Riccardo Nobili

Faked pottery—Old unglazed types—Artistic and scientific interest in pottery—Oriental glazed pottery—Greek and Etruscan half-glazed vases—Faience and its various types—Italian factories, Cafaggiolo, Urbino, etc.—Iridescent glazes, Hispano-Moresque, Deruta and Gubbio—French pottery—Faked Palissy and imitations of Henri II—Other types of French faience—China, the old and modern composition of china—Various ways of faking china of good marks—Half-faked pieces—Blunders in marks—Glasses and enamels.

Pottery presents one of the richest and most varied fields for imitation and faking. The endless types and specialities of this class seem to have spurred the versatile genius of the imitator.

Broadly speaking, and age apart, pottery may be divided into two classes: one in which glazing does not appear, and one in which this important element of ceramics lends an entirely different character to the product.

The first class more especially, if not exclusively, may be grouped into two types according to character: those that interest the scientist in particular, and those that come more into the domain of the artist and art lover. It is of course understood that there is no definite line of demarcation between the two.

Faking, however, with a great spirit of impartiality, makes no distinctions and is ready to meet its clients on the scientific or artistic field, and fully prepared to accommodate the scientist with an artistic bent or the artist possessing the learned propensities of the historian.

Thus Mexican idols and Peruvian pottery, as well as the productions of savage tribes, are imitated and copied with the same interest as the unglazed vases of Samos, Greek clay urns and Roman lamps. What regulates the increase of the forger’s activities and spurs his genius is, as we have said, the demand for an article and its price.

There is nothing surprising then in the fact that some rather indifferent types of pottery of savage tribes, or incomplete aboriginal specimens, should have been faked as though they presented the interest of a chef-d’oeuvre. Not altogether of this class, but certainly of limited interest so far as art is concerned, are the Mexican articles which have been among the most exploited by those who know that these kinds of relics are in great demand by scientists as well as collectors who have a passion for specialities.

In the Exhibition of 1878, a group of scientists put the incautious upon their guard by exhibiting a whole series of faked Mexican idols, pottery and so forth. But as the articles, especially at that time, were in great vogue, the warning was not sufficient for specialists and collectors, and the show of faked Mexican art proved such a success that it stirred the honesty or cynicism, we hardly know which, of a Parisian dealer who conceived the notion to advertise his wares: “Forgeries of Mexican idols, 5–25 francs.”

Unglazed Oriental and GrÆco-Roman pottery, with its fine forms and decorative character, has not only proved an attraction to the collector but very tempting to the faker who finds no great difficulty in imitating it. The way to render such pottery antique-looking is easy. Acids may play their part here too, but they are hardly necessary as the porous nature of the clay makes it able to absorb any kind of hue, tone and dirt if buried in specially prepared ground or in a bed of fertilizer.

Curiously enough from one point of view, the imitation of this early art generally flourishes on the very spot where the originals are excavated, and still more odd is it that on more than one occasion those duped were the very ones supposed to be good connoisseurs and who took direct interest in the excavations. Thus it is that there is an abundance of faked Samos, Rhodes and other specimens, in collections now housed in museums. A superficial inspection of the Cesnola collection in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, ought to be sufficient to prove that even connoisseurs as good as Cesnola, are not quite safe in this speciality against the trickery of modern imitators.

With Greek, Campanian or Etruscan pottery that bears a peculiar polish or glazing the nature of which is still a mystery to ceramists the case is somewhat different; good imitations are rare. Naturally there cannot be included among convincing imitations those upon which a lead glaze has been used, as such imitations are covered with a thick layer of shining glaze and are only intended for veriest neophytes who have presumably never seen an original. Successful imitations are either finished with a very thin and non-shining glaze or an encaustic polish. To ascertain whether encaustic has been used, one has only to rub the piece with a cloth soaked in benzine, which will soon turn it opaque.

In the pottery museum of SÈvres there is an interesting series of faked Greek and Etruscan vases, urns, etc. It comprises some good specimens of the work of Touchard, an imitator flourishing about the year 1835, other pieces by the Giustiniani of Naples, and some of the most successful fakes of this particular kind of pottery, the pieces by Krieg from the Rheinzabern factory. These pieces were sold to the SÈvres Museum as genuine, by a Bavarian, in the year 1837.

We are told that a good method in imitating Etruscan pottery is to work with engobe, adding a well-ground frit to the barbotine that contains the elements of a glaze. To our knowledge all imitations of this kind are wanting in appearance and it is safe to assert that they could hardly receive serious consideration from a true connoisseur.

