Art: Fake Lowestoft

Months ago a Mrs. Clementine Briggs Doran of Holyoke, Mass. and one William Wilbur J. Cooke of Philadelphia arrived in Boston, put up at the Ritz-Carlton. Mr. Cooke is chiefly famed for having once married the widow of John S. Huyler (chocolates). Mrs. Huyler-Cooke later advertised in the public prints that she was no longer responsible for the debts of William Wilbur J. Cooke.

In Boston Mrs. Doran and Mr. Cooke met Edward F. Cloran, ingenuous art dealer of No. 137 Stuart Street. They told him of a complete service of 232 pieces of Lowestoft china painted with the crest of New York State, which had been in the Van Rensselaer family for generations and which a poor relation was forced to sell—”privately, of course.” Despite the fact that services of armorial Lowestoft of that size are as rare as fragments of the True Cross, Dealer Cloran believed. He in turn interested Clinton I. Nash, Boston dealer, who bought the service for the price of $51,226 or about $232 the dish. Just to be sure, Mr. Nash forwarded some of his plates to Edward Crowninshield, bachelor brother of Bachelor Editor Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair. Edward Augustus Crowninshield, 60, was a famed amateur tennis player of the ’90s, second president of the West Side (Forest Hills) Tennis Club. Among his good friends now is Tennis-Artist Helen Wills Moody. One of the first men to play ice hockey in the U. S., he founded, with two others, the St. Nicholas Rink, played on the St. Nicholas team (first amateur hockey team). Few men know so much about Chinese Lowestoft, few own or have handled so many fine pieces, as Edward Crowninshield. Running his fingers over the “Van Rensselaer” plates he announced at once that they “didn’t feel right.” A more careful examination convinced him that the service was of plain Lowestoft porcelain which had been skilfully decorated on top of the glaze, then sandpapered to give approximately the correct “feel.”*

Detectives got busy. Mrs. Clementine Briggs Doran was haled into court, held in $20,000 bail, charged with grand larceny and conspiracy to defraud. William Wilbur J. Cooke prudently disappeared. Also missing was a Mrs. E. E. Caroline Saunders of New York. Meanwhile Inspector Warren H. Liese of the Boston Bureau of Criminal Investigation journeyed to New York, added immeasurably to the detective-story air of the whole business by producing the traditional sinister oriental, an expert Japanese repairer of antique porcelain who labors in a little art shop on Sixth Avenue, Manhattan and is known as “Mr. Chicago.” Inspector Liese insisted last week that Mr. Chicago of Japan is the real perpetrator of the forged Lowestoft, but since china-painting is not yet a criminal offense, Mr. Chicago remains outside the law.

Publicity attending the Van Rensselaer Lowestoft fraud suddenly launched upon newspapers and police stations disclosures of other art swindles from institutions and individuals previously too embarrassed to admit their gullibility. With some of these the slick team of Doran, Saunders & Cooke was directly connected, others were the work of rival tricksters.

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.