  In spite of the lower drawing’s publication by the aforementioned Ananoff in 1961 as an authentic Fragonard, it was later revealed to be a forgery. The drawing which appeared on the art market in 1962 turned out to be genuine. The scandal of the fake Fragonards was publicly exposed in 1978 by Geraldine Norman in The Times. Norman claimed that over thirty wash drawings attributed to Fragonard were fakes, many of which had recently been published by Ananoff with vague, unverifiable, or falsified provenances. Ananoff protested his innocence, as seen in this piece of footage, but he was ultimately deemed an unreliable narrator. In his honour—or to his shame—the forged drawings have come to be known in certain circles as ‘Fragonoffs.

  In 1987, the Met’s The Sultan was identified as a ‘Fragonoff’ and later discussed in detail by Perrin Stein and Marjorie Shelley in 2009 in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, following the arrival of the original drawing as part of the Catherine Curran Bequest. With both drawings now side by side in the Met’s collection, Stein wrote, “it is ultimately this carefulness that exposes the forger’s hand.” She noted that the spontaneity of Fragonard’s use of brown wash, which is missing in the forgery, is a hallmark of the artist’s style. Upon close examination, Fragonard’s disregard for his own underdrawing becomes evident, as he frequently ignored the initial indications in black chalk. By contrast, the forger is shown to have slavishly adhered to their own underdrawing.

  For further reading, see Stein and Shelley’s respective articles.