As regards glazed Oriental ceramics, there are to be noted some good imitations of Persian work and, above all, imitations of the characteristic pottery of Rhodes. Factories for these ceramics are almost everywhere. Perhaps the best imitations come from a factory in Paris. Imitations from this factory have succeeded in deceiving more than one connoisseur. A well-known curator of a Berlin museum bought one of these samples as genuine, paying eighty pounds for it, and an antiquary of Florence, quite a specialist in ceramics, very nearly committed the same mistake, but by good luck he was warned by a friend who had been taught by hard experience that this Oriental pottery is a product of very Western origin. Curiously enough the manufacturers do not sell their produce for anything but imitations; however, through the usual frauds in which the market in antiques abounds, these pieces are evidently palmed off on unwary collectors outside France. Oriental pottery is usually so well preserved, thanks to its hard glaze, that the faker is spared all complicated processes to give the piece an appearance of age.

The glazed work of Hispano-Moresque pottery presents a more or less successful field to imitators. The lustrous glaze of various hues does not seem to offer difficulties to the modern ceramist, who has learned how to use the mysterious co-operation of smoke in the so-called muffle glaze. Yet when confronted with originals, which are becoming rarer and rarer in the market every day, the best of imitations leaves room for meditation as the genuine is usually a very uncomfortable neighbour to the counterfeit.

The Italian Renaissance with its various and interesting types has yielded a fine crop of imitations. In fact plagiarism was already rampant when the old factories, now extinct, were in full activity. Thus on more than one occasion Faenza has copied Cafaggiolo, and the models of Urbino, Pesaro and Casteldurante are often interchanged, while the factory of Savona seems to have blended its unmistakable individuality with the models of all the most successful factories. Cafaggiolo, Gubbio and Derutha are perhaps the types of old Italian pottery to which the faker has given preference. There are some modern imitations of Cafaggiolo made by a ceramist of Florence so well done that they have deceived the best connoisseurs of Paris and Berlin. But for the fact that we have pledged ourselves to point out the sins and not the sinners or their victims, we could enumerate a rather interesting list of illustrious victims to this clever imitator of Cafaggiolo, who is still at work in Florence and more dangerous every day by reason of the perfecting of his deceitful art.

There are also old imitations of Cafaggiolo, made by the Sicilian factory of Caltagirone, and if one thing surprises us more than another it is that good collectors should buy this type freely as genuine. They are apparently blind to the grossness of the imitation and above all to its dark, dirty blue which has nothing in common with the beautiful colour of a genuine Cafaggiolo.

Another cherished type offering great enticement to the Italian faker, even though not imitated successfully enough to take in the real expert, is the work of Della Robbia. Imitations of this work, copies from good originals and honestly sold as such, are to be seen at one of the most important potteries of Florence, Cantagalli, a firm of almost historical reputation. Being intended to be sold as reproductions, copies or imitations, no patina is given to these.

It is not only in Italy that Italian faience has been freely imitated but also in other countries, particularly France. Among the successful imitators we may quote Joseph Devers, who made such good imitations of Italian faience that he had the honour to sell some of his specimens to the SÈvres Museum in 1851. Looking now at these imitations of Della Robbia, made so successfully by Devers in 1851, one wonders how they could have been taken for genuine by experienced connoisseurs.

The lustre work of Maestro Giorgio Andreoli and Derutha has been imitated by many factories, but, notwithstanding the efforts put forth and the progress made in discovering the secret of lustrous glazing, the imitations, especially of Maestro Giorgio, are deficient. In the Gubbio work of the best epoch a special firing must have been used, especially for the red hue, which is so original and characteristic that it seems to defy imitation. That the Maestro Giorgios must have been glazed at a low temperature, at any rate for the production of the iridescent effect of the colours, may be concluded from an incident that occurred in Gubbio years ago. On the spot where Maestro Giorgio is supposed to have had his furnace for firing his masterpieces, some debris of fine Gubbio work was found. By chance a woman put one of these pieces that had apparently not received the last firing for the iridescent hue into the warming pan with which she was warming her hands, and the moderate heat of the ashes was sufficient to produce the iridescent effect. Imitators of this kind of work use various methods, but one of the most common is muffled glaze, specially prepared and aided by smoke which envelopes the piece when incandescent and the glaze about to melt.

