10/01/2026
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“Prove it!” ~ when experts stand united
Michael Daley examines a National Gallery support campaign for a picture that lost its (sound) back for no good reason and kept its (weak) attribution…
Defending insecure or unsound attributions calls for vigilance, ingenuity, and speed. The National Gallery has shown all three in defence of its ‘Rubens’ Samson and Delilah.
The picture was bought for £2.5m at Christie’s on July 11th 1980 – then a world record price for a Rubens and second highest price for any painting. Its acquisition was regarded by the Gallery as an art-political triumph and presented as such with much razzamatazz. (A “strictly confidential” draft press release announcing the acquisition was prepared in advance of the sale.) It would be hard for an institution to have invested more heavily – financially and professionally - in a picture. The work itself however had arrived in London with a long, unacknowledged shadow and a short, iffy provenance. Today, in wake of the Gallery’s conflicting accounts of the picture’s history and condition, it possesses a very dark double shadow. Bluntly speaking, this is a picture whose sums do not add up.
Despite presently being dated at “around 1610”, Samson and Delilah’s absolutely secure provenance goes back no further than 1929 when it emerged from a restorer’s studio by all accounts in the very pink of condition (see AW File) as a “Honthorst”. It was upgraded to Rubens status in 1930 on the say-so and certificate of “authenticity” of Dr Ludwig Burchard, the then leading Rubens scholar who, as Kasia Pisarek reveals above, was a most generous provider of certificates in a generally lax era.
A generation later (in the 1960s), the picture was said to have been in the Liechtenstein collection between 1700 and 1881. This post-dated claim was plausible given the work’s subject and dimensions, but raised serious questions avoided at the time of Burchard’s upgrading. Had it indeed been in that collection, it would not have been as a Rubens, but as a copy of a Rubens by Jan van den Hoecke. That no account can be given of its whereabouts for the half century between de-accessioning as a copy and subsequent swift elevation to Rubens status might therefore be seen as a suspicious circumstance – not least because, as Kasia Pisarek reveals, its emergence onto the art market in 1929 coincided neatly with the deaths of two key figures intimately familiar with the earlier de-accessioning, namely, the Liechtenstein collection’s owner, Prince Johannes II and his artistic adviser Wilhelm von Bode. If this was that Liechtenstein picture, where had it been sleeping? - In dealers’ vaults?
The picture has a number painted on its front that, contrary to a National Gallery claim in 1983, does not correspond with a Liechtenstein inventory number. The claimed Liechtenstein connection was not only made late but without material evidence where evidence was to be expected. As a picture from the collection, it should have a black Liechtenstein seal on its front and a red one on its back. It has neither and no record of having possessed either. Was Burchard himself, a sometime co-signee of Rubens certificates with von Bode, aware that the picture had been de-accessioned as a copy when he presented it as nothing less than the long-lost (since 1641) original Rubens that had been commissioned for the home of Nicolaas Rockox?
The “disappeared” back
The criticisms of the Samson and Delilah’s credentials and traits as a picture, which began in the early 1990s, were fuelled in 2000 by a controversy we led over the unacknowledged removal of the picture’s original back and the historical evidence it carried. A persisting mystery attaches to the lost original back. The art establishment has sometimes seemed afflicted by a collective desire “not to know”. Until we proved otherwise, the National Gallery denied that any record existed of the original back. Until we began uncovering them, no records had been produced of the picture’s condition prior to 1983 when the Gallery reported on its own restoration the year before. Such records as have been produced by the Gallery on this picture are, by its own standards, strikingly incomplete (see below).
Record of the original back
In 1983 after its restoration of the picture the year before, the National Gallery reported the fact of the back’s removal (- the first ever public reference to the event) but wrongly implied that it had been executed out of living memory sometime in the 19th or very early 20th centuries. It claimed that the treatment was in response to a dire conservation necessity. As shown below, both positions have been abandoned.
