CURTIS DOWLING Fine art authentication services
B I O
Over 30 years in the fine art and antiques business of which fifteen years exclusively identifying fakes and forgeries and investigating art and the its provenance.
I have had a very diverse career spreading my time between authentication of art, lectures, writing and making television programmes, investigating art fraud around the world as well as the owner of fine art and antique shops, buying and selling as a dealer for many years prior to exclusively authenticating.
ART AUTHENTICATION
ART FORGERY INVESTIGATION
FAKE AND FORGERY TRAINING
LECTURES
GALLERY
So how does it work?
Everyone's main worry when buying art and high quality antique is the big question, is it real?... And what have you missed in the past year that could be worth a fortune? Many of our clients have including the biggest and most prestigious private buyers in the world, we have found all our customers a pleasure to work with but it brings me onto the person who calls themselves an expert. The art market is full of hard working, honest people around the world but it also attracts pomposity like no other business.
authenticating art for over thirty years for private clients, banks, pension funds, sellers, in fact most walks of life and felt I would speak with some of the major auction houses to offer our services, what would major auction houses say about our granular processes?
Lets be honest, It's so costly and time consuming to have full time authenticators on the books and also it is a specific and massively time consuming type of art detective job, as our show, THE TREASURE DETECTIVES, shows. our offering for those companies? to have a virtual authentication and investigations department within their business
An art appraiser looks at works of art to determine their value. This is not an authentication to determine if the artwork is original; it may be necessary to work with both an authenticator and an appraiser, that's where we come in!
With the cost of art investigation and authentication so very expensive it makes sense as you cannot have experts on everything, or the time to make sure everything being sold is right. Well it's been a very interesting exercise and the replies and conversations have fallen into three very distinct categories which I wanted to share with you, making the art market a minefield
Firstly there has been the companies who have welcomed the opportunity to offer all their prospective clients the guarantee that every high value item has been thoroughly checked. Lets be honest if you are spending £10,000 plus in any other world you would have more guarantees than you can shake a stick at, in the art world not always so
The second group just do not have enough high value items coming through to justify the expense but the third group is very interesting as it splits into two comments, both shocking when, if you remember, Tom Hoving of the Met said 40% of the MMOA collection was fake, he just didn’t know what 40%
Their comment? We don't bother with authenticating and don't need too, it's buyer beware and not our business if its real or fake and the fabulous comment from many, our experts are never wrong, we have in-house expertise. That's not the experience of many, you only have to read the papers regularly where major auction houses are having to apologies to buyers for selling fakes and giving the customers money back, or worse going to court to row about it.
So maybe we can help....
For more details curtisdowling@icloud.com