DETOURS

Adam Can you introduce yourself and how we know you, and how long have you been on Roadshow?

Debra Well, I'm Debra Force, the owner of and president of Debra Force Fine Art, which is an art gallery in New York City. And I've been an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow for over 22 years.

Adam Debra is a specialist on the paintings table, and she was there at our event in Tampa, Florida in 2005 when an astonishing painting came in.

Debra In the scene you have the main central figure, the racing boat, and behind it is the observation boat. I certainly remember the painting as one of the highlights of works that I've looked at over the years, and what struck me about it is, well, first of all, its size. It's 30-by-50 inches approximately, and it struck me because it was an exciting yacht race.

Adam The painting is a large oil on canvas of two sailing yachts in a turbulent sea, but there wasn't a lot of information available on its backstory.

Debra The lady who brought it in said that it had belonged to her husband's grandfather, who had seen it in a shop in New York City sometime in the late 1800s.

Adam The painting had remained in the family since then, so there was no paper trail to go on. And more perplexing, there was no signature, but Debra could tell a few things about it right off the bat. It was almost certainly a late 19th century painting, and she had a confident guess about who did it. The well-known marine painter, James Buttersworth.

Debra In terms of Buttersworth's style, the rolling waves with the sea spray, it's very characteristic of one of his later works done in the 1880s. The billowing sails, also characteristic. And this is really nice because it's got figures, which is kind of interesting. It's really a major work by the artist.

Adam Given all this, Debra made her appraisal.

Debra This painting at auction would probably be estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 to $500,000.

Show Guest Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.

Adam But there was a caveat.

Debra The painting is not signed and so we would need to do further research in order to document that it is in fact by Buttersworth.

Adam Debra didn't know it then, but she had just set off a debate that continues to this day, who actually painted this masterpiece?

I am Adam Monahan, a producer with GBH's Antiques Roadshow, and this is Detours. Today: Yacht What it Looks Like.

James Buttersworth was one of the premier marine painters of the 19th century. Several of his works are on display at the Peabody Essex Museum, so I went there to learn more.

It's very pretty. Glass on the outside. Gorgeous November day. Actually, what I want to do too is we'll go look at the water, because Salem's right on the water and it's an awesome city. If you haven't been here, go to Salem, Massachusetts.

I was there to meet this guy.

Dan My name is Dan Finamore. I am the Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Adam What type of things are contained in your maritime section of art here at the Peabody Asset Museum?

Dan So to define what maritime is or maritime art is a pretty wide open field, as wide open as one can envision, where the sea influences people. So the most traditional definition are paintings of ships, are ship models, are lines drawings that allow one to understand the construction of ships, that use this material as illustrative of an industry or to be used for researchers in maritime history, but we've blown that away. That's the old school kind of mentality. Today maritime art is any piece that would reflect the impact of the sea on people's lives.

Adam Do we have any examples of Buttersworth in this gallery right now?

Dan We have two Buttersworth's here.

Adam Before that appraisal in 2005, I had never heard of him, but he is a very big name.

Dan He is among the biggest of any American maritime painter. But that said, I'm not at all surprised that you've never heard of him, because he was never brought into the cannon, so to speak, among art historians, because they've always held marine art at bay. It's been a special category and it's easy to think of that as a lesser art.

Adam Art historians might look down on it, but Buttersworth and his peers were highly sought after in their day. And many maritime paintings like the one on our show are truly stunning.

Dan There are paintings you look at and then you walk away and you can't actually reconstruct it in your head. But this is one of those that gets burned in, and I realize, "Oh yeah, it's a rare one."

Adam Buttersworth is known as an American artist, but he was actually born in England in 1817 to a family of marine painters.

Dan James Edward Buttersworth started life painting in a sort of traditional British marine school, which would've been a cross-section of subjects, but a lot of his early paintings are British naval vessels at sea. When he arrived in America at the end of the 1840s and around 1850, he started to paint American merchant vessels, and some of those paintings were turned into very popular prints, lithographs, that were disseminated very widely. So his work in its translated form in lithographs were part of the public consciousness. They were everywhere.