My discovery in 2000 of the picture’s original 1930 Burchard certificate of authenticity was doubly embarrassing to the Gallery. It showed that Burchard had explicitly testified that the panel picture was then in excellent condition and still retained its original back. Removal of the back, therefore, took place after the picture was attributed to Rubens and not before, as the Gallery had seemed at pains to suggest. The discovery itself was made in the Gallery’s own dossiers when it had denied (to us) possession or knowledge of such. This raised the possibility its earlier misleading reports might have been published knowingly.
Record of deception
Questions of dependability in its technical accounts had been a sensitive issue for the Gallery since 1977 when former director, Kenneth (later Lord) Clark, admitted founding the science department as cover for the Gallery’s controversial picture cleaners by presenting “what purported to be scientific evidence to ‘prove’ that every precaution had been taken.”
In recent years the fig leaf has taken centre-stage with conservators (now outnumbering and outspending curators) calling the ideological/professional shots. Having initially promoted “scientific/conservational” expertise as a political expediency, the Gallery has allowed technical staff to lay claim to pioneer status in a new collective discipline (“Technical Art History”) in which restorers, scientists and curators pool efforts and advance on a common front. To its exponents, the new hybrid constitutes a progressive dismantling of unhelpful and outmoded hierarchies. Critics like us see an abdication of scholarly responsibilities and an abandonment of essential habits of connoisseurship. (See AW File.)
There would, of course, be no harm and much potential profit in technicians analysing the material components of pictures without prejudice or commitment, and then publishing their disinterested inquiries for consideration of the body of scholars as a whole. There is every danger in allowing analytical procedures and their reporting to be compromised by museum political expediencies.
How do they do it?
Throughout this particular controversy, the Gallery has subsumed vital art critical comparative material or visual evidence within the (supposedly) scientifically verified narrative of its conservators and scientists. We hope to show that the “technical art historical” procedures evident in the Gallery’s quarter-century long narrative on the Samson and Delilah, effectively dressed material evidence to support this attribution and purchase. In direct consequence, rigour and consistency of record keeping and reporting has been one casualty, methodological coherence another.
Small beginnings
My Burchard finding was published in an article “The back is where it’s at” in the June 2000 Art Review. It was reported in the Independent on Sunday of May 21st 2000 (“Tell-tale sign that £40m Rubens could be a copy”). Two days later, following further press coverage, an unsigned notice defending the painting’s attribution and the Gallery’s treatment of it, was placed in front of the picture. This unprecedented defensive reaction marked the beginning of a sustained pro-active campaign to bolster the picture.
The notice drew attention to a fuller statement (available at the information desk) defending the attribution and denying that the Gallery had tampered with picture’s original panel. This statement (unsigned and simply titled: “Updated 23 May 2000”) was an amended press release originally issued in October 1997 in response to earlier press coverage of criticisms from Euphrosyne Doxiadis and Kasia Pisarek. The initial, evolving position statement has found fullest expression in the Gallery’s 2005-06 exhibition and book Rubens ~ A Master in the Making.
The early defences of the attribution had three legs: 1) a linked disparagement of critics and a claim of universal support among Rubens specialists; 2) an assertion that the picture’s atypical features are proofs of authenticity; and, 3) the claim that tests had both corroborated the attribution and dispelled suspicions of Gallery interference with the picture’s original oak panel support.
I) Disparagement of critics
Museums resent challenges to their authority and expertise. The reflex response is to deflect not address criticism and to repudiate critics by impugning their qualifications or characters directly or by proxy.
Critics v supporters
“None of those individuals who have doubted the painting’s attribution to Rubens has published any work on the artist.”
(October 1997 Press release and the May 23 2000 updating.)
“At a colloquium at the National Gallery to mark the exhibition Rubens Landscapes, a large number of distinguished scholars who have devoted their careers to the study of Rubens unanimously agreed that the painting was one of the artist’s masterpieces…”
(October 1997 Press release and May 23 2000 updating.)