In France the hard-glazed work of Palissy was naturally an incentive to the imitator’s versatile aptitude, and later on to the faker’s. Being as esteemed for his work, as ill-treated for his religious convictions, Palissy had many imitators in his own time, mostly among his pupils or enthusiastic followers. However, Palissy died in the Bastille without revealing the secret of his glaze or the composition of his clay, so even his followers could only grope in the dark, to use the expression by which Palissy defined his long and arduous research, before he discovered the secret of his marvellous pottery. Perhaps because plagiarists are, after all, always plagiarists, the fact remains that none of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century imitators reached the level of the master.

However, false Palissys are legion now. They are of all kinds and the originals being now practically off the market, museums, as usual, abounding in pseudo-Palissys, so a comparison with an original is not always possible.

Apart from his immediate followers, Palissy was copied and imitated at Avon near Fontainebleau in the seventeenth century during Louis XIII reign. Demmin, a real authority on Palissy ceramics, mentions many false Palissys now in museums, some of them regular pastiches, suggested from well-known prints of a later date than Palissy. According to Demmin, some of these pieces are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the motives of the composition, old-fashioned gardens, being taken from engravings in the style of Lenotre, possibly dating between 1603 and 1638.

In modern times there are to be noted imitations by Alfred Corplet, a restorer of pottery who filled the market after the year 1852 with passable imitations, sold as such, of Palissy work. For a long time he had been a restorer of broken and damaged Palissy work and thus he had had opportunity to study the work of the master closely, and at one time his imitations fetched high prices. A.M. Pull also imitated Palissy work about the year 1878, as well as Barbizet Brothers, of whom a plat À reptiles is kept in the SÈvres Museum. Some firms even reproduce sea-fish which are never found on genuine Palissys, as the master only moulded such animals and fish as he found in the environs of Paris.

There are many fakers who still love to imitate the work of Palissy, and if we may give advice to the inexperienced collector we would say: “Don’t go after Palissys nowadays, as a find in this line is almost an impossibility; good originals are either kept in well-known collections or jealously guarded in museums.”

Henry II faience, the technique of which is as much a mystery as Bernard Palissy’s glaze, has also been imitated, but, with the exception of a few specimens, the imitations are so coarse that they could hardly be dangerous even to the neophyte who had perchance some slight acquaintance with originals. As in the case of Palissy, however, Henry II ceramics do not abound on the market and such a thing as a find is not to be hoped for.

More common are the imitations of Rouen, Moustiers, down to the ceramics of the Revolution. The latter were at one time in such demand that a very commercial type was produced which can be imitated, of course, with ease. In this field also, therefore, do not get excited too quickly over some truculent subject with the conspicuous date of the Terror. Naturally among these subjects, the assiettes au confesseur and À la guillotine, depicting the execution of Louis XVI, are too tempting to forgers not to be given a certain preference among the faked pottery of the Revolution.

We would point out, further, that the pottery of all parts of the world has invariably been faked or imitated, as soon as a promise of success was presented to the imitator and of gain to the faker, but it is not the purpose of this work to make a long exposition of the countless types of faking, which would considerably increase its bulk and risk monotony by an endless list of names and almost identical facts with the usual dramatis personÆ—the cheater and the cheated.

To give an appearance of age to pottery, especially glazed pottery, there are various methods, as we have already said.

Sometimes it is not only a question of determining whether an object is genuine or not, but as pottery is apt to be one of the most restored articles of antiquity offered to the collector, the art lover must be acquainted with the means of detecting which parts of a piece of pottery have been restored, often over-restored. There are two ways of restoring pottery where parts are missing. One is to make the missing part in clay, bake it, and glaze and colour it to imitate the genuine part of the object. When this is done the new part is cemented to the old, and the piece is supposed to have been only broken and mended, a fact which does not lessen the value of the object in the eyes of the collector so much as incompleteness would. As this operation is an extremely difficult one which only a few specialists can perform—there is a Florentine ceramist who does it to perfection—and very expensive as well, only really fine pieces of pottery are restored in this way as a rule. Ordinary pieces are repaired as follows. The fragments of the object are carefully cemented together and the missing parts are then supplied with plaster. Some use plaster mixed with glue, others some similar composition, in fact any soft substance will do if it will harden after it has been modelled and properly shaped. When the missing parts have been filled in and carefully polished with sand-paper, they are prepared for oil paint with a light coating of a weak solution of glue. After this the artist paints in the missing pattern with oil colours and a brush, copying from the original parts of the object. This finished, the glaze is imitated by a coat of varnish.

