FAKES AND FORGERIES IN ISLAMIC POTTERYAuthor(s): OLIVER WATSONReviewed work(s):Source: Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, Anno 23 (84), Nr. 2, KUNST UND KUNSTHANDWERKIM ISLAM 2. BAMBERGER SYMPOSIUM DER ISLAMISCHEN KUNST 25. - 27. JULI 1996 (2004),pp. 517-539Published by: Istituto per l'Oriente C. A. NallinoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25817948 .Accessed: 26/08/2012 04:50

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OLIVER WATSON

(Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

FAKES AND FORGERIES IN ISLAMIC POTTERY

In the mid-1930s, in an article titled "The General Problem of Falsifications" Ar thur Upham Pope starts by railing against the wiles of the forger ?[...] whose

greed and unscrupulousness frequently force into the market and even into public collections falsifications that mislead the public, corrupt aesthetic standards, distort

history and waste money?.1 And one might add, embarrass the expert. We have just finished cheering Pope

for this bold pronouncement when we see that his article turns out to have two main

thrusts. He wants to persuade us that too much caution about falsifications is actu

ally more damaging than too little, and he tries to defend what now appears the in defensible: the silver "Alp Arslan" salver in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Look

ing now, for example, through the plates of ceramics in the Survey of Persian Art, we

might wish that Pope had paid more heed to his own fine words. But it is a difficult

business, and none of us can afford to be complacent, nor criticise the mistakes of

others too harshly. I could easily make all the main points of my discussion from my own institution's

collections, we have been collecting for much longer than many institutions after all, and have had more opportunity for error. I can show mistakes that even a scholar of

Arthur Lane's class can make ? a scholar whose meticulous observation and profound

knowledge laid the foundations upon which our subject still rests. Before proceeding further, a few definitions: it is useful to distinguish between fake

and forgery, though both are plentiful. A fake is an innocent object, possibly original but

"improved" in some way to enhance its interest and thereby its value. Faking is found as

repainting, addition of dates and signatures, new gilding, replacement of missing pieces, and marriage of genuine but non-belonging parts. Forgery is the entirely non-innocent

making of a deceptive object from scratch, as in the matter of banknotes. The simplest deception is a simple mistake, where the error is entirely of the

spectator's own making, often an overexcited response to things that are quite coin

cidentally similar {eg a. genuine 14th century "Veramin" bowl displayed as "Samar

1 - Pope, "The Problem of Falsification", p. 177.

OM, XXIII n.s. (LXXXTV), 2, 2004, p. 517-539 ? Istituto per l'Oriente C. A. Nallino - Roma

5i8 Oliver Watson

ran" blue-on-white ware)2 or are perfectly innocent copies or reproductions: many

modern Iznik-ish tourist wares3 come to the Museum as public enquiries in the hope that they are the genuine thing. The Italian firm Cantagalli which made excellent re

productions of Iznik wares around the turn of the century, scrupulously marked their pieces with the singing cock.4 It is the unscrupulous dealer who tries to trans form the reproduction into a forgery by grinding-off the mark. More doubt sur

rounds the intentions of the French firm Samson, who from the mid-19tn century made careful copies of a wide range of historic ceramics, all highly collectible, and marked if at all with discreet, even deceptive, marks in the styles of the originals they were copying. Chinese and European porcelains were their chief product, all made in a fine hard-paste body which is what gives away at once that they are copies of Iznik. An illustration of the dangers of Samson wares for Islamicists is a Kutahya coffee-pot in the V&A (fig. 1). It was accepted as genuine by Arthur Lane, who illustrated it in Later Islamic Pottery, including its mark among the genuine Kutahya marks.5 The Arabic "sin" was however Samson's usual mark when they bothered to mark their Is

lamic copies; and the pot is of an entirely non-Kutahya hard white paste, while nei ther shape, nor foot-ring, nor colour, nor weight is right for Kutahya ware (fig. 2). So why was Lane fooled? One can only suggest that he liked the piece, and as he liked it, he fitted it into his conceptual framework, and did not let the discrepancies disrupt his view of Kutahya ware.

