Rembrandt’s chemist. A.P.

Laurie and the public science of art

Geert Vanpaemel (KU Leuven)

In 1932 the Scottish chemist Arthur Pillans Laurie published a book on The Brushwork of
Rembrandt and his School. It consisted of 44 pages and 127 plates, mainly enlarged
photographs of small details of Rembrandt’s paintings. The book is quite unique. Although
Laurie was by no means the only chemist in history to investigate works of art, his book was
not as much about chemistry as it was about art criticism. Basing himself on certain scientific
methods which were entirely his own, he forced himself into the small world of Rembrandt
connoisseurs who preferred to ignore him. The review of the book in the leading journal
Burlington Magazine was scathing: “The Text is confused even for a book on the Fine Arts.
The Introduction […] includes passages of pure fancy […] in the main, highly improbable. […]
The book contains numerous inconsequences or improbabilities, expressed in the same tone
of dogmatic assertion. […] The use of magnified photographs, undoubtedly considerable,
cannot serve as an aid to attribution. […] To talk […] of ‘the test of magnification,’ as if
magnification were a sacrament, suggests little but defective sight.”

This negative reception is reflected in more recent work on the topic. The historian
Catherine Scalden in her book on Rembrandt, Reputation and the Practice of
Connoisseurship devoted only two pages to Laurie, according to her an example of the “new
avenues of approach” that were being explored, but without any important inference for the
evolution of Rembrandt connoisseurship. Yet, for the historian of science the intrusion of
Laurie into the field of connoisseurship poses interesting new questions. Clearly, the
methodological claims which supported Laurie’s expertise were quite different from the
standards of knowledge of the typical art connoisseurs, but neither were they a simple
extension of a well-established scientific authority. Seen from the perspective of the
chemical expert his bold statements on Rembrandt were the end-point of a long
development of research and technical skills. When Laurie’s book came out, he had
established for himself a well-recognized and often consulted expertise in matters of art,
from Persian miniatures to paintings of Old Masters. Even if his book on Rembrandt may
have been a bridge too far, it still stands as a hallmark at the dawn of a new era in the
scientific examination of paintings. This paper traces the slow emergence of scientific ways
to discuss and treat works of art from a perspective of the expert as a public persona. In
particular, it will become clear how claims of expertise were intimately connected to the
public sphere and were often articulated in newspapers or public lectures.

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The education of a chemist

“I believe the trouble is I am neither ‘fish, flesh, nor good red herring’.” This reflection was
written in 1915 by Laurie after his failure to get elected as Fellow of the Royal Society. The
description fitted very well the scientific career of Laurie, which was difficult to pinpoint on
one specific line of research. He published on electrochemistry, the fabrication of munitions,
educational reform, British politics, painting materials, stone preservation, agricultural
chemistry, and even meatless meals. But more in particular, Laurie’s remark referred to the
lack of recognition that existed for what would become his most important claim to fame:
the scientific examination of art, “a mixture of scientific experiments and literary criticism,”.
By the time of his death in 1949, the situation had changed dramatically. Most larger
museums now had scientific departments for conservation and related art research,
published in specialized journals and disseminated through regular conferences. Even if the
scientific examination of art was not always wholeheartedly accepted by the art community,
it was at least recognized as being part of the accepted tools for conservation and the
attribution of works of art. Laurie was a privileged witness and actor in these developments.
His career clearly shows how chemical experts had to struggle to enter the field of art
connoisseurs, art dealers and conservators. In particular, the example of Laurie illustrates
the role of public perception and popular media.

Arthur Pillans Laurie was born in Edinburgh on November 6th, 1861. His father, Simon
Somerville Laurie was professor of education at the University of Edinburgh with some
reputation as a philosopher. Arthur first studied chemistry in Edinburgh and went on to
King’s College in Cambridge where he obtained first class Honours of the Natural Sciences
Tripos. After graduating from Cambridge, he worked with Thomas Edward Thorpe at his
laboratory in South Kensington on the determination of the atomic weight of gold. During
that time he became a resident at Toynbee Hall, and a lecturer for the University Extension
Movement at the People’s Palace, opened in 1887 and combining culture, education and
entertainment.