Such claims are designed to shut down critical engagement and any consideration of evidence. The disparagement of critics is not always made in good faith.
Doxiadis
On February 18th 1992 Euphrosyne Doxiadis submitted a report to the National Gallery she and two artist colleagues, Steven Harvey and Siân Hopkinson had written on the attribution’s weaknesses. (That report is now available on a dedicated website “afterrubens.org”.) It was respectfully received and placed in the Gallery’s own dossier on the picture. It drew a prompt confession from the then Senior Curator, Christopher Brown, that the extensive gaps the authors had demonstrated at the beginning and near the end of the picture’s claimed provenance (i.e. of ninety and forty nine years respectively) made it impossible to be 100 per cent sure that the Gallery’s picture was the original Rubens Samson and Delilah. Within months (I discovered in 2000 when permitted to consult the picture’s curatorial and conservation dossiers), the National Gallery was faxing inquiries to the Art Reference Library of the Frick Museum, New York about 19th century sales catalogues held on the Prince of Liechtenstein’s collection.
Pisarek
On October 5th 1997 Kasia Pisarek’s researches on the picture were adopted and reported by the Sunday Times’ art critic, Waldemar Januszczak in two articles “National’s £40m Rubens could be fake” and “Is this the man who Faked a Rubens?” It prompted the confession from director, Neil MacGregor that “This new evidence is respectable and the scholar raises some serious questions I cannot answer easily.” He never did and the Gallery itself soon reneged on a promise to produce answers. Its October 1997 Press Release was published in two editions. The first conceded:
“Debates of this sort require patient consideration of different sorts of evidence. The best format is for this evidence to be presented at some length for public discussion – and the National Gallery will be arranging such a lecture and debate over the next few months.”
Within days, the commitment was dropped from the press release’s second edition.
Journals of record
The Gallery later announced that Christopher Brown would publish a scholarly article on the picture in the Burlington Magazine. It never came. The editor told us that that none was submitted. An article submitted by Kasia Pisarek was rejected by The Burlington (letter 7 January 1998, from then editor Caroline Elam) and later also by Apollo (letter 21 May 1998, from then editor David Ekserdjian. Dr Brown subsequently left the Gallery to direct the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. An article by his successor, David Jaffé, appeared some years later (August 2000) in Apollo, but was expressly intended to end, not launch, any consideration of the evidence. (Weeks’ earlier journalists had been summoned to a Gallery press conference on the pending article which, they were assured, “will finally silence the critics”.) On publication, our request to reply was rejected by Apollo’s editor, David Ekserdjian, a former staff member of Christie’s. He also declined to publish a letter challenging Mr Jaffé’s methodology sent by Michel Favre-Felix, a painter member of the Association Internationale pour le Respect de l’Integrite du Patrimonie Artistique - ARIPA. (For prolonged exchanges on the subject, see “Journals of Record” I – VIII, in ArtWatch UK Newsletters 12-19.)
Paddling furiously
In October 1997, within weeks of the Sunday Times’ coverage of Kasia Pisarek’s findings, the Gallery was corresponding with Warburg Institute and Corpus Rubenianum Rubens specialist, Elizabeth McGrath about Jan van den Hoecke. Material McGrath was sending to the Gallery (in support of the Rubens attribution) had been sighted by Gregory Martin, formerly of the National Gallery, then of Christie’s, who happened to agree with her. She expressed confidence that Hoecke had actually worked with Rubens in his studio and might have collaborated with him on a Rubens then on loan at the National Gallery. McGrath expressed fear to the Gallery that if her material were to get handed on to the press she might be thought to be propounding her own theories. We feel it a pity that her information was not put into the public domain and regret that in today’s art world it is thought unacceptable for scholars to propound theories.