Incredible as it may sound, in the hands of a clever artist this rather clumsy method produces an almost complete illusion. It is, however, easy to ascertain what parts have been repaired. The new parts are warmer to the touch than the glazed pottery, and they will also smell of turpentine or oil paint. Should an old mending have lost all smell, the heat of the hand is sufficient to revive it. Place your finger for a time on the part you suspect, and then smell it and you will be able to detect whether the part has been repainted with oil colours. A piece repaired by the other method is naturally more difficult to detect; an experienced eye, however, will notice some slight differences in colour and form between the old and the new parts, and sometimes the join is not quite perfect, a defect that is often remedied by filling in the crack with a mastic imitating the glazed ground of the piece. This rarely occurs, however, as a good repairer can generally calculate to a nicety the shrinkage of the part to be added and makes such a neat and perfect fit that only an experienced eye can detect it.

In the case of a purely modern imitation, the faker’s art consists, as usual, in giving the piece a convincing appearance of age, once the actual making has been performed. This is generally effected by exposure to apparent ill-usage, by greasing and smoking the object, then cleaning it and repeating the operation over and over again till the dirt has penetrated into all the cracks, or by burying it in a manure-heap and letting it remain till it has lost all freshness. There are also chemical ways by which the glaze is eaten and its composition altered. It is a fact that fluoric acid readily eats the glaze just as it dissolves glass, and under certain circumstances the lead in the glaze under the form of silicate changes under the action of hydrosulphuric acid.

Cracks or a regular network of craquelage are generally produced on new ceramics by the same principle as they are obtained on oil paintings, namely, by producing artificially a difference in the shrinkage capacity of two superimposed layers. In oil painting it is the layer of pigment and of varnish, in the case of pottery the two layers are represented by the baked clay and the glaze. If the clay has a smaller shrinkage than the glaze, in the second firing of the piece to melt the glaze, the latter will dry in a network of cracks like those on Chinese or Japanese vases, which are reproduced by this method. Reversing the game, the glaze peels off here and there in drying and produces the imperfections sometimes desired on imitations of old and damaged pottery.

An artificial disproportion between the shrinkage of the clay and the glaze is usually obtained by modifying the quality of either the one or the other. Does the clay shrink more in the firing than is desired, the ceramist generally mixes it with non-shrinking elements such as powdered brick, or even another kind of clay which he knows must shrink less on account of its composition, although it may not be suitable in colour and quality. By this same modification of the composition the shrinkage of the glaze is increased or diminished. Glazes are generally composed of a combination of silex, furnished by sand, and oxide of lead with the addition of some flux such as borax. With an increased quantity of silex in the composition of the glaze the shrinkage capacity is diminished. Consequently a predominance of the other elements, lead, flux, etc., produces the opposite effect, namely, giving the glaze a greater shrinkage capacity. Some workmen prefer to modify the quality of the clay to obtain the desired craquelage, others find it more practical to modify the glaze.

A full account of faked china would probably fill a bulky volume. It may be taken for granted that every kind of artistic china worth imitating has tempted the faker, with disastrous results to the unwary collector. We have mentioned some of the most noted forgeries of faience, merely to show what a happy hunting-ground ceramics have been to the faker of all times, and with china this is doubly the case. From the early attempts of Bottger, those rare specimens of rare china, down to almost modern samples of SÈvres there has been a long succession of types that have kept generations of fakers and imitators incessantly busy.

Curiously enough and with no intention of cheating, as far as china is concerned, noted factories have themselves greatly added to the confusion between originals and copies by becoming their own plagiarists, as it were, by imitating old kinds. Thus the Meissen factory now puts upon the market types of old Dresden very satisfactory to people not intimately familiar with the fine old models of the factory. The same has been done at SÈvres, Doccia and other factories. Then, too, in some cases the plagiarism is furnished with distinguishing marks that have increased the confusion—for the neophyte collector, be it understood.

It is well known, for instance, that before closing its doors towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Capodimonte factory sold all the models of the factory to Ginori’s noted china works at Doccia, and together with the models the right to use the N surmounted by a crown which was the Capodimonte factory mark. Ginori’s factory has ever since reproduced imitation Capodimonte with the mark of the Royal Neapolitan factory. Of course the pieces may be sold by the firm as Ginori ware and not as Capodimonte, but once on the market they are sure to come into the possession of some unscrupulous dealer who will palm them off as Capodimonte.

