Amateur exposes the `jumble sale Goya' as fake

Independent, The (London), Feb 26, 2000 by Ian Herbert

THE ESTEEMED opinions of several art historians have been all but confounded by the near-obsessive attention to detail of an amateur enthusiast who seems to have exposed as a fake a painting that was believed to be a Goya.

Until Joe Chesters, a retired council worker from Northop Hall, North Wales, intervened, Italian Woman and Child was thought to have depicted the Spanish artist's wife and child Xavier. It was in the ownership of an estate near Mold, in North Wales, before it was bestowed on an employee as a gift and subsequently pitched up unceremoniously on a jumble-sale table at a chapel in nearby Buckley in the 1930s, lending it the title of "the Buckley Goya" in local parts.

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In 1968 Tom Dempster Jones, a collector from North Wales, bought the piece for 10 shillings (50p), promising its vendor a cut of the pounds 100,000 he believed it might fetch. He called in the Canadian Goya expert Dr Rolph Z Medgessy, whose conclusions could barely have been clearer. The work, he said, was indeed from the hand of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, and probably portrayed the artist's wife "with their first child Xavier". He also said the painting was covered in the artist's "microsignatures", a couple of millimetres high.

Mr Dempster Jones sought a second opinion and received the conclusions he had been hoping for. The German art historian Dr Herbert Paulus said, in 1969, that the picture "agrees graphically" with a picture in a sketchbook of Goya's work from his time in Italy.

Mr Chesters' obsession with Goya dates from his schooldays. "My schoolmates were enjoying people like Dan Dare and Zorro," he said. "But Goya was my hero because he could tell you a story. He could make you cry, make you laugh, show you beauty through a woman's flashing eyes." He developed serious doubts about the micro- signature theory. "Everything told me it was a fiasco," he said. "Slowly, I worked through authorities on the subject and none tallied." His interrogation also revealed contradictions. Xavier was Goya's seventh child, not his first as Dr Medgessy had asserted. He was also born in 1784 - years after the artist had left Italy.

His quest to prove the "Buckley Goya" a fake was further helped when the Italian sketchbook believed to have been Goya's was exposed as a fake and the original - held at a private library in Majorca since the 19th century - turned up in 1993. There was no hint of Italian Mother and Child in it.

Despite attempts to sell the painting abroad, the "Buckley Goya" remains in private ownership in North Wales. Quite how much money it might have changed hands for is unclear.

Its exposure as a fake now seems conclusive. The curator of 18th- century Spanish painting at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Dr Manuela Mena Marques, agrees with Mr Ches-ters that the "Buckley Goya" is bogus. "It is the work of an artist working in the last quarter of the 19th century, possible English," she said. "It is nothing to do with Spain or Goya."

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Amateur exposes the `jumble sale Goya' as fake

Independent, The (London), Feb 26, 2000 by Ian Herbert

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