Loop of silence
Dr Brown’s departure has effectively been used by the Gallery to thwart inquiries into Samson and Delilah’s acquisition and subsequent treatment. On April 6th 2002 (letter) we asked the then director, Neil MacGregor, whether Dr Brown had been aware in 1982 of Burchard’s 1930 testimony on the condition of the Samson and Delilah. He replied (letter, April 9 2002): “As I am sure you know, Christopher Brown left the National Gallery some years ago…I suggest you pursue the matter with him.” When Christopher Brown was asked (December 2005) by the US magazine Salon to comment on his past involvement in the controversy surrounding Samson and Delilah, he replied: "I am sorry but I don't want to do this. Please address your questions to the National Gallery." It seems we may now never learn what Brown knew.
What did Brown know?
There was reason for believing that Brown would have been aware of Burchard’s 1930 testimony on the picture’s condition: “Under the terms of Ludwig Burchard’s will, I had the privilege of consulting the manuscript notes on the Samson and Delilah. My visit to Antwerp was made possible through a grant from the Sir Martin Davies Travel Fund”, Brown had reported in the catalogue to the Gallery’s 1983 Acquisition in Focus~ Rubens Samson and Delilah exhibition. (During visits made to Antwerp before 1980, Brown had visited the home of Nicolas Rockox, which had been turned into a museum.)
Did Burchard’s notes record the presence of Liechtenstein seals on the picture? Did they reveal any knowledge on his part of the picture’s whereabouts before 1929? Did they not contain a copy or draft of his 1930 certificate of authenticity? Does the Gallery know the answers to these questions?
Walls of expertise
Blanket claims of unanimous support for attributions often prove hollow – as with scholars who attended a colloquium on the National Gallery’s challenged Raphael Madonna of the Pinks (another panel picture, incidentally, which emerged late in the day from a restorer’s studio after all evidence had been removed from its back - by polishing it). When our colleague Professor James Beck asked members individually for their views, he found three had not supported the attribution.
(On a now-acknowledged collective error made on an Annibale Carracci attribution, see pages 4-5.)
The Massacre’s consensus
Sotheby’s claimed a consensus of scholarly support for its own elevation to Rubens of the Massacre of the Innocents shortly before the picture was sold on July 10th 2002 in London for nearly £50m. This was done almost entirely on the picture’s claimed connection with and similarity to the Samson and Delilah. The two were brought together at the National Gallery before the sale. (Christies had loaned the Samson and Delilah to the National Gallery, for examination before the 1980 sale.) Both are now said to have been in the Liechtenstein collection as copies by Jan van den Hoecke. With the Massacre, the presence of the original back and its two Liechtenstein seals were presented as strengths and selling points not handicaps, in the wake of the earlier acceptance of the Samson and Delilah – which is now shorn of its original back and its (presumed) Liechtenstein seals.
This “consensus” of support for the Massacre had consisted of only five experts, of whom three, Paul Huvenne, Arnout Balis and Elizabeth McGrath, were identified. Some of them thought the Massacre predated the Samson and Delilah, some thought that it post-dated it. It is certainly different but a work cannot be both more and less advanced stylistically than another. So which part of that (very select) expert consensus might have been right?
Vital chronology
The Samson was originally said to have been painted immediately on Rubens’ return from Italy at the end of 1608 - according to Christopher Brown, “in mid-1609”. The Massacre however is admitted to contain an allusion to a classical sculpture discovered at the end of 1611. Tests had shown that wood used in its panel was still growing in the ground ten years later than wood found in the Samson. As a result, a dendrochronologist, Peter Klein claimed, a date of ex*****on for the picture only becomes “plausible from 1615 upwards”. This awkward fact was not mentioned in the sale catalogue but was contained in the last sentence, of the last page of a special volume of reports on the picture, which had been said, in the last sentence of the twenty pages long sale catalogue entry, to be “available to all on request”.
