Philip Mould: the art sleuth

What are the main problems when it comes to trying to identify old paintings?

Paintings are like people – they change with time. What you have to do is try to get back to understanding what they looked like in the peak of their youth.

How do you go about trying to determine who painted what?

Every artist has his or her own handwriting in stylistic terms: the way they apply the paint, the way they express things like faces or drapery, the way they handle light – there’s a huge vocabulary of differences between one artist and another and the more you see, the more you get your ‘eye’. You have to spend time familiarising yourself and I’ve done that particularly with portrait paintings.

What tools do you use?

The most valuable thing I’ve got is a halogen torch – I don’t leave home without it. I take it to parties, to people’s homes when I visit, on holiday… It’s an intense white light that gives the capacity for the most phenomenal visual insight. It can almost look through the painting; it is my second eye.

But why is there so much mystery – are paintings often faked, or is it more often a case that they have been left unsigned?

Signatures mean nothing. There’s a huge amount of forgery around, particularly online. It’s not forgery in the way we understand it, meaning a contrived attempt to dupe someone specifically – which is a crime – it’s something new, known as a ‘trapper’ in which you have something that looks like a Picasso, seems to be signed by Picasso, it’s got old nails in it, old exhibition labels on the back and it looks and smells like a Picasso. It will be sold as ‘French school, 20th Century’, and the trapper is hoping to ensnare someone who thinks they’re getting a relative bargain.

How did you first become interested in paintings?

My father took me to a gallery in Liverpool when I was a young boy and pointed to a painting by Turner. He said: ‘Do you know, that one painting is worth as much as all the other pictures in the room?’ That’s how I became interested in art.

What would you consider your biggest success story?

I suppose the one that got me established, and which bought my house, was to find the only portrait of Henry VIII’s brother, Prince Arthur, which was a picture hidden beneath a later painting.

How did the art world react?

With a lot of excitement. In terms of the finding I made that had the most impact, it would be when I found the other half of Gainsborough’s first painting. He painted a brother and sister standing together; the brother was known and hanging in a museum, and I found the other half of it about 20 years ago.

You co-present a TV series called Fake or Fortune? for the BBC: what’s been the most extreme reaction when you’ve told someone their painting was worthless?

It’s sometimes anger and hostility, because as paintings get handed down through the family, myth coalesces into fact. So it’s almost as if you’re insulting their ancestors. In the end you have to remind them that it’s your view, and people can always go for a second opinion. I’m not infallible, I’ve made mistakes. I’m learning all the time.

What’s a typical day for you?

I answer emails from people who want a view on their paintings. I talk to staff at my gallery in London about paintings they’ve seen in auctions across the world and we decide which to pursue. Later I might go visit my restorer to see how works are progressing. It’s like a ward visit – all these pictures in various states of undress and in the process of being repaired. You’re always trying to work out what the artists intended and what the picture should look like.

Is there a ‘lost cache’, a sort of holy grail of art, that all art dealers have heard about?

There’s a huge collection of pictures in Berlin the Russians got hold of at the end of the Second World War that may or may not have gone up in flames. A lot of things got lost in enemy action. If you keep alert you can find things that weren’t necessarily known to be lost in the first place: that’s the excitement, adding to an artist’s known body of work.

Are all old paintings valuable?

They can be. It’s often a case of the more beautiful the better. Sometimes an uninteresting image by a great artist is not as saleable as a beautiful image by a minor artist. It’s a very image-led market.

Finally, what would you have done if, when you went to Buckingham Palace to collect your OBE, you’d spotted a fake on the wall?

Ha-ha. Well, I did once spot a Van Dyck on the walls of Buckingham Palace that they didn’t know they had. It was in the Royal Collection and so I did what anyone would do, I told them. I think it was one of those pictures whose identity had been lost; I just helped them to refind it.