A good connoisseur, however, can tell, almost at sight, the real Capodimonte from the ones Ginori’s factory has been turning out for more than a century. The latter are not so fine in form or colour, and although made from the same mould are not so well finished and retouched as the real Capodimonte.

Apart from this, a large contribution to imitations of highly reputed china is made by smaller factories that find it convenient and profitable to copy pieces of celebrated marks. Some of these factories even go so far as to imitate the mark, rendering the deception perfect.

There is another form of deceit in the market for artistic china, peculiar to this particular branch. Many factories are in the habit of disposing of such artistic pieces as are not considered altogether up to the reputation of the factory. These pieces are often bought by clever workmen who embellish them with skill and patience, and then sell them profitably. If the mark is missing it is added with muffled colours. To obviate this irregularity some of the best factories either erase the mark on the wheel, or cut certain lines in the glaze which indicate that the piece is genuine but not recognized by the factory as up to its standard of artistic value. Of course even a moderately expert collector knows the indelible sign made over the genuine mark, but there, nevertheless, seem to be people who buy such pieces under the impression that they are genuine first-rate Dresden, whereas no other claim can be made than that the white background and the mark are authentic, both baked a gran fuoco as the decoration is generally muffled work and can be executed by any skilled workman who has built a muffle in his own house. Nowadays defective pieces are destroyed by reputable firms; but years ago they were not only sold off, but even given to the very factory men, who took them home, decorated them and put them on the market as genuine pieces. Some of these curious fakes are naturally almost as good as the genuine article, being at times the work of the same artist and the defect of the first firing is not always visible as a slight curve in a dish, or a tiny speck in the glaze of a vase, is a sufficient blemish for the piece to be thrown aside by the factory. Where the faker does not always display his usual sharpness is in the falsification of marks of noted factories. He is apt to make gross mistakes by copying a mark from an original without knowing the historical characteristics of the marks of certain factories, their peculiarities and eventual changes. Take, for instance, the SÈvres mark. It is known that instead of dating the pieces in figures, the SÈvres factory began in the year 1753 to mark the pieces with an A between the entwined initials of the King’s name, and that each successive year was marked by the French alphabet till the letter Z was reached in 1776, after which the alphabet was repeated again, doubling each letter, thus:—

It is, however, not unusual to see a faked piece of SÈvres imitating the work of the end of the eighteenth century wrongly marked as to date, the faker having evidently copied the mark from an original, unaware that it represented a date as well. This incredible ignorance can only be explained by the fact that many of these clever imitators, are artists altogether unacquainted with any information outside their imitative art. There are also other difficulties in the imitation of SÈvres and its marks, more especially the pieces of the above series, of which the faker appears to be unaware. Beside the factory mark, in the alphabet series particularly, there is always the special mark of the artist who did the decoration. These marks are generally not very conspicuous, initials, dots, lines, etc., and belong to specialists, miniature portrait painters, landscapists or simple decorators. By copying the old marks mechanically without knowing the information carried by the artist’s initials or marks, the faker is liable to attribute a piece of faked landscape painting to a portraitist and vice versa. Errors of this kind are more common than is generally supposed. In faked china there is no question of patina or devices by which to confer an appearance of age to the piece, nor of artificial breakages for, by a freak of connoisseurship and contrary to faience, repaired china has lost in a great many cases all artistic and monetary value.

We now turn to glassware and enamels as bearing a certain affinity in the domain of faked art and antiquities with the glazed pottery already illustrated.

The museum of Saint-Germain contains specimens of faked Roman glass with iridescent effect produced by the queer scheme of sticking fish scales to one side, which as every one knows are iridescent. A most naÏve form of faking to which later progress in the grand and artistic profession of duping unwise collectors hardly renders it necessary for imitators to have recourse.

Phoenician glass, the little scent bottles, the so-called lachrymatories or tear-bottles, furnish a large source of profit to the faker. They do not command high prices, and appeal to the less fastidious class of collectors, tourists, and are sure of finding purchasers. Interment in earth or manure gives the desired iridescent quality to the glass in time.

From these antique types we will proceed to others of more recent times which demand more care and skill to imitate, not so much on account of the art as the peculiar defects of certain kinds. While Cologne distinguishes herself with imitations of specimens of old glass, the so-called product of excavation, and other cities of Germany reproduce old national types, Italy has revived old Murano with a certain amount of success, as well as various kinds of Quattrocento and later samples.