Circular arguments
The reports contained other injurious material. Like the Samson and Delilah, the picture is said to have little under drawing or revisions. There is a single large pentimento – but the technical reports note that it was executed in a manner “rather different” from the rest of the picture (i.e. painted with “denser pigments”). The two pictures are said to be “strikingly similar” in their (for Rubens) entirely uncharacteristic stinting use of lead white pigment. The Massacre contains a pigment (orpiment) found in no other Rubens of the period and used in a manner “not encountered” in 17th century work. (The Samson and Delilah was admitted to contain a purple found nowhere in Rubens). The Massacre contains features characteristic of Rubens’ corrections to his workshop assistants’ productions. Notwithstanding this conflicted, unhelpful evidence, the Samson is said to corroborate the Massacre, the Massacre to corroborate the Samson.
Taken in
Experts are prone to herd-like behaviour and sometimes make catastrophic mistakes when following their leader of the moment.
In 1937, seven years after Dr Ludwig Burchard certificated his newly discovered Samson and Delilah as an entirely autograph Rubens, a fake Vermeer (Christ at Emmaus) by Van Meegeren was certificated by Dr Abraham Bredius and bought by the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam to critical acclaim. A stream of fake Vermeers followed. (A rare, now vindicated, dissident was Lord Duveen whose agent dubbed the first Van Meegeren “Vermeer” a “Rotten Fake” on sight.)
The Great Vermeer Mistake has many parallels with the Samson and Delilah attribution.
Expectations
In scholarly circles in 1937, it was suspected that the young Vermeer, like Rubens, had been influenced by Caravaggio. This rested on the single, unusually big, not altogether secure, and stylistically uncharacteristic Vermeer Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. On the strength of this single picture, Van Meegeren artfully realised those very scholarly expectations. His fake Vermeers dazzled then experts much as the Samson and Delilah is said to have dazzled Rubens experts at its first public outing in Antwerp in 1977.
Certificates
Both the Samson and the Christ, the upgrade and the exposed fake alike, came into being on the art historical say-so, and authenticating certificate, of a single expert “top dog” in their respective fields.
Bredius, wrote the following gushing note of authentification for Van Meegeren’s Christ:
“This glorious work of Vermeer, the great Vermeer of Delft, has emerged – thank God! – from the darkness where it lay for many years undefiled and just as it left the artist’s studio. Its subject is almost unique in his oeuvre; a depth of feeling springs from it such as is found in no other work of his. I found it hard to contain my emotions when this masterpiece was first shown to me and many will feel the same who have the privilege of beholding it. Composition, expression, colour – all combine to form an unity of the highest art, the highest beauty.
Bredius,
September 1937.”
Where Bredius rushed embarrassingly but sincerely to tell the world of his discovery (“A New Vermeer”, the Burlington Magazine, November 1937), Ludwig Burchard, as Kasia Pisarek shows, bothered to claim no professional credit or honour for his “discovery” of what is today being presented as one of the all-time great Rubens’s. Even his certificate seemed devoid of passion or enthusiasm:
The photographed painting on the other page is one of Peter Paul Rubens’ major works from the time of the master’s return from Italy. It must have been painted in 1609 or 1610. With Rubens’ agreement, Jacob Matham reproduced the painting with a copper engraving around 1615. As witnessed by the inscription [or “caption”] of the painting, the picture at that time was in the possession of Antwerp mayor Nicolas Rockox. Indeed, the inventory of Nic. Rockox’ estate, dated 19 Dec. 1640, lists the picture as “Eene schilderne…(Annales de l’Academie d’Archaeologie de Belgique, Anvers 1881, p. 437). On pp 143-44 in vol. I of 1886, the five-volume catalogue of Rubens’ work by Max Rooses, the painting is described in detail as number 115, based on the Matham engraving and mentioning the Rockox inventory. The picture itself remained as unknown to Rooses as to all literature since. It is further notable that a picture of an interior by Frans Francken (Pinakothek Munchen No 720), which appeared to be of mayor Rockox’ living room, showing the painting in pride of place above the mantelpiece, while in an adjoining room is the picture of the “Doubting Thomas” which we know Rubens painted for Rockox. According to S. Hartveld of Antwerp, the room with the mantelpiece exists even today in the Kaiserstraat in Antwerp where Frau Gruter-Van der Linden now lives in the Rockox house. A sketch for the Samson picture (pen, varnished, 16.4 x 16.2) is in Amsterdam in the collection of Mr J.Q. Regteren, Altena.