Adam Many of these earlier works celebrated the commercial clipper ship, a new American invention that could travel much faster than previous ship designs.

Dan But then by the 1870s, Buttersworth had transitioned into being a specialist yachting painter.

Adam In the late 19th century, yachting was a big deal.

Dan If you were to read the sports pages of the newspaper in the 1870s, yachting was at the top, yachting was the number one, and actually forget the sports pages, on the front page of many newspapers during the important races. It was obviously a pastime for the idle rich.

Adam And depicting yachts was a pastime for marine painters. The painting at our Tampa event looked just like a Buttersworth. A few months later, the painting's owner decided to have it officially appraised for sale. She called up Skinner Auctions.

Stephen So my name is Stephen Fletcher. I'm Executive Vice President now of Bonhams Skinner.

Adam And Stephen happens to also be a Roadshow appraiser. The owner told Stephen the painting had been attributed to Buttersworth, and now Stephen had to figure out if that was correct. So he called up a maritime art expert named Charlie Lanagan.

Stephen His input is good because he's coming sort of from an academic standpoint, so he knows about whether it is technically well painted, if the position of the vessel in the water makes sense, all these elements. So his experience is far more broadly informed than mine would be.

Adam You're like a general practitioner and he's like a brain surgeon.

Stephen Yeah, that's it.

Adam Here's Charlie.

Charlie So Steve and I flew down, hired a car and went to this woman's attorney's office where the picture was, and it was a fabulous picture. I spent a long time looking at it, and then I go outside and take a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, because you have to reset your mind. I did this a few times. I said, "It's just a fabulous picture." So we got outside and we were going back to the car and he said, "A hell of a painting, I don't think that's a Buttersworth." I thought, "Seriously?"

Adam The other potential painter, Antonio Jacobsen. Jacobsen was born in Denmark in 1850, three-ish decades after Buttersworth, and moved to the US in 1873. Like Buttersworth, he settled in what was then West Hoboken, New Jersey. Here's Dan from the Peabody Essex Museum again.

Dan Antonio Jacobsen started life as a painter of signs and the fronts of safes. In businesses, safes used to be highly ornamented and things. And so that's how a lot of people would get into commercial graphic art. And he started a few paces where he painted ships on those safes probably for maritime industries and then began painting for ship builders and ship owners.

Adam Unlike Buttersworth, Jacobsen specialized in ships of the steam age.

Dan So instead of the beautiful sails of old time ships, he was looking at the industrial sort of polluting iron vessels and steel hull constructions, which were looking towards the future rather than to the past.

Adam But Jacobsen painted plenty of yachts too.

Dan Jacobsen was an opportunist. He would paint where he saw the market. So both Buttersworth and Jacobsen would paint the same scenes and the same vessels even in very similar styles to the uninitiated. You also have to keep in mind that they probably knew each other. We don't have the documentation to know how closely they might've been looking at each other's work, but if one of them had a good idea and a good technique, wouldn't surprise me if the other one said, "Ooh, I can do a bit of that."

Adam But despite all their similarities, their work wasn't identical.

Dan Buttersworth's technique for presenting moving water is quite distinctive, and that's one element that we always look for when we assess whether a painting is by Buttersworth and whether it's a good one and whether we enjoy it or not. And the presentation of the sails themselves is also huge. When the sails are full, he really is very believable again, and you can see the reef points and the seams in the sails and the puffing out of the sails. Then at the tops, what we often see is a sail being changed, and so it's being brought down and then it's flapping. So how do you capture the movement, that flapping movement? That's a challenge as well.

Adam Buttersworth excelled at challenges like that. Jacobsen, on the other hand, was much more prolific, but he had more of a formula.

Stephen He did several thousand pictures, and the later ones kind of all look alike. Some are better, and the ones, for instance, of yachts tend to bring more money than let's say a steamship, but stylistically, they don't look like this picture. So this picture, there's a luminescent quality about it. The water, which is active, is absorbing the sunlight. There's this beautiful expression of movement and wind. I mean, he got it all.

Adam If this painting were by Jacobsen, it would probably be an earlier work, before he developed his formula. That raised another question.

