The shameful secret of Scotland's fake Botticelli

Bought in 1933 with "every penny" the National Galleries of Scotland possessed, Botticelli’s The Portrait of a Youth was hailed as a coup for the national collection.

But within two decades, the painting was quietly taken down and put away in storage, never to be shown again.

Now, using previously confidential documents, The Scotsman has managed to piece together the true story of the fake and the careful attempts made to conceal the truth from the public.

The painting was bought in a blaze of publicity by the director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Stanley Cursiter, who boasted in the pages of The Scotsman that the gallery had acquired "a newly discovered portrait of a youth by Botticelli".

The galleries paid a staggering 12,000 for the painting - the equivalent of 520,000 today. Privately, Cursiter admitted he had spent "every penny we possessed".

While the picture closely resembled a painting in the Louvre attributed to the "school of Botticelli", Cursiter noted that the work he had acquired was "clearly superior".

It was not: by 1952, three years after Cursiter left the galleries, his successor Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse had helped confirm that the Louvre had the original painting. Scotland was the proud owner of a 20th century copy.

Records show that a mysterious Mr Phillipot admitted painting it. Chemical tests showed the paints used were not available until 300 years after Botticelli’s death.

But the public was not to be told. Instead, the painting quietly "disappeared".

When, in 1952, it was suggested the painting be included in an exhibition of fakes, Lord Cooper, a member of the galleries’ board of trustees, slapped down the proposal.

"I do not think we should glory in our shame," he wrote.

"Incidentally, it is going rather far to label it publicly as a ‘fake’, which suggests not an error of judgment but a fraud, and I hesitate to ascribe dishonesty either to the painter or to the sellers from whom we bought.

"The picture should be quietly buried, not flaunted in the eyes of the public."

The painting’s true history emerged decades later, but with only the briefest of mentions in academic journals.

Mysteriously, a crucial 1951 report on the picture from an expert in the National Gallery in London, including the tell-tale chemical tests on the paint, appears to have gone missing from the galleries’ file.

Contacted yesterday, gallery staff and directors knew little of the painting’s background, beyond that it was a fake that has never been shown since.

Cursiter published his memoirs in 1975. While he described in detail another gallery’s purchase exposed as a forgery, he made no mention of the "Botticelli".

It was a far cry from his gushing enthusiasm four decades earlier in which he compared his painting with the work in the Louvre.

Cursiter wrote: "The Edinburgh picture is so clearly superior that there seems not the slightest room for doubt that it is an original work by Botticelli."

He added: "The picture has been subjected to the most rigorous chemical examination."

There were early doubters, among them the Botticelli expert Albert Scharf.

But Cursiter based the acquisition from Knoedler’s on an "excellent report" from Martin de Wild, a Dutch restorer he had befriended after World War I.

When congratulated by Kenneth Clark, at the Ashmolean Museum, Cursiter admitted: "The Trustees had some hesitation but in the end gathered all their courage and bang went every sixpence we possessed."

What The Scotsman said back in 1933...

"THROUGH a combination of fortunate circumstances the National Gallery of Scotland has been able to acquire from Messrs Knoedler, London, a newly discovered portrait of a youth by Botticelli - or at least a picture which apparently has not been recorded or described hitherto in the lists of works by the artist. It is understood that the new picture has been for many years in a private collection in France, and although closely related to the "Portrait of a Man" in the Louvre, no detailed comparison of the two pictures had ever been made ...

"The Louvre Picture is attributed to the School of Botticelli. In it there are slight infelicities of drawing and a lack of that perfection of craftsmanship which is characteristic of the artist. The Edinburgh picture is so clearly superior that there seems not the slightest room for doubt that it is an original work by Botticelli.

"The picture has been subjected to the most rigorous examination. Under chemical analysis it has been found that the pigments used are white lead, brown ochre, carbon black, and lapis lazuli, and a curious point in the technique... which could only have been produced by the most careful preparation."