The picture is in a remarkably good state of preservation, with even the back of the panel in its original condition.
Signed Ludwig Burchard
Floodgates
Once the fake Vermeer was accepted on Bredius’s authority, the door was left open for a stream of similar Van Meegeren “Vermeers”. This is well known and extensively chronicled. Acceptance of the Samson and Delilah paved the way for The Massacre’s upgrading and for the wave of newcomers now being pressed with alarming circularity as corroborations of the Samson and Delilah.
II) Theoretical ingenuity
Hans Tietze noted in his 1948 book “Genuine and False” that: “In many instances the resourcefulness of the deceived experts in defending their untenable positions is no less astounding than the error itself.” Christopher Wright, a scholar of 17th-century art said of the Samson and Delilah ("Expert denounces National Gallery's Rubens", The Times November 25 1996) “They have made a mistake with this. We all make mistakes. It's the defence of the mistake not the mistake itself, that is to be criticised.”
The National Gallery’s 1997 and 2000 statements both conceded that the Samson and Delilah “does not look like the other [twenty] works by Rubens in the Gallery”. Undaunted, the Gallery averred that this was because “it is the only work in this collection typical of the artist when he returned from Italy in 1608 […but, it] is directly comparable to works of the same period elsewhere”.
Presenting this picture as untypical of the oeuvre generally but typical of a singular narrow slice within it was audacious. Even recently, when defending this “autonomous” period in the 2005-06 Rubens show’s catalogue, David Jaffé was obliged to concede conceded that it is “only recently…understood” and remains “problematic”. In truth, it is more problematic than understood. Why should today’s scholars - who are at the greatest historical distance from the artist and handicapped by having to compare works that have suffered different and varyingly grievous “conservation histories” - be better able to appraise works than contemporary and subsequent Rubens scholars prior to Burchard? The notion might be credible had Rubens escaped all notice and produced a body of work bearing little or no relation to either the preceding or following period. Neither was the case. There is no reason for postulating an oeuvre within an oeuvre. Aspirant/candidates for inclusion ought properly to be related to the proven, bona-fide works of the period – why suggest anything other? The ark of Rubens’ work from late Italy through to his triumphant return in Antwerp is one of the most glorious “sun-bursts” in art history. Why gainsay or adulterate it? Attempts to break the artistic, stylistic thread between those linked proven works in order to insinuate a catchall “hitherto-overlooked-period” is unworthy and preposterous. Did this hypothecated period occur between two particular secure masterpieces or alternately in the gaps between all of the secure works? Why should Rubens have painted thick, with gusto and revisions in all his secure works of the brief period but thin, without revisions and with dodgy pigments in the upgraded works that have gained acceptance in our times? Why should Rubens, in this short period, be rendered ever more various and eclectic?
Great expectations
The National Gallery, when characterising Rubens as “brashly concerned to show his acquaintance with the most recent trends of Italian art”, claimed the concern occupied only a “brief phase” and that this picture was “exactly what one would expect Rubens to have painted at that moment, just returned from Rome”. Both notions testify to the picture’s persisting isolation. We have no need to “expect” – we know how he painted on his return. Because convincing siblings for Samson and Deliah are not to be found among the period’s absolutely secure paintings, the “brief phase” is being lengthened, its remit widened. It currently runs from 1609 to “around” 1614. Within it, David Jaffé now stretches Samson and Delilah’s own claimed moment of ex*****on to “c. 1609 –11”. Even so, all evidence suggests that the Massacre – presented by Jaffe as “corroboration” of the Samson and Delilah – falls well outside even this extended period. Combinations of “expectations” and shifting, elastic historical moments afford treacherous foundations for art historical edifices.
