On July 16, 1976, The Times published a sensational article by its saleroom correspondent, Geraldine Norman, claiming that 13 drawings by the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer, which had been sold over the previous seven years, were modern forgeries.
The scandal grew, and in following months Norman was able to expose the forger: a small-time picture restorer called Tom Keating, who was eventually estimated to have painted more than 2,000 pictures in the style of more than 150 artists, fooling (and satisfying) practically the whole of the art establishment, from commercial galleries and salerooms to collectors and museums.
Doubts about the ersatz Palmers had first been expressed to Norman by the connoisseur David Gould, who had been brave enough to believe his own eyes rather than accepting the majority opinion. Indeed, in 1970 he had written to The Times challenging the authenticity of Shepherds with their Flock under a Full Moon, a drawing, apparently from Palmer’s Shoreham period, which had been sold at an auction in Woodbridge, Suffolk, for £9,400 to the London dealers Leger’s.
Even seeing a photograph had been enough to make him wonder if it was a pastiche: “The drawing has all the ingredients apart from the somewhat unusual bats (‘borrowed’ from the 1824 sketchbook?) of a Shoreham period drawing of 1831. But to my eye it lacks the idiosyncrasy which infused Palmer’s work with an inimitable poetry. It looks, in fact, like one of the ‘adaptations’ from old English watercolours which the late Rowland Alston made for his own amusement — and the confusion of his friends.”
Gould’s early guess about Rowland Alston turned out to be wrong, and his letter fastidiously avoided calling the Palmer a “fake”, but he was to take a close interest over the following years in the drawings from the same source which were to emerge.
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Following his tip, The Times correspondent went to interview Keating, who refused to comment on Palmer but, over a cup of Nescafé, vigorously expressed his contempt for the art world. When Geraldine Norman returned to Keating’s cottage a week later, he had disappeared. Finally, in 1979 Keating went on trial for forgery, but charges were dropped because of his ill health.
Gould, meanwhile, found himself in demand to broadcast on fakes and for his remarkable expertise in English art, which he had learnt not from formal instruction, but through contact with an older generation of collectors, connoisseurs and practitioners.
David Gould was born in 1922 in Fulham, and in his youth he happened to meet Nina Griggs, the widow of F. L. M. Griggs, the artist whose etchings record the beauty of Camden in the days of C. R. Asbee and the Guild and School of Handicraft. She was one of the lady “angels” who looked after the former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Sir Sydney Cockerell in his old age .
Through her, Gould met Cockerell, who introduced him to the work not only of the Pre-Raphaelites but also the Cotswold School of Arts and Crafts, and to the world of the William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Cockerell, who in his own youth had been secretary of the Kelmscott Press, also initiated Gould into the perilous pleasures of collecting books, prints and drawings.
These aesthetic pursuits were interrupted by war service, but Gould’s love of the Cotswolds was reinforced when the RAF posted him to Gloucestshire, from where he flew aerial reconnaissance missions.
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Back in London after the war, he studied furniture and painting restoration with the fastidious dealer and restorer, R. E. A. Wilson, who had once known Sickert, and who introduced him to the work of Samuel Palmer.
In 1951 Gould married Joan Burton, who was herself then nursing a collector of paintings by G. F. Watts and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Thus equipped with knowledge, a fastidious taste and a discerning eye, he became for a while the gadfly of the art world. During the 1960s he attracted a small coterie of people interested in the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting, all of whom gathered round his stocky, bearded figure. He often welcomed them to his big house at Barnes, its walls crowded with drawings by Rossetti and large canvases by Sir Edward Burne-Jones — the sole contact with the 20th century being a very small television set in one corner of the living room. In another corner stood a bed by the Cotswold craftsman Ernest Gimson, which Gould said “might well be used to make two sides of a pig-sty”.
Gould entertained his visitors with comic tales of the saleroom, enhanced by tantalising glimpses of rare books and photographs. The fortunate were then admitted to the status of regular correspondent and became recipients of illustrated letters of a type inspired by Burne-Jones. Though various improbable adventures were depicted, many of the drawings were of himself, immersed in bibliographic or artistic study (or perhaps mildly sozzled reverie).
In 1971 Gould was asked by Sotheby’s to head a new department in Belgravia specialising in Victorian art. Although several spectacular sales took place under his aegis, Gould’s talents lay not so much in creating a viable sale as in the careful assessment of individual painting. This was not enough for the auctioneers, and his stay at Sotheby’s was short.
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Around this time, however, he became one of the early panel of experts on The Antiques Roadshow, his gentle, encouraging manner helping to make it one of the BBC’s most unexpected television hits.
With his friend the aesthete Christopher Hewett, Gould opened the Taraman Gallery, near the Victoria and Albert Museum, beginning with an exhibition of the technically brilliant but deeply depressing etchings and engravings of Alphonse Legros. Nothing was sold until the last day, when the sculptor Henry Moore came in and bought a number of the best works, saying that he had always considered Legros underestimated. Sadly the gallery lasted for only a decade , as other exhibitions floundered leaving only their exquisite catalogues behind.
Gould was too fastidious and self-critical to write much himself, although he loved to both encourage and criticise the work of others. He was however blessed with a true talent for friendship with art lovers and scholars such as Raymond Lister and Lord David Cecil.
Despite chronic lung problems, Gould enjoyed the last decades of his life creating a wonderful garden in an idyllic corner of the Cotswolds near Stroud, with his second wife, Joan Angelbeck, whom he married in 1984. She survives him, along with the two daughters of his first marriage.
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David Gould, art dealer and connoisseur, was born on October 22, 1922. He died on May 20, 2004, aged 81.