Art forgery example

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Instrumental Analysis

by Imran Reedznan

Lisa Hawkins

by DaJuan Hawkins

GP

by Olivier Auber

Houssam A. Said (900070379)- 23/03/08

by houssam said

Paul Cézanne (Art forgery example)

Any collector should check his source, it should be trust worthy to guaratee its reliabilty.

Edger, a fine art collector found a new piece of art, there was an investigation to check it is real or forged, carried out by the three doctors as mentioned in this map

Dr Montoya

polyenes could be contaminants caused by soot or burning lamp oil or even cigarette smoke

For paintings that are a century old, the absorbance at 300 nm is typically around 0.15. However, this painting shows an absorbance of 0.6, suggesting that it is not likely to be a hundred years old

examined the elemental composition of three samples taken from different colored areas of the painting, yellow, blue and green, by x-ray fluorescence (XRF). For the non-specialist, XRF involves irradiating a sample with x-rays to excite the element's inner electrons. As the atoms get de-excited, they emit x-ray frequencies that are characteristic of that specific element. The emission of x-rays can be detected for most metals and certainly for any element of atomic number 14 or larger.

Dr Andersen

We cannot exclude the possibility, however, that it was painted by some kind of twentieth-century unscrupulous genius who not only is a skilled painter and art historian, but also a material scientist. Unfortunately it is much easier to de-authenticate a painting by finding anachronisms that it is to authenticate it

By IR refractography there is an indication that there is an underdrawing, probably charcoal

used infrared spectroscopy (IR). We use IR to detect anomalies beneath the paint, such as the presence of other paints, the types of binders used, and so forth. The data from IR spectra obtained from both IR refractography and transmission spectra indicate that this might not be a Cézanne at all. It is true, as Philip Marden pointed out, that the heavy strokes applied with a palette knife, which are especially characteristic of Cézanne's early period, are there. But the analysis of the yellow areas shows indirectly that they could be cadmium-based, maybe composed of Cadmium Yellow Lithopone (a mix of cadmium sulfide and barium sulfate). This pigment mix wasn't widely used until 1927, and yet Cézanne had died some 20 years earlier. However, IR spectra does not directly detect metal nuclei, so the presence of barium and cadmium must be confirmed by another technique."

Dr Simpkins

but it is possible that some other compound present in the pigment is quenching the polyene fluorescence enough to lower the signal into the background

Some of the areas of the painting, particularly the dark green areas in the trees and the orange in the rooftops, do show brighter fluorescence than the remainder of the painting. Such bright areas are also found in another painting by Cézanne called Gardanne now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and they are found in the same visual elements: the trees and the rooftops. The emission spectra of both the green pigment and the orange pigments in Mr. Collins' painting are very similar to those found in the Brooklyn Cézanne

examined fluorescence from the surface of the painting using both short-wave and long-wave UV excitation from a mercury lamp. With our spectrometer we can collect a full emission spectrum from any area of the painting, collecting emission from an area as small as a 2 mm square

How they detected art forgery?