In 1895, Laurie obtained the Doctor of Science degree at Edinburgh for a thesis on the
constitution of alloys. In the same year he became Lecturer in physics and chemistry at St.
Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington, London, where he did pioneering work on the
use of X-rays for the investigation of renal calculi. But he soon returned to Scotland, when he
was appointed Principal of Heriot-Watt College in 1900, a position in which he would remain
for the next 28 years. After his retirement from Heriot-Watt in 1928, Laurie moved back to
London, where he continued to work as an independent researcher and an art expert.
During the years before the Second World War, he joined the British fascist movement The
Link. In 1939 he published a pro-Hitler pamphlet Great Britain’s Policy after Munich,
followed in 1940 by the even more controversial The Case for Germany. Whether this
political episode had any influence on his scientific work cannot be decided. He apparently

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continued working and publishing. Laurie died on 15 October 1949 in Hasslemere, Surrey.
Patrick O’Farrell, historian of Heriot-Watt University, gave an elaborate description of
Laurie’s personality:

“Laurie was a character: straightforward, forthright, honest to a fault; burly in figure, brusque
and gruff in manner, versatile, scholarly, humanitarian, lover of the arts; pugnacious, full of
vitality, stubborn and argumentative, generous and kindly; a good talker on any topic, but
most of all on pictures; a good friend and a stimulating antagonist; a man intensely individual
and unorthodox, authoritarian yet himself impatient with authority.”

Becoming an art expert

Laurie’s interest in art research was stimulated by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William
Holman Hunt at the early 1880’s. The Pre-Raphaelites aimed to return to the artistic ideals of
the fifteenth century. As a part of this gospel, the Pre-Raphaelite painters attempted by new
and ingenious technical means of their own to reproduce the luminosity and the durability of
the early pictures. In his first lecture “On Artists’ Colours”, held before the British Association
in 1889, Laurie explained his three lines of inquiry: (1) to study the methods used for the
preparation of colors in the 15th and 16th centuries; (2) to practice the manufacture of
colours and (3) to examine modern colors for traces of injurious chemicals. In 1891, Laurie
founded a color company, Madderton & Co., first at Cambridge, but soon set up in Loughton.
Before long, he had composed a very successful textbook for art students Facts about
Processes, Pigments and Vehicles published in 1895.

Even if Laurie’s primary aim had been to produce a reliable palette of permanent pigments
for modern artists, he soon turned to an investigation of medieval recipes. In particular the
fifteenth century text by Cennino Cennini attracted his attention and admiration. Gradually,
his historical interest started to act as an organizing principle in his work. Although he still
gave papers to e.g. the House Painters and Decorators Association and wrote (series of)
articles for e.g. the Oil & Colourman or the Journal of Decorative Art, his larger publications
increasingly focused on the history and the historical use of painting materials. In 1910 he
published Greek and Roman Methods of Painting. Some Comments on the Statements made
by Pliny and Vitruvius about Wall and Panel Painting. The same year still, he published an
even more comprehensive overview of historical painting methods: The Materials of the
Painter’s Craft in Europe and Egypt from Earliest Times to the End of the XVIIth Century with
some Account of their Preparations and Use. By then, Laurie had a amassed an extensive
knowledge of the existing literature in English, French and German, and he was respected
among chemists and artists. When in 1911 Arthur Church, Professor of Chemistry at the
Royal Academy of Arts, retired, he confidently applied for the vacant position. He was
indeed appointed on 25 January 1912. The duties of this professorship consisted mainly in
the annual delivery of six lectures for the art students of the Academy but the appointment
brought him in closer contact with the art circles of London and the general art audience. He

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immediately seized the importance of this and suggested that at least the first of these
lectures would be open to the public. He also arranged for several journalists to report on it
in their newspaper. As a topic for the lecture he proposed “Pigments old and new. Their
value in detecting forgeries”.

The detection of forgeries was a quite recent theme in Laurie’s research. It first turned up in
his correspondence in November 1911. His method was based on an exact determination of
the time period when certain pigments had been in use. Laurie focused his research on the
analysis of illuminated manuscripts, of which the pure pigments could be easily determined
and the dates were fairly accurately known. By the end of 1912 he had compiled a dated list
of pigments, the use of which he believed could help in establishing the authenticity of
paintings.