“Corroborations”
I) Technical
David Jaffé has certainly shown energy and resource in support of the Samson and Delilah attribution in his August 2000 Apollo article and the 2005-06 Rubens: A Master in the Making exhibition. There is no doubting his conviction that the Samson and Delilah is a fine, rare-but-authentic Rubens. Nonetheless, and although he played no part in its purchase, as Senior Curator today with responsibility for Flemish paintings, he did seem in Apollo fully to have accepted the role of “official gatekeeper” to the problem picture:
“Questions have been raised about aspects of the physical state of Rubens’s ‘Samson and Delilah’ since its purchase by the National Gallery at auction in 1980. In particular, the contrast between its almost perfectly preserved paintwork and the alien support of blockboard – a composite board made from spruce end grain blocks [sic] glued together and sandwiched between a wood veneer – on the back of the panel may come as something of a surprise.”
The backing that came from nowhere
“Surprise” indeed and for these reasons:
1) No published document records a blockboard backing on the picture before the Gallery’s 1983 Technical Bulletin reports.
2) All references to the Samson and Delilah made up to the 1982 restoration (including a Gallery report of that year - see below), describe or imply a sound, well-made, excellently preserved panel.
3) To this day, no one has ever admitted planing the original panel down to a thickness of less than 3mm and gluing the remains onto a sheet of blockboard.
4) With this picture, the Gallery’s condition records breach its own claimed procedures.
A Tale of Two Panels
The extent of the “accountability deficit” with this picture can be seen by comparison with Altdorfer’s Christ taking leave of His Mother. Both were painted on panel; both were bought for huge sums in 2000 (undisclosed in the case of the Altdorfer); both were immediately put on display; both were examined before being purchased by the Gallery; both were restored in 1982; both restorations were reported in the Gallery’s 1983 Technical Bulletin. There, all similarities end.
The condition of the Altdorfer on purchase is reported and illustrated with many photographs in the Bulletin. The condition of the Samson on purchase is neither illustrated nor recorded. With the Altdorfer, a short art historical note, by the curator Alastair Smith and a longer account of the restoration itself by Martin Wyld, the Gallery’s Senior Restorer were given. With the Samson and Delilah, there is nothing at all from the curator (Christopher Brown), and the restorer (David Bomford) contributes only a brief “Note on the Condition and Treatment”. The lion’s share of the account was given to the then head of science, Joyce Plesters. Despite its length, no photographs – other than an x-ray - of the picture before restoration are included. The photograph count was bumped up with images of other pictures - a Van Dyck; a Memlinc, twice; another National Gallery Rubens, twice; and, five pictures of three Rubens sketches. Plesters refers to an infra-red photograph of the Samson and Delilah which shows that no under-drawing exists, but reproduces an infra-red photograph of another painting.
The Altdorfer report includes: a black and white photograph of the picture, out of its frame, “on acquisition” in 1980; a black and white photograph of the picture, out of its frame, before cleaning; a large black and white x-ray photograph taken before the restoration and before the removal of the cradle; a detailed x-ray photograph taken before the restoration; an infra-red photograph of the whole picture, out of its frame, before the restoration (and therefore identifying earlier retouching); two detailed infra-red photographs; a colour photograph of the picture out of its frame after cleaning and restoration; four photographs of the picture’s back - two of the whole and one of a detail before restoration, two of the whole back and one of a detail after restoration; and, a close-up photograph of the picture’s bottom right-hand corner showing the distance at which the painted area stopped from the panel’s edges. (The equivalent photograph on the Samson would have given crucial testimony that the cropping of his toes was not a result of the panel having been cut along it right hand edge.)