More difficult to explain is his acceptance of a minai bowl in the V&A. In Early Islamic Pottery, he warns us:

Unfortunately the overglaze colours can be very well imitated by skilful

forgers, so that the more obviously expensive minai pieces, sometimes

furnished with 'interesting' dated inscriptions, are apt to engender more

than aesthetic uneasiness.

and

Dates painted on minai vessels are often suspect as fraudulent additions

2-Seen at a distinguished European public collection; compare also the reverse of a fifteenth

century Spanish dish, with painted frond-like decoration, illustrated as a twelfth-century Persian

piece: Bamborough, Treasures of Islam, p. 81.

3 - Such pottery is made in Greece and Turkey. For pottery in Jerusalem, see The New York Times,

August 11th, 1985, 6. A pamphlet, perhaps published sometime in the 1920s-1930s, claims the Je rusalem pottery was started by refugees from Kutahya during the Great World War: Embroideries,

Pottery, Rugs, made by Refugee Women and Orphans in the Workshops and Trade Schools of Near

East Relief, Near East Industries, New York, nd, p. 16.

4- Lane, Later Islamic Pottery, p. 114, no. 23.

5- Ibid., pi. 51e; mark p. 114, no. 22.

6- Lane, Early Islamic Pottery, p. 42.

7 - Ibid.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 5'9

So it is surprising that he appears to accept without qualification and on the very next page a minai bowl "dated" 640/1242 (figs 3-4). Close inspection reveals that most of this "date" is painted on a large section of plaster restoration most skillfully done before the piece entered the Museum in 1919;8 only one original word most

unlikely ever to have been part of a date. It is easier to see why Lane was taken in by the next example. In Early Islamic

Pottery, he illustrates on facing pages two similar Iranian lustre dishes of the late 12^

century each showing a mounted rider.9 The rider on the right has the classic "moon-face" of an Iranian Saljuq beauty; that on the left has a squarer face framed

by a pointed beard (fig. 5). Lane compares him to a falconer on a Fatimid lustre dish from Egypt and suggests that he was painted by an Egyptian in Iran, while the "moon-face" was painted by an Iranian.10 Alas, recent conservation of the putative

Egyptian-painted dish has revealed that it is constructed from fragments of at least two separate dishes: the face inserted with foreign fragments cut to form turban and

hair, the beard modern paintwork (fig. 6). The square Egyptian-style face is entirely the work of the modern faker.11 But Lane, finding a stylistic demonstration of his thesis that Egyptians brought lustre painting to Iran, did not look closer. The impor tance of the piece for his argument ironically meant that he examined it less. Agree ing with his thesis, I did exactly the same almost 30 years later but with much less ex cuse: the dish in the meantime had been cleaned to show exactly where the restoration and missing parts were, and it was on public display again in the Museum - but the

photograph I had ordered from the Museum happened to be old.12 This was our "Pilt down man" - our excitement at the "missing link" over-rode our judgment.13

We can divide "falsifications" into a number of different types, some overlapping in technique, some whose borders are blurred and depend on the intentions, inevi

tably unknowable, of those involved in making or trading them.

Mistakes

It is all too easy to make mistakes, misidentifying or mis-attributing objects that in themselves are

perfectly innocent. Some things are more easily prone to a mis

reading than others. In the V&A for example there is a tile that bears a date as part of a moulded kufic inscription: 206 H/821 CE (fig. 7). An early documentary piece?

8- Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", figs 10-11; Guest ("A Dated Rayy Bowl") had already recog nised that much of the date was written on plaster, but reads, optimistically and wrongly, the last

few letters to be ?... forty?. His reconstruction of the date goes against any known genuine example.

9- Lane, Early Islamic Pottery, pis 52c and 53c.

10- Ibid., p. 37-38.

11 - Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", figs 8-9.

12- Watson, "Persian Lustre-Painted Pottery", pi. 2.

13- For Piltdown man, see Jones, Fake?, p. 93-95.

