Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 January 1910 — BOGUS PICTURES. [ARTICLE]

BOGUS PICTURES.

Counterfeit Antique. Openly Manufactured In Italy. Speaking of the manufacture of counterfeit paintings in Italy, a writer In the National Review says that sometimes genuine old pictures are really discovered In peasants’ houses, but rarely In good condition. The peasants have a disastrous trick of rubbing pictures with onions to clean them. By so doing they take off not only the varnish, but the precious patina and certain colors, in many cases leaving only the mere gold background (supposing the picture 1b of that date) and the more deeply Incised lines. These wrecks are eagerly bought for a trifle by art dealers, wlio employ skilled experts to restore or rather to remake them on the basis of the original outlined.

Pictures of the early period with gold backgrounds and quaint manshlp are regularly manufactured, especially at Siena, where the panels can be seen openly drying before the shop doors. Their foundation Is a panel properly worm eaten and chemically aged, painted on the gesqp ground that was the basis for all pictures of that epoch and to which they owe their luminous qualities. Such pictures are often made up out of a number of really old but ruined pictures and are an ingenious puzzle that require dexterity, taste and knowledge to construct.