Debra My thought when the idea of Jacobsen came up as a possibility was that it just seemed strange to me that a young artist would not have signed his work, whereas perhaps if it were by Buttersworth and it was at the end of his career, maybe it was found in his studio, that's how it ended up in the shop.

Adam The stakes for getting the attribution right were high and not just because of historical accuracy. There was a big price difference. Back in the show as a Buttersworth you valued it at 250 to $500,000. If you had had to put a Jacobsen attribution on it, do you know what the value would've been around then?

Debra Well, I don't know. Given the size, I think we'd have to say at least one to 150.

Adam Buttersworth can sell for about four times as much as a Jacobsen. Wow, so a difference.

Debra Yeah, it is a lot different. It is a lot different.

Adam So Charlie Lanagan, who thought it was a Jacobsen, brought the work to his art expert buddies.

Charlie So I took it to a friend's house, Louie Howland, who was the foremost authority on 19th century yachting scenes. One afternoon we had tea and we looked at the painting. There were four other people there. A couple of the guys that were there, they owned Buttersworths, and some of the others had Jacobsens.

Adam So how do you even have this group of enthusiasts, that it's just all people who are into maritime art and know each other?

Charlie Yes. A friend, Ted Thomas, we'd go to his house for tea and discuss different paintings two or three times a year.

Adam I love that. Some people like Pokemon cards.

Charlie Exactly. And we spent about two hours going back and forth, and at the end of the two hours, nobody would say whether it was a Buttersworth or a Jacobsen. They just said it was a masterpiece.

Adam The tea drinking boat loving aficionados went back and forth. "It looks more like a Buttersworth, but not exactly like a Buttersworth." "There are elements of Jacobsen, but it's not like the thousands of other Jacobsen's out there." After the break, we get a final answer on the artist and the ship it depicts and find out if the experts all agree.

The final answer on the mystery painter didn't come from Charlie or his crew of maritime experts. The auction host ran an ad for the painting, listing it as a Buttersworth, but when another expert, an Antonio Jacobsen expert, called in to correct them, Charlie couldn't help but agree.

Charlie You can't argue with a real pro on that.

Adam Now Stephen Fletcher had to tell the owner what they'd found and that it would probably sell for less as a Jacobsen than a Buttersworth, but it wasn't all bad news.

Stephen We said it's probably the best Jacobsen he ever painted, in our humble opinion. Sure, it's a portrait of a yacht, but it's also a portrait of an event, a race, a lot of activity. So we stressed the positive.

Adam Skinner sold the painting at auction in February 2006 before our TV appraisal even aired.

Stephen In the end, it brought a quarter of a million dollars, and with a buyer's premium, it finally ended up at 281,000 and change, which was, we were pretty excited about it.

Adam So even though it was sold as a Jacobsen and not a Buttersworth, the painting achieved Debra's original appraisal value of 250 to $500,000. Charlie wrote the catalog listing, and through his research we got answers to a lot of questions about what's depicted in the painting, including the name of the yacht.

Dan The signal flag identifies what the boat is that's in the painting, and so you can look it up in some of the registers that were printed in the 1870s and identify it as the Yacht Dreadnought.

Adam That's a really cool name.

Dan Dreadnought was a very popular name for ships and for yachts, but particularly for commercial vessels of the day. There was a clipper ship named Dreadnought and so on. And to draw upon that heritage is also of significance. He had high aspirations for his yacht.

Adam They also figured out which race this might've been, the Cape May Challenge Cup held on October 10th, 1872.

Stephen An account in the History of the New York Yacht Club states that the Dreadnought beat the Palmer in this race by one hour and 39 minutes, quote, both yachts competing the course in a little over 24 hours. That sounded like a substantial win, but considering the race was 24 hours, one hour and 30 minutes, maybe it's closer than we thought, I don't know.

Adam And we've learned that while this painting is unusual for a Jacobsen, it's not entirely unique.

Dan What we came to realize is that Jacobsen's style transitioned quite at a regular pace from his early years into his latest years. Why is anybody's guess, but his technique evolved over the course of time, and so you'd have to have seen his very early paintings to know that this actually is indicative of what Jacobsen was doing at his earliest days. And I would say it's very effective. It's beautiful.

