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Boston. Edward Jackson Holmes, director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, paid $35,000 for two tiny wood panel paintings, supposedly by Giambattista Cima de Conegliano. They were proven fakes. For his two Coneglianos and $85,000 he was offered a Velasquez portrait of a man, which hung proudly in the museum for several weeks. A fake also, it is now ignominiously in the cellar.
Stockbroker Edwin Sibley Webster of Stone & Webster paid $32,500 for a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, before he noticed a small stamp in the upper right hand corner on the back of the canvas: COPY FROM THE ORIGINAL IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM MAY 1927.
Buffalo. William Matthews Kecking, director of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, reported to New York police last week that the pernicious William Wilbur J. Cooke had sold two spurious Stuart Washingtons for $21,000 each, one to Seymour Horace Knox, banker-poloist of Buffalo and East Aurora, N. Y.; one to Walstein C. Findlay of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Findlay fortunately had paid but $5,000 cash when the fraud was discovered.
Wilmington. Henry F. du Pont bought another Lowestoft service (decorated with ships) last winter, found it spurious, returned it to the Anderson Galleries, Manhattan.
*Chinese Lowestoft porcelain was never made in Lowestoft, England. It is 18th & 19th Century Chinese porcelain turned principally on upper Kiang Si province, decorated in Canton by Chinese workmen with coats of arms, religious symbols, ships and other designs supplied by British and American colonial buyers. The porcelain was sometimes carried in the ships of the Dutch East India Company to Amsterdam. Some of the early British orders were taken and delivered by the firm of Baker & Allen of Lowestoft, who stamped the porcelain with their own mark, hence the name.