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Sunday 7 September 2008

Wanted! Lost portraits

Martin Gayford on his exhibition of Constable portraits.

Criminals can turn into detectives: consider the career of Eugène-François Vidocq, thief, convict and subsequently head of the Paris Sûreté. And, as we have seen recently in London, political journalists can metamorphose into successful politicians. So it is not all that surprising that, once in a while, an art critic should cross the line and turn curator.

After many years of writing about exhibitions, for the first time I am organising one myself (or, more precisely, co-arranging it with Anne Lyles of Tate Britain). Even less amazing, I suppose, is that the job turns out to be rather different from what I had imagined. Previously, I’d always thought that making an exhibition roughly broke down into three parts: think of a good subject, select the right works and place them handsomely in the galleries. All of those are, of course, highly desirable objectives. What I had not foreseen was the difficulty of finding the exhibits in the first place.

The subject of our show — portraits by John Constable — is unusual. Though Constable is a very famous painter indeed, his portraits have been disdained and disregarded up to now — that is part of the point of taking a close look at them. Even so, I was startled to discover how hard it was to trace some of them. Pictures that are reproduced in standard books on the artist — and in some cases those that have passed through leading auction houses in the recent past — have proved difficult or impossible to trace so far.

This experience casts some light on an interesting and mysterious subject: how works of art get lost. Quite frequently, missing paintings and sculptures by celebrated artists turn up. Just this month, a picture by Watteau called ‘La Surprise’, which had been lost for 200 years, went under the hammer, also three drawings by Goya, missing for 130 years. Such discoveries are made all the time. When they are noticed by dealers at an auction, rather than by the auction house in advance, they are known as ‘sleepers’. The sharp-eyed can, on occasion, make a lot of money by spotting a sleeper.

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