Adam So this was a weird case in that we had it at our Tampa event in 2005, and it got attributed to Jacobsen before we even aired the episode, and we still aired it with the Buttersworth information with a graphic that said, "We have some news for you." Were you aware that that was going on behind the scenes at all?

Dan My phone was ringing off the hook, and a lot of people were absolutely irate. "Of course, it's by Buttersworth," "Of course, it's by Jacobsen." Everyone had a very strong opinion about it at that point. I hadn't seen it in the flesh yet. So until I saw it in the flesh, I was doing my best to be impartial, which is pretty challenging, because I was really happy that people cared so much.

Adam The painting is now on loan to the Peabody Essex Museum. So Dan has seen it in the flesh a lot. It wasn't on display when I visited, but the way that it is typically hung places it in the center of this "Who's the artist" controversy, literally.

Dan When we put it on display, we put it in a very small gallery in the center of the gallery, and on one side we displayed paintings by James Buttersworth, and on the other we displayed paintings by Antonio Jacobsen. And we let people decide, "Who do you think is the artist of this painting?" And then we had what we thought to be the answer, the best guess of the moment, so to speak, under a little box. And you'd lift up the box and see if you agreed with that decision or not. It was fascinating to just stand in the room and listen to people's conversation, because it really fostered debate and conversation and close looking and analysis of various stylistic elements among the general public, not just among people who think they're well-trained in the arts, but just, "Okay, here's a challenge for me. How well can I do?" And I think it was probably split fairly 50/50.

Adam Can you see why somebody would think it's Buttersworth, somebody would think it's Jacobsen and the gray line that is between them?

Dan To me, it's very clear why that mistake would be made. It's just a razor's margin to identify the difference. And today it's perfectly viable to argue, "This isn't by Jacobsen, this is by Buttersworth." I would have a hard time believing it because I've spent a lot of time looking at this painting. But if you walk in and you have an hour, it's not a foregone conclusion that you'll be able to be definitive about it at all.

I would like to be able to point to scientific proof that was indisputable and no one can disagree with me, but that's not the case. At the end of the day, I've seen many, many marine paintings, and in my gut I know it's a Jacobsen. And for what that's worth, it's all yours.

Adam Charlie actually did find some evidence that for him is definitive.

Charlie When I was picking up a painting I had cleaned, there was a small Jacobsen of the Dreadnought, and to me it was identical, because the waves were correct, the shadows on the sail. It was done by the same hand, and that was signed. But I saw this after the sale, and that really reaffirmed that we made the correct decision in attributing it to Jacobsen.

Adam That leaves just one more question. Where the heck is the signature? Stephen has a guess.

Stephen One might wonder whether at some point it had a frame that might've had his name on it, sometimes these little name plates. I have no idea. The only thing I can say, if I had painted this, boy, I'd sign it because I would be very proud of it and I'd want everybody to know I was responsible.

Adam Might be three inches tall, Stephen Fletcher. This is a great painting with the artist.

Stephen What's the name of that yacht? Oh, it's the S. Fletcher.

Adam Dan and Stephen are entirely convinced this is a Jacobsen, but Debra?

Debra I'm on the fence, I guess I would say. I don't think one could totally rule out Buttersworth.

Adam Charlie, not so much. How sure are you that this is a Jacobsen?

Charlie A hundred percent.

Adam How would you react if someone could prove that it was in fact a Buttersworth?

Charlie I'd be stunned.

Adam Your head would explode.

Charlie No, I'm 99.9 sure it's a Jacobsen.

Adam See, we got you down 0.01%.

Charlie Yeah, I know.

Adam That's what a podcast can do.

Charlie Nothing's certain in life. Remember that.

Adam Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Galen Bebe, sound designed and mixed by Jack Pombriant. Our assistant producer is Sara Horatius, and our senior producer is Ian Coss. Jocelyn Gonzalez is the director of PRX Productions. Devin Maverick Robbins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH, and Marcia Bemko is executive producer of Detours. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.