James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)
Trois Crayons Newsletter, March 2025
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.
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
At first glance these two drawings might appear to be by the same artist, depict the same model and originate from the same life drawing session. The drawings share the same black chalk outlines, white hatching on the body, and the same level of near completion. On closer inspection, however, one drawing begins to fall apart, and alarm bells start to ring. Although both drawings were given to the Harvard Art Museums by Grenville L. Winthrop in 1943, one has been identified as a forgery, made to mimic the other, which is an original by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. But which was which, and what gives it away?
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The original, of course, is the upper image. As pointed out to me in New York last month by a loyal reader, I should clarify that the ‘of course’ is a tongue-in-cheek Britishism, and the answers to the Real or Fake questions are by no means obvious!
Although a monogram or inscription on an old drawing is no guarantee of authenticity, and numerous unsigned, unmonogrammed, drawings by Whistler do exist, this forger did not attempt Whistler’s “butterfly”. In addition to the missing monogram, however, various stylistic and anatomical shortcomings reveal the forger’s hand. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., former curator of American art at Harvard, commented on these shortcomings in 2004:
“Whistler was a very good draftsman when he made his drawing and understood the figure beautifully,” says Stebbins. “The way that the right arm and elbow come around the model’s head, and the way that her left hand is folded under her face, are convincing. The arm by the faker is not convincing. The left leg by Whistler you believe is folded underneath. The left leg by the faker looks cut off, a stump without musculature, a piece of spaghetti.”
The faker has also revealed a small misunderstanding of the master by including an horizon line, which Whistler would not have done in any drawing of this sort.
“The whole figure by the faker is sexier and flimsier than Whistler’s,” says Stebbins, “and looks a little like the pinups of the 1930s or early 1940s, the Betty Grable pinups that the soldiers had. Whistler’s nude is not a pinup at all.” Stebbins believes that the fake was probably made in the 1930s.
“Forgeries tell you what period they are,” he says. This is an important characteristic of many forgeries and is seen again and again in the history of fakery—they reflect the aesthetic of their day and of the forger, rather than that of the artist being forged, and they con experts who are the forger’s contemporaries. The fakes look incongruous only later, to those with a different aesthetic. For that reason, the late Agnes Mongan, curator of drawings, held that the life of a fake was one generation.”
Quoted from: Christopher Reed, "Wrong!", Harvard Magazine (Cambridge, MA, September 2004-October 2004), vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 50-51.
