Rodin
An enchanting sketch of a dancer believed to have been drawn
by Auguste Rodin is at the centre of an investigation that draws the
team into a recent forgery scandal that has rocked the French art
establishment.
Alice
Thoday, a Lincolnshire resident with Belgian roots, inherited the rare
watercolour from her mother and has always believed it to be part of a
series of works Rodin drew of a Cambodian dance troupe which visited
France in 1906. It could be worth over £100,000 if genuine - but the
trouble is, Rodin is one of the world's most faked artists.
The
quest to prove it is the genuine article takes the team to Paris and
the Musee Rodin, where they search for stylistic similarities in genuine
works. The provenance trail leads to Mexico City in the 1940s, where
Alice's mother was given the painting by a businessman called Jimmy
Heineman. Who was he and how did he get his hands on a rare Rodin
sketch?
The deeper the team digs, the more
worrying the evidence is about the extent to which Rodin's work has been
faked by notorious forgers such as Ernst Durig, a Swiss-born sculptor
who claimed to be Rodin's last pupil.
The team
turns to scientific analysis and a handwriting expert in a bid to get
to the truth. Will the world's foremost expert believe the picture is a
missing sketch by Rodin himself, or a very clever fake?
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