Philip Mould is a renowned expert on portrait paintings, and a host of the British version of Antiques Roadshow. His new book, The Art Detective, tells the stories of six paintings that were either authenticated as masterworks or unmasked as forgeries. Host Guy Raz talks to Mould about some of his major finds, and how he goes about distinguishing fakes from the real thing.
GUY RAZ, host: Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Around Thanksgiving time in 1992, a London art dealer named Philip Mould was invited to rural Vermont to see a private collection. The owner was Earle Newton, and he kept his paintings inside an old, disused church.</s>GUY RAZ, host: When Mould walked in, he saw hundreds of portraits scattered about, and one of them, propped against the altar, caught his eye.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): (Reading) It stood out partly because of its quality but also because it did not conform to the politer, better-behaved expressions all around it. An unashamedly porcine image of a middle-aged woman in pink taffeta, she had the unfashionable hint of a smile showing through her bulbous cheeks. Its candor was mesmeric.</s>GUY RAZ, host: That's Philip Mould describing the encounter. At that moment, Mould realized he was staring at a painting by the English master William Hogarth, a painting worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Earle Newton bought it at a country yard sale for $250. It's one of the stories Philip Mould tells in his new book, "The Art Detective." He's a paintings expert for the British version of the "Antiques Roadshow," and Philip Mould joins me from London.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Welcome.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Hi, there.</s>GUY RAZ, host: How did Earle Newton come to own not just that painting by Hogarth but the other masterworks in his collection?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Earle Newton, professor as we called him, was an extraordinary man. He was an indiscriminate buyer. He would sometimes go into shops and just buy things in quantity.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): In fact, he once bought 25 oil paintings for about $250. And what he wished to do was just accumulate as much as possible in order to fill his life and his houses that he bought, as well, because he accumulated them. In fact, he accumulated old cars. This man was an indefatigable hoarder and buyer.</s>GUY RAZ, host: You had flown out to Vermont in 1992. This was sort of at the beginning of your career. You didn't know what to expect. First, you thought this was some kind of grand hoax, right? You didn't expect to see anything.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): It was only as I was touching down  it was snow-filled Vermont, it was a sort of a black-white night, if you know what I mean  I suddenly realized what on Earth am I doing?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): He then picked me up in this huge, rusting Bentley and took me deep into the wilderness, then, to my amazement found that even though it was the day after Thanksgiving, they had laid out the table and said, we're waiting for you.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): And I gradually came to the sticky realization, as I looked around the walls, that there were no portraits. There were no paintings. And I thought I might have, well, walked into some sort of, who knows, rather terrifying hoax.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Maybe a Stephen King novel.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Yeah.</s>GUY RAZ, host: But in fact, it wasn't a hoax, but it took a few days, right? I mean, you were there for about 24 hours before he actually showed you his crown jewel, so to speak.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Indeed. So I hadn't seen one painting anywhere. The next morning, I got up and crunched my way through the snow to a church across the road. And then he opened the doors.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Incidentally, it had a sign outside it saying Museum of the Americas, but no one ever visited it. Anyway, so he opened this door, turned on the lights one by one, and the sight that met my eyes is something I shall never, ever forget because instead of a congregation of people in this disused church, it was a congregation of portraits.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): And where the altar was, there were full lengths. Where the stations of the cross would have hung, you know, there were middle-sized paintings. It was an assembly of oil-painted faces.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Bit by bit, I began to work out beneath all the dirt, beneath all the grime  and this is actually one of the art detective's functions in life is to actually look through the layers of accumulated filth and try and work out what treasures might lay beneath.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): And it took me about an hour to absorb it all, and I realized that I was in probably in the greatest sweets shop I shall ever find.</s>GUY RAZ, host: How much was his collection worth, approximately?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Adding it all up - and he's now left it to Savannah College of Art -his collection must be close to about $10 million.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Ten million dollars. I mean, for somebody in your profession, it's not always easy to make money. People, I think, have an assumption that galleries are always selling their works, but it's actually quite difficult. This trip turned into a gold mine for you. I mean, you actually came back with something quite valuable.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Indeed, I did. And I have to say it was the last experience I would describe as the pre-computer age because I don't travel anything like as much as I used to. The modern hunter of art  and there are many, many out there, sits in front of a screen.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): I end up buying, I don't know, three or four pictures a week sometimes, sight unseen, in all far-flung parts of the world.</s>GUY RAZ, host: You have identified a Thomas Gainsborough piece just by seeing it on the Internet. And you bought a Gainsborough painting from an eBay sale. First of all, what did you pay for it?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): I think about $170.</s>GUY RAZ, host: And how were you able to identify it as the real thing from a photo online?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): It's a bit like bird watching. You get to sort of recognize the plumage, the colors, the shape, the behavior of the portrait, you know, and the posture and what have you. And here was a painting of a man with a rather unprepossessing looking solid jacket, which didn't quite make sense, but a rather beautiful face.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): It was rather honeyed in the way that the strokes were applied, and he had a sort of faraway look in his eye. And I thought: hang on, there's only one artist who can do that. That's Thomas Gainsborough. But the jacket looked appalling.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Anyway, I bought it, and I got it back into the gallery, and I realized that what had happened was that this was almost certainly a Gainsborough, but at some point in its history, someone had decided to repaint the body to turn it into a different looking man.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): And so I did something which in some ways I'm rather embarrassed about, actually, because I don't restore my own pictures. I have professionals for doing so. But it was only $180 or whatever, and it was irresistible. It was nighttime. Everyone had gone home.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): And I took out a bottle of acetone, put the painting on my easel, took out some swabs of cotton wool and bit by bit over the course of two hours, I removed his jacket. And from beneath appeared this most startling form.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): At one point, incidentally, I got very concerned because I saw pink suddenly coming through, and the jacket was browny-yellow and I thought, oh, no. I've gone too far. The acetone has burnt through into the canvas. But in fact, it was the hand. It was the man's hand, which Gainsborough had very neatly put into his waistcoat.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): It was like a hatching pupa, actually. And this thing came out, and suddenly, I was looking at, you know, this scruffy little picture bought on eBay for $180, I was looking at a (unintelligible) early Gainsborough, painted just as the artist was getting going in his career in Ipswich in the 1750s.</s>GUY RAZ, host: And what did you end up selling it for?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): The condition was not great. So I unfortunately could only sell it for about $35,000.</s>GUY RAZ, host: That's not a bad return.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Oh, it's not a bad return. No, no, no. It's a really good return. But the trouble is when you say Gainsborough, you know, it's a bit like saying jackpot. But you know, there is such thing as a cheap Gainsborough, as well as an expensive one.</s>GUY RAZ, host: When so many people have so much access to information now, is it really likely that we'll hear about hidden masterworks, you know, gathering dust in some attic all that much in the future? I mean, do you think those paintings are still out there?</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Yes, there are a lot. And I'll tell you what's going to be happening increasingly now. Our science has massively moved ahead, we all know that, but the science of restoration has, as well, and we can now look into pictures, look through them, look behind them. We can take later paint off.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): The (unintelligible) photography now has allowed us to be able to compare artists' works so much better. I mean, we can get, like, 1,000 images of some of the greatest artists in front of us, so attribution and the actual exposing of things, who they're by and what they're like, is now much easier.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): So the type of discoveries that are going to be made and will be made are not so much the things from granny's attic but the things that are hidden from view.</s>GUY RAZ, host: That's Philip Mould, author of "The Art Detective" and the official art advisor to the Houses of Parliament in London.</s>GUY RAZ, host: Philip Mould, thank you so much.</s>Mr. PHILIP MOULD (Author, "The Art Detective"): Thank you.