520 Oliver Watson

Alas no. The tile's fabric and decoration - fritware with turquoise glaze and enam elled and gilt decoration - shows that it must be much later, probably 131*1 century. The date might well be the result of careful copying of an earlier inscription in an other medium when the building to which it belonged was renovated.14

More liable to lead one astray is a Kashan lustre bowl now in the Khalili collec tion: the date Shawwal 504 H/March 1111 CE which forms part of a standard set of verses, is genuine and part of the original decoration.15 The only problem is that the bowl by its fabric, form and style of decoration must have been made a century later: 611 H/1214 CE is a perfectly plausible date which could be paralleled on numerous other examples16

- 511 H is simply not possible. The preceding inscrip tion gives no clue to this puzzle, and one could hardly argue that the potter had sim

ply made a mistake himself after more than a decade in the new century. The bowl is

perfectly genuine but dates from one hundred years later than the date inscribed on it. An unexplained enigma.

Copies and Reproductions

Problems deriving from copies have already been discussed above. Later copies of Iznik seem to give the most problem to the non-expert, and of course Iznik has been one of the most reproduced of all ceramics - from the 17^ century Italian pieces from Padua; 18tn century Istanbul (Tekfur Serai), Kutahya, or Berlin; 19r^ century European copies by Cantagalli or Samson, or copies in this century by "tourist" pot teries from Greece to Syria. Reproductions of Turkish pieces were even commis sioned in Iran for the V&A in the late 19th century.17

The Iranian wares of the 19th and 20th centuries "inspired" by earlier periods, such as the common relief-tiles with "Shah Abbas" on horseback, do not now pre sent much problem except to the inexperienced

- though they were frequently taken

as old by our predecessors.18 The lustre work by the late 19tn century potter CAU Muhammad, one of the very few able to produce a genuine lustre pigment, can be confused on occasion with the work by which he was inspired,19 though his work is

14-Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries" fig. 1; Lane, Guide to the Collection, pi. 5a, where the date is not read.

15 - Grube, Cobalt and Lustre, no. 281; I have been able to examine the bowl closely - the date ap

pears perfectly genuine and integral; the preceding verses are conventional "love quatrains" and of

fer no clue to the problem.

16- Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, pis 67, 71, 74.

17- For a good Samson copy of a famous Iznik mosque-lamp in the V&A see Drouot-Richlieu, lot

17; for the other Iznik copies see Watson, "Iznik from Isfahan".

18 - Lane, Later Islamic Pottery, pi. 63a, who recognised their late date; such tiles are still regularly

brought to the Museum for opinion by owners believing them to be Safavid in date.

19-Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, p. 76-79, pi. Vlllb-XI; Melikian Chirvani, "From the Royal

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 52i

usually not as purely derivative as some of his contemporaries20 (fig. 8).

Repair and Reconstruction

The Chinese custom of burying chattels with their dead means that the excavation of

graves has supplied a vast quantity of pre-modern ceramics in pristine condition. In

the Islamic world the vast majority of ceramics come from archaeological sites dug legally and scientifically or (more often) not. Only from the 16tn century have ce ramics survived in any quantity above ground and in good condition. There are of course individual examples and groups of medieval Islamic ceramics which through accidents of history have survived complete and unaffected by burial - early finds of

Raqqa and Sultanabad wares or the Gurgan finds for example.21 The great majority of pieces however are broken and restored, with greater or lesser parts missing. To

find, in the ruins or the rubbish-dumps of an old city, even a moderately complete set of fragments which would make up a bowl is a great rarity, and the number of such pieces which have been found pays testament to the prolonged labours of those

who have sought them. The majority of pieces, however, have missing bits made up in plaster and then painted to restore the complete pattern. The ethics of such resto ration work - the extent to which it replicates

or invents patterns and inscriptions, the clear distinction between original and makeup

- continues to be debated among professional conservators and their clients. When it reaches the stage of "accuracy" which fools even Arthur Lane, as in the minai bowl mentioned above, and consists of fully one third of the bowl, one may question the intention.

Another method, long practiced, is to insert genuine sherds of similar type into the missing spaces and merely disguise the joins. Here one can trace a complete spec trum of work, from a single small sherd filling a gap in the rim, the attachment of necks and handles, to large areas constructed from foreign sherds (such as the horse

rider dish mentioned above) or the amalgamation of one base with another wall.22

Completely fanciful new objects may be invented: I have seen more than one large cockerel constructed from sherds -

body and wings made from wall-sherds and a mag

nificent plume of tail-feathers made up from long sections of rim. Conversely, without sufficient sherds to make a complete bowl, a new cut-down shape may be invented: a

Boat", figs 25-27, published a tile signed by CA1I Muhammad, but dated 751 H/1351 CE as being of 14th century date, see Watson, "Persian Lustre Ware", p. 77; one is forced to wonder exactly what cAli Muhammad's motives were in this case, by giving his tile a spurious early date.

