Wednesday 5th June 2024

The Forensic Eye: Find Your Inner Connoisseur

Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe

How do dealers, auctioneers and museum staff determine whether a piece is by one painter or another? Artists before the 18th century usually worked with a number of assistants around them, trained to reproduce the style of the master as closely as possible. How can we study these workshop productions, distinguishing between master and pupil, master and copyists? In this lecture, Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe will consider clues, weigh up their relative usefulness, and reveal some of the tricks of the connoisseur.

Chantal has an MA in History of Art from Edinburgh and a PhD from the Warburg Institute, London University. She has trained as a painting conservator, and has taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art on the MA in Fine and Decorative Arts since 1989 as well as for a number of societies and institutions in London: these have included the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection.

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