Arts diary: Hunt for the masterpiece hiding in your attic forges ahead once more

Last year the show, in its first outing, hosted by notorious art sleuth Philip Mould and the fair Fiona Bruce, plunged with gusto into a battle over the authenticity of a family’s treasured Monet – and included Bruce’s emotional clash with French customs officers, which made for great telly.

Garnering strong reviews, it also probed the making of a fake by the celebrated Dutch forger, Han van Meegeren, held by the Courtauld Institute.

Fake or Fortune has been recommissioned, and has set its sights on unearthing a treasure or two in Scotland. Filming starts this month; the hunt is on.

Mould, the London dealer considered a leading authority on portraiture, and his gallery director Dr Bendor Grosvenor, have already come up with the goods on one Scottish masterpiece. A picture, bought at auction as “a portrait of a young girl”, has been identified as a portrait of James I & VI.

The picture, a rare image of James in full adult court dress, was painted on top of an earlier religious painting of a saint. It was sold on this week for close to £20,000 to a private collector. It is attributed to the workshop of James VI’s court painter Arnold Bronckorst, with the ghostly under-image of the saint partially visible to the naked eye.

Grosvenor – who also works on the show – made a name up here when he re-identified a pastel portrait, said to be Bonnie Prince Charlie, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s collection, as a portrait of Charles’ younger brother, Prince Henry Stuart.

“We’re on the hunt for potential lost pictures, anywhere in the UK, that we can swing our lamp over, and cast an expert eye,” he says. “If anyone has a potential Leonardo under their bed, and has always wondered about it, now is the time to give us a ring. You never know.

“I’ve been to a couple of country houses in Scotland over the last couple of years and I’m always amazed at what’s lying on the floor somewhere. But it could be anyone finding a lost gem.”

There may be plenty of candidates out there. The Leonardo expert Martin Kemp told this newspaper recently how he’s offered a constant stream of Leonardos to “verify” – getting some furious responses when he declines. Mould’s firm gets offered three or four supposed Rembrandts, Raphaels or the like a week, says Grosvenor: “Most of the time they don’t add up.”

To contact the show, e-mail [email protected]

Shrigley down south

“WHEN I’ve told people that I’m doing a show at the Hayward Gallery they say, ‘Really, that’s amazing,’” says Glasgow artist David Shrigley. “I’m sure they mean it in a nice way, but they are a bit surprised I get to show at the Hayward.”

Shrigley’s first major UK retrospective, Brain Activity, opens at the Hayward Gallery in London on 1 February. More than 175 works run from the black comedy of the offbeat drawings that made his name, to sculptures and stuffed animal pieces.

Another Shrigley show opens simultaneously at the private Stephen Friedman Gallery, showing Ostrich, his headless stuffed ostrich, pictured, wall pieces, and ceramics. Shrigley “parodies the excessive and ridiculous aspects of the culture market”, the gallery notes, but he’s now firmly ensconced in it. Shrigley cheerfully recalls how when the Tate once approached him, he hoped they wanted an exhibition in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, but they were proposing he design some merchandise for Tate members.

And, Shrigley’s Pass the Spoon, a “sort of opera” about a TV cookery show gone wrong, for which he wrote the words, is to be performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in April after its popular Glasgow run. With cast members including a banana, an egg and a dung beetle, it transfers to London’s Southbank Centre, alongside the Hayward show, in May. The Scotsman’s review called it “the most sublimely silly play to grace the Scottish stage in years.”