Bords de la Seine à Argenteuil ("Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil") is an oil painting by Claude Monet[1] and is owned by Englishman David Joel. The painting is a landscape depicting the River Seine at Argenteuil in France.
It was featured on the BBC TV programme, Fake or Fortune?.[1]
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The painting was acquired by Joel in 1992 for £40,000.[1] Joel is an art historian who has published two important art books, the first a catalogue raisonné, the second a history of Monet at Vétheuil and on the Norman Coast.[2][3] The painting had previously been offered for sale at auction, but failed to reach its £500,000 reserve.[1][4] The title Bords de la Seine à Argenteuil along with the date, 1875, appears on the frame, and there is a painted signature of Claude Monet.[1] In the years since he purchased it, Joel has attempted to establish it as an authentic Monet.[1] The most widely accepted authority on Monet's work is the catalogue raisonné published by the Wildenstein Institute in Paris.[1] The Wildenstein Institute has examined the painting only once, after Daniel Wildenstein had died, but does not accept it as genuine.[1] He only ever saw a poor photograph of it in Monet's obituary.[5] Fiona Bruce (a journalist) and Philip Mould (an art dealer and historian) investigated the painting in the TV programme Fake or Fortune? broadcast on 19 June 2011.[1][6] The Art Access Research Centre scanned the picture using high resolution, infrared and X-Ray photography.[1] At the Lumiere Technology Centre the picture was scanned using a 240Mega-pixel camera and 13 different light filters.[1] The resulting image was examined by Iris Schaefer, the head of Conservation at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, who has previously uncovered a fake Monet which had been accepted by the Wildenstien Institute. She declared the Joel painting genuine.[1] The chemical analysis of paints used in the painting and signature were studied by Dr Nicholas Eastaugh (Courtauld Institute of Art) and were found to conform precisely with Monet's palette and the mediums he used in 1873.[7]
The programme had the brushwork and signature examined by experts who concluded that they were by Monet.[1] The programme concluded that the painting was genuine, an opinion shared by a number of experts,[1] including Monet scholars Professor John House (Courtauld Institute of Art),[1] Professor Paul Hayes Tucker, and others.[8] However the Wildenstein Institute refused to accept this, thereby choosing to ignore the latest research, and continued to regard the painting as a fake, a decision based predominantly on the connoisseurship of the late Daniel Wildenstein.[1][9]
The stretcher has a label from the Paris art supplies dealer Latouche who is known to have had dealings with Monet and to have supplied canvases to a number of impressionist artists.[1] The style of this label suggests the canvas was sold before 1884.[1] On the back of the painting there is also a French railway sticker for transport from Paris to Argenteuil where Monet lived between 1871 and 1878.[1] The back of the painting has a further sticker from a London gallery, Arthur Tooth and Sons, which handled a number of Monet paintings.[1] The sticker has the sticker number 3322.[1] Gallery records show that it was acquired from Mahmoud Kahlil.[1] He was an Egyptian art collector whose collection is now housed in the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo.[1] The museum records show a photograph of the painting which had been acquired by Khalil from the Paris dealer Georges Petit.[1] There is another sticker on the painting with the number 5575.[1] Stylistically, this label matches others which are known to be from the George Petit gallery and the number implies that it was in Petit's gallery before May 1920 and thus before Monet's death in 1926.[1]
The evidence suggests the following provenance:[10]
Monet painted a number of scenes in the Argenteuil area. An acknowledged work with the same title was painted by Monet in 1872. This work was sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York for $4.8 million in 2005.[12]