Yale Center Exhibition Examines Hoax on Prominent 18th Century British Artists

Written by Michael Booher Saturday, 13 August 2011 20:45

New Haven, CT - This fall the Yale Center for British Art will serve as the first and only venue for a small but fascinating exhibition about a late eighteenth-century hoax that fooled several prominent British artists and that sheds light on a number of intriguing technical and historical issues. Benjamn West and the Venetian Secret brings together paintings and works on paper pertaining to the hoax from several institutions, including the Yale Center for British Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; The Lewis Walpole Library; The Morgan Museum and Library; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.  On exhibit 18 October through 4 January, 2009.

In 1796 Benjamin West, the American-born President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, fell victim to a remarkable fraud. A shadowy figure, Thomas Provis, and his artist daughter, Ann Jemima Provis, persuaded West that they possessed a copy of an old manuscript purporting to contain descriptions of materials and techniques used by the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance, including Titian, to achieve the famously luminous effects of color that had long been thought lost, forgotten, or shrouded in secrecy. West experimented with these materials and techniques and used them to execute a history painting entitled Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1796–97). In truth the manuscript was fake and the story an absurd invention. West had believed it, and, through him, the Provises managed to dupe a number of other key artist-Academicians.

When the fraud was finally exposed, the embarrassment was far worse for West than it was for the other victims. It was largely through his influential position as President of the Royal Academy that the perpetrators gained access to so many of his variously hapless, dim-witted, or simply greedy colleagues. Years later, having been mercilessly held up to ridicule by satirists (in song; in the press; and in a remarkable satirical engraving titled Titianus Redivivus by James Gillray, 1797, West painted an almost identical version of Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1804), this time according to his own methods and traditional studio practices. This “atonement” painting is today in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret brings together these two versions of West’s ambitious composition, along with x-radiographs and recent technical analysis, and considers the remarkable differences between them in color and effect. The exhibition also includes two extant copies of the fake Provis manuscript, a signed agreement in which the Academicians agreed to keep the method secret, West’s preparatory drawing, Paul Sandby’s rude Song of 1797, and James Gillray’s satirical engraving.

Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret has been co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. The curators are Angus Trumble, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art; Mark Aronson, Chief Conservator of Paintings, Yale Center for British Art; and Helen A, Cooper, Holcombe T. Greene Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery.  Visit the Yale Center for British Art at : www.ycba.yale.edu/

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