Saint Anthony Abbot distributing rosaries

Miniature painting in mixed media, tempera and oil on the front of a wood panel, rear and sides painted black, red wax stamp to verso, (130x110x10mm), France, c.1900-1930,

A beautiful and characteristic miniature by the so-called Spanish Forger, one of the greatest imitators of medieval book art in modern times.

Saint Anthony Abbot (c.251-356) holds two pearl rosaries. He offers one to an elegantly dressed couple, in the centre. On the right, a second couple converses while waiting for their rosary. A church, a hilltop castle and a forested landscape inhabit the background.

In the Spanish Forger’s output, works of a religious nature are the least common. This is the only known depiction of this scene produced by the Spanish Forger.

This panel is among the Spanish Forger’s smallest.

Bella da Costa Green, then director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, unmasked the Spanish Forger in the 1930s. He has retained the name “Spanish Forger” because scholars originally believed him to be a Spanish painter of primitives—panel paintings as well as manuscript illumination-working in a northern style in the fifteenth century.

Today he is known as “the most skilful and successful and prolific forgers of all times.” Indeed, he may be the only forger to have enjoyed a one-man retrospective at a major museum with an accompanying catalogue raisonné of his works, and to be collected by museums and private collectors in his own right. The artist was already active in the 1890s, perhaps in the early 1880s, and he was still painting in 1920. He borrowed freely from chromolithographic editions published in Paris for his compositions, which suggests that he may have been employed by one of the Parisian publishing houses (Auguste Firmin-Didot?).

Stuffed inside some of the original frames were remnants of old Parisian newspapers. Scientific analysis of his paintings discloses the presence of green copper arsenate, which was not available before 1814, among other modern pigments, and he applied his gold leaf last, rather than first, in a glaring departure from medieval technique.

This panel is now recorded as P136 in Dr W.M. Voelke’s ongoing catalogue.

William Voelkle and Roger Wieck, The Spanish Forger, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1978