Laurie was apparently very enthusiastic about his own invention. He seized every
opportunity to examine old paintings, even if, as he admitted to one private collector, “the
whole subject is still in an experimental stage.” For his research Laurie constructed a
microscope attached to a metal rod fixed to the easel, so that it would not come into contact
with the picture. He thus examined the surface of a painting under ordinary and polarized
light. This probably lead Laurie to the discovery of another method, which was to become his
trade mark: the use of micro-photographs. These micro-photographs was enlargements by
two or three diameters of small portions of a picture in order to study the minute details of
brushwork. After some initial testing of the method at the Edinburgh National Gallery,
Laurie, “anxious to test the method on some disputed case”, approached the famous Dutch
connoisseur Dr. Abraham Bredius, the director of the Mauritshuis, who had recently thrown
doubt on the authenticity of a painting “The Old Gray Hunter” by Paul Potter in the London
National Gallery. Laurie arranged with Bredius to come to The Hague to take micro-
photographs to be compared with the paintings in London. Laurie concluded that the
painting was not by Potter but by Peter Verbeecq, although part of the picture was shown to
be in still another hand. Laurie, characteristically, rushed into print – not in the scholarly
Burlington Magazine where Bredius’s original paper had appeared, but in the London
Illustrated News and in Nature. At the end of 1913 and through 1914, Laurie lectured widely
on his new methods, showing his microphotographs to amazed audiences. If newspaper
reports can be trusted, Laurie made a strong impression. Laurie, it was reported, had
identified pigments used at various times “with absolute certainty,” thus making the
detection of forgeries “comparatively easy”. A full description of his methods was published
in The Pigments and Mediums of the Old Masters (1914).

Laurie was well aware that with this new line of research he was threading on new grounds.
“The further I go,” he wrote to one collector, “the more I am impressed by the unreliability
of the statements made by art critics who are prepared to state that a picture is an original
or has been repainted simply from an impression and without a scientific examination.” On

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Bredius, he reported: “I have the utmost respect for the conclusions of the Art expert based
upon his wide and deep experience, but if the aid of scientific methods is to be brought in
order to confirm or refute an Art expert’s conclusions, it must be done in an exhaustive and
thorough manner.” In a letter to The Times (24 February 1914) he stated: “It is evident that
we have reached a point where the conclusions of even such highly trained experts as Dr
Bredius and Dr Bode differ, and it is the time, therefore, that a new method for settling such
matters was adopted.” The reaction in the press was favorable. One journalist considered
Laurie to “belong to a new school of art criticism. […] If Dr. Laurie’s methods come to be
widely adopted, the day of the picture faker is done.” A reviewer in The Connoisseur was
even more exalted.

The issue of Professor A.P. Laurie’s Pigments and Mediums of the Old Masters marks the
beginning of an era when questions relating to the age and authenticity of pictures will be
decided by the chemist and photographer with as much certainty and ease as the ingredients
of a food or a poison can now be determined by an analyst. […] It is impossible to attach too
much importance to Professor Laurie’s work. That in the course of the next few years it will
entirely revolutionize the modern methods of picture identification may be taken for
granted, for it substitutes a scientifically accurate method for one which is largely based on
personal predilections and intelligent guesswork.”

But some reactions were more critical. The reporter of The Athenaeum considered Laurie’s
work a transgression from his position as a teacher of chemistry.

“Prof. A.P. Laurie’s opening lecture last Monday at the Royal Academy […] seemed rather to
be addressing art critics – of whom there were a fair number present – than practical
students of painting. […] Such lessons as emerged […] from the study of these slides were
hardly lessons in the technics of the craft of painting, and we trust that Prof. Laurie will not
disdain to return to the consideration of these in his later lectures.”

