$75,000 ‘Lindauer’ sold for $4600 in 1974
A HAWKE’S BAY art buyer paid $4600 for a fake Lindauer portrait that was later sold to the Alexander Turnbull Library for $75,000.
The publicly funded library acquired what it believed to be a genuine Gottfried Lindauer painting at auction in 2013, but it revealed this week that forensic testing had established it was a fake.
Wellington police are investigating, and were given the vendor’s details by Wellington-based auction house Dunbar Sloane yesterday.
The catalogue for the 2013 auction said the work had been bought by the vendor’s Hastings in 1974.
That sale was made through auctioneer Murray McKearney,
father in who died in 2008. His son, Christopher, said records showed the painting sold for $4600, but he did not have details of who bought it.
‘‘In those days they would have been pumping paintings through [the auctions] without knowing whether something was fake or not – if it was a good one,’’ he said.
‘‘And if it fooled the Turnbull Library, it could probably fool a lot of people.’’
Dunbar Sloane Jr said his own efforts to contact the 2013 vendor – a private collector based in Hawke’s Bay – had been unsuccessful, and he had passed the person’s details on to police.
There appeared to be a number of Lindauer forgeries, along with fakes purported to be by Charles Goldie, originating out of Hawke’s Bay, Sloane said. ‘‘They’ve come to us through the years and we’ve rejected them.’’
Alexander Turnbull chief librarian Chris Szekely said in a blog post this week that the national heritage collector had ‘‘backed our own judgment’’ when buying the Lindauer, despite advice from Victoria University art expert Roger Blackley that it looked likely to be a fake.
The painting was ‘‘potentially the only image of a 19th-century Maori leader’’, and the subject ‘‘appeared to be a person of some importance’’.
‘‘We listened to [Blackley’s] views but proceeded with the auction. Differing opinions are not uncommon in these matters, and in this instance we went with the library’s in-house expertise. It is now evident that we were wrong.’’