Fake Charles Peale Polk Oil Portraits
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GUEST:
I live in a 300-year-old whaler's cottage in Sag Harbor, and I went antiquing years ago, and I spotted these two paintings in a curio shop in Amagansett, and I fell in love with them immediately. I bought them and they've been hanging in my living room ever since. Yeah.
APPRAISER:
So what year approximately did you buy these?
GUEST:
Uh, around 2001.
APPRAISER:
Stylistically, these were painted somewhere in the late 18th, early 19th century.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
The clothing style dictates that.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
There weren't that many artists circulating throughout America at that point in time. And when you do the research of these late 18th-century paintings, you come upon a family called the Peales. Very famous family, very accomplished, well-known for their dozens of portraits of George Washington.
GUEST:
Oh, wow.
APPRAISER:
And with a little further research, voilà, these very portraits pop up as being painted by Charles Peale Polk. He was a nephew. These are portraits of Captain Thomas Kell...
GUEST:
Oh!
APPRAISER:
...and his wife and daughter. So you have a problem.
GUEST:
It's... Okay.
APPRAISER:
Because they're well-known portraits that were sold by a very prominent gallery in Philadelphia...
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
...about 1995. You then start to examine them forensically. They are oil on canvases, they are original artworks. When you turn them over, what you see is an attempt to fake age. You have a canvas that has been stained or dyed to look old.
GUEST:
Mm...
APPRAISER:
They were put on a stretcher. Old wood. Late 18th-century wood? No. But to a naive eye walking into a shop, they were meant to fool. Now, what did you pay for them back in the day?
GUEST:
For the pair, $6,000.
APPRAISER:
The originals in the mid-'90s sold for around $150,000.
GUEST:
Oh, wow. (laughs)
APPRAISER:
Yeah. I think we're gonna have to put a retail value on them for the pair of $1,300.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
You led with passion. You have a, a period house.
GUEST:
I do.
APPRAISER:
I'm sure they look absolutely beautiful.
GUEST:
They look spectacular there.
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