Niall Fairhead, an art dealer in London, goes online to buy overseas, “because if you buy these things at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, you can often pay well over the top for them. “So I get an email which says there’s an interesting Matisse in St. Louis.” (He pronounces it St. Looey.) Jeune Fille a la Chaise Longue dans un Sous-Bois had come up in Ivey-Selkirk’s June 2013 auction. Fairhead bid without hesitation. A big Matisse exhibit was coming to the Tate, so Matisse would be on buyers’ minds. He won the lithograph for $14,160.
“It was particularly nice,” he says. “It showed a pretty young girl lying on a divan bed in a forest and looking very angelic and all the rest of it, and there was a slightly suggestive thing that I thought was quite nice, a man’s hat laying near her. Suggesting perhaps a liaison, but it was subtle. The piece was signed, numbered, and seemed to be in pretty good shape. We had a condition report from Ivey-Selkirk; we understood there was some foxing (brown age spots) and some dirt.
“When the thing arrived, we were so busy, I took a cursory glance at it and gave it to my restorer. Then my framer put it in a beautiful silver frame—we use a very expensive gilder.” Fairhead was taking it to show a client when he looked closely and thought, “Oh, my goodness. There are things about this which I don’t like.”
Fairhead cancelled the appointment and went straight back to his office. He removed the print from the frame and put it under a magnifying glass. He says he saw signs of offsetting, which would suggest it was not an original lithograph. “In my view, it was definitely a fake, and a very clever one. And in fact probably a very old one, because a lot of the foxing and staining was on top of the offsetting. I went along to see my good friend Alexander Hayter at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury, which is the number four auction house here in London. He looked and said, ‘That’s a very clever fake.’ So I went along to my paper restorer, Jane Zagel, and she said, ‘Yes, this is offsetting.’”
Fairhead sent the lithograph back to Ivey with a polite anyone-can-make-a-mistake letter and a firm request for a refund. He received a reply that “in their view it was not a fake, and they were going to take it to a museum curator. And they came up with an opinion that it was not a fake.”
Lesley Poggomoeller (who’s now with Link Auction Galleries) sought out “an academic authority, not just an auction house specialist. The catalogue raisonné said Matisse would draw the image on transfer paper, and they would put that drawing on the lithography stone. So in her opinion, it was a transfer lithograph,” not the usual regular or offset lithograph.
Fairhead had ceased to care; he simply wanted his Visa debit card refunded. He says his bank “ran away from the problem as fast as their legs could carry them. Being a tenacious sort of guy, I sent a package to the CEO marked private and confidential for your eyes only and I wrote a damning indictment, because they told all sorts of porky pies.” He did get a refund, but through Ivey-Selkirk’s bank.
The lawyer for the estate, meanwhile, contacted Fairhead to ask about the lithograph, which had been bought in good faith by a civil-rights attorney in New York back in the 1940s. It’s since been returned to the estate, and as the experts have agreed to disagree, may surface again in a future auction.
Fairhead says all his correspondence was with Malcolm directly. “Oftentimes you’d phone him up, and he wasn’t there. Whenever I did speak to him, he was always very polite, affable, and pleasant, but I guess something went wrong in his business and he was in trouble. I feel a certain measure of sympathy for him, but when I was about to lose $14,000…”
