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Period Copies After the Old Masters
A period copy is an antique painting made after a known composition by an Old Master, executed by a trained professional of a later generation for a client who wanted the image and could never own the original. It is a hand-painted canvas of its own date, and the word after is what says so.
Most of them were painted from a print. That single fact explains almost everything about how they look.
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| How a composition travelled, and what it lost on the way | ||
| The original | The engraving | The period copy |
| In Rome or Paris, in a gallery almost nobody enters. | Printed in the hundreds and sold across Europe, in black and white. | Painted at full scale in a provincial town, above an altar for two centuries. |
| Hasthe master's own hand | Losesthe colour, and the direction | Addsa palette, a touch, and two hundred years of its own |
| The print carried the drawing and nothing else. That is why no two period copies of one composition match. | ||
Three centuries of ordinary work
Why Old Master Copies Were Painted |
Copying a famous painting was ordinary professional work for three centuries. It was how a young painter learned, and it was how the images that mattered reached the people who wanted them. A parish that wanted the altarpiece everyone was talking about had one option, which was to pay a painter to go and make it.
The scale of it was considerable. In nineteenth-century Paris, the Louvre issued copyist permits in large numbers, and the great rooms were worked in daily by professionals at their easels. Churches, private chapels, seminaries and provincial museums all commissioned repetitions of celebrated compositions. Some copyists were students, many were established painters who took the work between commissions.
The practice continued long after photography arrived, for a reason worth stating. A parish that needed an Assumption above its altar could do nothing with a small print. It needed a canvas, at scale, in oil.
An antique in its own right
What You Are Buying in a Period Copy |
A period copy is not the master's picture and does not pretend to be. What it is, is the architecture of a great composition, at the scale of a room rather than a chapel, on a support that has genuinely lived through its own century.
That last point is the one collectors underrate. The copy is an antique painting in its own right. It has been relined or it has moved and split as panels do, it carries craquelure, its stretcher and frame have their own history, and it has hung somewhere for a hundred years or more. None of that is borrowed from the original. It belongs to the object in front of you.
And the hand matters. A good copyist does not trace, he rebuilds. The drawing follows the model, but the touch and the colour belong to his own century, and it shows. That is what separates a period copy from a facsimile, and it is why these oil paintings reward looking at rather than merely recognising.
One term, one threshold
What After a Master Actually Means |
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| Studio of | Circle of | Follower of | After |
| in his rooms | beside him | in his manner | from his design, by a later hand |
| A painting merely in a master's manner is not after him. Without an identifiable composition behind it, the term does not apply. | |||
The full ladder, from signed and studio of down to after, is set out in our guide to reading attribution on an antique painting. Alongside the copies after named masters, our collection holds works catalogued circle of and follower of, which describe a different relationship altogether. Those painters worked beside a master in his own lifetime rather than after him.
| → | The next questionAnd the one genre where copying was the plan?The royal portrait, commissioned to be repeated and sent out to embassies and ministries. |