These imitations are not always made with the intention to deceive and their success depends upon the class of collector. He who has perfected his taste finds that although they may approximate to the old originals materially, artistically they are wanting. The excess of precision that belongs to modern reproductions somewhat lessens the artistic effect and forms one of the salient differences between old and new.

But these after all are not dangerous, they represent the cabotage on the sea of deceit; there are also fine pieces of real artistic value that are imitated by artists of every nation such as old Bohemian chefs-d’oeuvre, Murano chandeliers, the latter sometimes composed of old and modern parts.

Cut glass is another branch in which the skilful imitator has triumphed. The work of Valerio Belli and others is so well imitated that even the best connoisseurs are deceived.

With regard to enamels we would repeat the usual refrain, do not buy them until you know whence they come, and until you have traced at least two or three centuries of well-authenticated pedigree.

There are ordinary imitations in the antique market which are quite easily distinguished, but there are others, regular chefs-d’oeuvre of art and craft, that defy and have, in fact, defied experience and knowledge.

Not all imitations are by Laudin or Noailher, whose work may be of interest to the accommodating taste of lovers of imitations, but there are products of a higher grade, unfortunately for collectors and museums, and these are not sold as imitations, but good round sums have been paid for them and they have, in a way, ruined the reputation of more than one collector and expert.

The technique of the work is identical with that of the past, and the process for giving an appearance of age very much resembles that already described in this chapter, though there are some fakers who claim to have found a patina that cannot be dissolved, being incorporated with the enamel as a glaze obtained in the second firing. The many lawsuits and summonses at the Courts with respect to the buying and selling of counterfeit enamels, are ample proof that faking is rampant also, in this interesting branch of art collecting.

It suffices to say that among the illustrious victims of faked enamels there is to be included the elder Baron Rothschild, or le Baron Alphonse as he was briefly called among antiquaries.

The first of his bad experiences in faked enamel was revealed to the wealthy Baron by Mr. Mannheim, one of the finest and most honest connoisseurs of Paris, then taking his first steps in the traffic with antiques. From the first, Mannheim had an excellent eye and he discovered that a place of honour was being given to a false piece in Baron Alphonse’s rare series of choicest enamels. At first he did not dare to reveal the secret, but after having gained the certitude that not only the one piece, but others also, of the collection were more or less clever fakes, he took the opportunity to speak that was offered one day by the Baron’s praise of this fine piece of enamel.

At first the Baron was of course obstinate in his unbelief, but upon a final test and the opinion of other experts, Mannheim’s good eye finally triumphed. The chef-d’oeuvre and other spurious pieces for which the multi-millionaire had paid a fortune disappeared from the collection.

Long after the above experience with which Mannheim’s name was connected, Rothschild bought an altar-piece of immense value and great artistic merit. This fine enamel had been sold to the Baron by a London dealer, who had evidently bought the piece as an antique and did not scruple to sell the rarity to his best client for one million lire.

Having been told by his dealer that the enamel had originally come from Vienna, Baron Rothschild one day pointed it out to an Austrian attachÉ, his guest, commenting upon its beauty and his own good fortune in having it in his possession. He concluded by expressing his surprise that Austria should let such a fine work of art cross the frontier. The attachÉ said nothing in the presence of the other guests, and only whispered to his host “I will come to-morrow to tell you what I think of your find!” The next day, in fact, he returned and revealed to the Baron how he had been deceived in what he thought to be a precious original, as it was nothing but a copy of a well-known altar-piece preserved in Vienna. He was even able to name the man who had made the copy of the precious enamel, a certain Werninger who had secretly made a reproduction while restoring the original.

The Baron claimed and obtained his million from the London dealer, whose good faith in this affair was beyond question, and a warrant was issued against Mr. Werninger. The dealer did not recover the price he had paid but Mr. Werninger was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, ample time in which to meditate upon the reprehensible side of his alluring art.

As usual we must conclude the illustration of this particular branch of the trade with a warning, for if Baron Rothschild had to regret the acquisition of expensive enamels, and he is not the only conspicuous connoisseur to do so, what is the fate likely to overtake the first exploits of a neophyte in the field! If not assisted by a first-rate expert, the freshman had better not meddle with enamels for a long time, but assuage his passion by going and admiring well-known and authentic pieces in famous museums.