Rembrandt

By the beginning of the 1920’s Laurie’ position as an scientific art expert was quite
undisputed. He toured the country with his camera and his microscopes to examine
paintings in public museums and private collections. He acted as an advisor to insurance
companies, or as an expert witness in court trials, such as the notorious Romney trial in 1917
or the long drawn Hahn-Duveen case, which captured media attention from 1923 to its final
outcome in 1929. In both cases, Laurie’s role was not decisive, but he kept reminding his
readers about how his scientific examination of the paintings had been of crucial
importance. He undoubtedly overstated his case, but the overall impression to his readers
must have been that only science could reliably authenticate an Old Masters’ painting and
establish the difference between a real and a fake.

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During the 1920’s Laurie held somewhat of a monopoly on the English market. Only the
British Museum had established in 1920 a laboratory for the restoration of its art objects
which had suffered from the war. Laurie’s expertise was therefore unique. When he moved
to London in 1930 he set up a private laboratory in his house. He offered his services free to
the Royal collection of pictures, the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and other public
galleries.

Yet, his standing in the world of art was still quite negligible. No serious debate on the
scientific methods propagated by Laurie took place in the scholarly pages of the Burlington
Magazine, nor did any of the connoisseurs acknowledge the importance of science for their
work. Chemical research did gain some importance in the field of art conservation, with e.g.
Alexander Eibner in Munich and Martin De Wild in Holland. In 1932, the first specialized
journal was founded at the Fogg Art Museum in Harvard, Technical Studies in the field of the
Fine Arts, but it did not include studies on authorship or art history. Laurie did contribute to
this growing literature of conservation, but for his involvement with the authentication of
pictures and the detection of forgeries he seemed to rely mainly on the public media.

Many of his letters appeared in The Scotsman, The Morning Post or The Times, where
readers could also find extensive reports of his public lectures.

Among the topics with which he could capture the readers’ attention was the authenticity of
paintings by Rembrandt. During the 1920’s he would regularly return to the topic. Laurie’s
first major publication appeared in 1922 as a reaction to some specific allegations of
authenticity by the Dutch scholar Willem Martin. Laurie had been studying the authenticity
of Rembrandt paintings with his method of microphotography since 1914. Following the
Morelli theory of concentrating on small, meaningless details instead of on the
interpretation of composition or style, Laurie believed that his magnified photographs could
discover the handwriting of the artist. Rembrandt was particularly well suited to this
analysis, as he often used heavy impasto painting. Obviously, this involved some extent of
subjective interpretation, but Laurie was convinced that the experienced expert could reach
decisive conclusions with little room for doubt. As with his chemical researches, he believed
skill and experience to be crucial and sufficient in successfully performing this analysis. The
microphotographs themselves formed the objective ‘scientific’ evidence, which to the
experienced eye did not need much further explanation.

His method of studying magnified photographs and patching them together to find
characteristic brushwork was actually rather unscientific and it did not convince neither
connoisseurs nor scientists. Whether Laurie was mistaken in the assessment of his own
expertise cannot be said with certainty. But clearly, the readers of Laurie’s book understood
him to mean that microphotographs were the new scientific instruments to clear up all
difficulties – a contention that was easily taken down.

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Conclusion

Becoming an expert in a field alien to one’s own scholarly background necessarily involves a
certain measure of complying to existing standards, but also of challenging these very
standards. Laurie was successful in achieving the status of an expert, but in the end
alienated himself both from the scientific standards of his own discipline, as from the
standards of the field in which he entered. The most intriguing part of his career was the way
in which he used and manipulated the public media. In letters to newspapers, in public
lectures and in popular books, Laurie presented an image of himself as the prophet of a new
way to understand art, based on sound scientific principles. Often he voiced sharp criticism
with regard to the classical scholars and connoisseurs who were not able to reach a
consensus on matters of attribution or authenticity. With every case of forgery that captured
the public attention, Laurie could take one little step forward to defend the scientific
methods of detection. In his scientific papers he was much more prudent and humble, but
these papers did not reach the audience he intended: museum directors, collectors and art
dealers. In turning to the public media, He complied with a more radical view of himself,
which ultimately led him to publish his controversial book on Rembrandt. Only with the
appearance of the new scientific field of art conservation in the 1930’s, embedded in the
institutional setting of museum laboratories and within the emerging boundaries of a well-
defined academic field, could young chemists demonstrate their expertise without recourse
to the public sphere.