Collecting Guides
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Royal Portraits, Made to Be Copied
A sovereign had one face and needed a hundred, in a hundred rooms, at the same time. The picture painted from life was not the end of the process but the beginning.
Period Copies After the Old Masters
A photograph reproduces an image. A copy reproduces a painting, and a parish that needed an Assumption above its altar could do nothing with a print.
Reading Attribution on an Antique Painting
Seven terms between a painter's own hand and a copy made after him, and what each one actually claims about the picture.
How to Read Signatures and Inscriptions on Antique Paintings
Before photography, there was exactly one way to own the image of a famous painting. Someone had to paint it again, by hand, in oil. For four centuries, copying was not a shady corner of the art wo...