A Renoir Once Labelled a Fake Is Now Attributed to Renoir

A work on paper that a New York gallery once classed as a forgery has been reattributed to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French Impressionist painter. The reattribution comes from German art historian Henry Keazor, who founded the Heidelberg Forgery Study Collection, known as HeFäStuS, and teaches modern and contemporary art history at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. ArtNews reported the findings.

The sheet came to him by chance. In 2023, a private collector offered it to Keazor and HeFäStuS as part of a household clearance, the sale or disposal of a home's contents. The owner had inherited the work in the 1970s from a friend who ran a New York gallery. That gallery had judged it a fake and described its medium as a pencil drawing.

Keazor found the problem while he was unpacking it. The sheet was not a pencil drawing. It was a print.

Paper and microscopic tests followed. They showed the structure of autotype paper, a material used for printed reproductions, and confirmed that the signature was handwritten in black grease chalk.

Keazor and his students now believe the work is a hand-signed lithograph, a print made by drawing with greasy crayon on a flat stone and then pressing paper against it. They date it to around 1899. It shows Amelie Diéterle, an actor and singer.

The image matches one Renoir made for "Germinal", an artists' portfolio that also included works by Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The portfolio prints were produced in an edition of 100, with printed signatures instead of handwritten ones.

Keazor's explanation is that the Heidelberg sheet was a test print, pulled using only one of the two printing stones. The signature sat on the other stone, so Renoir added it by hand. That would explain why this copy carries a signature the rest of the edition lacks.

The work will go on view at the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg from November 26 to March 21, in an exhibition called "Riddle around Renoir." The show is a rare chance to see a sheet whose label has changed from fake to genuine, and whose medium has changed from drawing to print.

For the owner, the clearance that prompted the sale now ends in a museum case. The gallery's original verdict, the pencil label and the signature all turned out to be part of the puzzle the exhibition takes its name from.