This year the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has extended the annual Connoisseur course I teach in London to a week, so I have been busy planning additional field trips. The RA is well located for Connoisseur expeditions, with the Wallace Collection and Sotheby’s to the north and Christie’s and the National Gallery to the south. I estimate we will cover about 10 miles over the course of the week. We always provide torches – an essential tool for the Connoisseur student – but now we may also need to provide trainers.
Each year I like to bring a painting from my collection as a teaching aid, ideally a potential ‘sleeper’ (or miscatalogued painting) bought at auction. The dirtier and more obscured by old varnish these are, the better, as understanding the condition of a painting is an essential part of connoisseurship. A highlight of the course is when painting restorer Simon Gillespie demonstrates a cleaning test. This year I have a potentially previously unknown portrait by Zoffany to examine. Will the cleaning reveal a genuine Zoffany or a case of attributional optimism?
One of my false discoveries can be just as instructive as one that is successful. I stress in the course that learning to be a connoisseur is not just about studying “good” works of art, because the connoisseur must study as many copies, forgeries and works by followers as he must study securely attributed works, because then the difference between (say) a genuine Zoffany and a copy becomes easier to tell. However, buying your own copies is an expensive way to learn.
Connoisseurship was once an essential part of any university art history course, but by the 1980s it had become so tarnished by its association with the art market, class and ‘taste’ that it was seen as old-fashioned and even harmful. Many ‘new’ art historians took the view that everything they disliked about the art historical ‘canon’ was largely the product of an elite class of connoisseurs, and they rebelled by rejecting the focus on attribution and instead looking at the larger contexts of art.
I think the new art historians were right to rebel. The context is good. The canon was indeed shaped by an elite class of art historians, collectors and dealers, and their tastes defined who was a “great” artist, which is why the canon was almost entirely made up of white, Western men. But I also think it was unfortunate to tie connoisseurship—the often banal, objective practice of recognizing artistic techniques—so firmly to an elite class and its subjective preferences. Has the rebellion against connoisseurship gone too far? In her book Art history: a very short introduction (a staple of university reading lists), Dana Arnold begins with a destruction of connoisseurship and connoisseurs.
The RA is now the only place in the UK where connoisseurship is still taught. I would love to teach a similar course at a university if anyone was interested. It is still best to know the who, what and when of art history before answering the why. Connoisseurship remains one of the best ways to rebalance the canon as we discover previously overlooked works by women artists. Seven of the 19 oil paintings on display in the opening room of the current exhibition on women artists at Tate Britain, Now you see ushave only been discovered by connoisseurs in the last decade. I was lucky enough to find three of them myself. It will be up to the next generation of connoisseurs to find even more.
