Fake or Fortune? Gauguin [BBC] 10 September 2017
Gauguin Fake or Fortune?, Series 6 Episode 3 of 4 The team are on the trail of two pictures brought to their attention by viewers, both believed to be by Paul Gauguin – one of the giants of 19th-century art. Could two lost works have surfaced in Cambridgeshire and a suburb of Manchester? Paul Gauguin is one of the most intriguing artists of late 19th-century France, a stockbroker who abandoned Paris for a bohemian life in Tahiti. He is certainly one of the most valuable – his Tahitian masterpiece When Will you Marry? sold for $200 million in 2015, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold. A woman in Manchester thinks she may have inherited Gauguin’s very first pencil sketch for this iconic painting. If it’s genuine, this fragile relic of the artist’s time in Tahiti could be worth over £200,000, but its authenticity has been called into doubt. To raise the stakes even further, the team are on the trail of a second possible Gauguin – a still life depicting a bowl of fruit. A Cambridge-based man has spent years trying to prove that his oil painting, inherited from a family friend, is a genuine work that dates back to the crucial moment when Gauguin discovered the style which made him famous. The team have got a battle on their hands because the authenticity of both works has been called into question by leading auction houses. The quest to find out the truth about the two pictures takes them to Bilbao, Brittany, Paris and the Imperial War Museum as they delve into the story of the sketch owner’s grandfather, a German art historian who fled the Nazis for a new life in England. But as the investigation progresses, they stumble across a forgery scandal that is only beginning to come to light.
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