20-Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", p. 41-42, fig. 6.

21 - See Kelekian, Kelikian Collection, for Sultanabad pieces; Garner, "Ancient Potteries" and Grube,

"Raqqa-Keramik" for Raqqa pieces; and Bahrami, Gurgan Faiences, for Gurgan pieces found bur

ied, but in excellent states of preservation.

22 - See Pope, Survey, pi. 746a, for a silhouette-ware dish where the decorated rim has been added

to base from a different vessel.

522 Oliver Watson

"boat-shaped" vessel in the Barlow collection is clearly the fitted-together remains of a conventional round bowl, and others similarly sculpted are known (fig. 9).23

A further sophistication is the inlaying of sherds: a shallow area is excavated from the first piece, so that bits skimmed from other pieces may be inserted. The "front" of a dish may thus be improved without disturbing the "back". A lustre dish from the

Reitlinger collection now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is dated 604 H/1207 CE and is signed by the potter Abu Zayd, but the horseman decorating the interior has been cut from another piece. It was probably skimmed from the surface of a tile, possi bly by the same artist, and is inlaid into a shallow cut-out prepared for it. One giveaway is that the break-lines on the reverse do not match those on the front (fig. 10).

More extraordinary is the recorded fabrication of new (forged) sherds to fill miss

ing gaps - an undertaking of such technical complexity (matching not only qualities

of glaze and decoration, but wall-thickness, curvature, and an exact match of pat

tern) that beggars belief.24 Evidently a complete piece is commercially worth so very much more that such effort is justified.

It is noticeable that Iranian pottery suffers particularly from this attention, whereas Egyptian wares for example tend in general to be neglected by collectors

(and indeed by art-historians) precisely because they have not undergone such treat ment. Hannover in 1925 blamed the Armenians:

One can hardly be too cautious with [...] the Armenian dealers settled in

Paris and London. Not that these dealers, like many of their European

confreres, sell spurious articles for genuine. This seems to be forbidden by their conscience [...] On the other hand, the Armenian dealers are quite

without scruples of conscience when it is a question of making out a

patchwork of fragments to be an undamaged piece. The Armenians are

masters of restoration in the widest meaning of the word. In most cases

there is more plaster than earthenware in the botched-up pieces they offer

for sale, a fact which they understand all too well how to conceal by means of painting, including very deceptive patches of silica with the glit ter of gold or silver, which they have no difficulty in procuring from the iridescence on worthless potsherds. Their skill in this province is so exten

sive that from the bottom of one piece and some fragments from the sides

of another they will make up a bowl that to all appearances is entire and

as such deceives everyone who has not made a habit of beginning his ex

amination of a piece of pottery by rapping it with his knuckles and listen

ing to the sound, which inevitably reveals whether the piece is intact or

not. It goes without saying that the undecorated Persian (or Syrian) semi

23 - Fehervari, Islamic Pottery, no. 115; see also Melikian Chirvani ("From the Royal Boat", figs 25

27) for other similar examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

24-Pease, "Two Bowls", documents one such piece; others have been reported since.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 523

faiences with single coloured glaze are far from constituting so willing a

recipient for the process here indicated as those decorated in several col

ours; moreover, as the latter fetch the highest prices, they are in double

measure the most profitable. The greatest possible caution is therefore re

quired in the case of the most expensive of all the Rhages wares, those

with a wealth of figures and colours in the decoration, in which some

times gilding occurs and provides still another means hiding the multi

tude of flaws".25

Overpainting

Overpainting, as pointed out by Hannover above, Lane and many others, is fre

quently used to enhance objects, especially those decorated already in overglaze tech

niques. Many a minai bowl has added colours and gilding,26 and more than once has a Curator confessed to me that they have stopped cleaning this or that famous piece for fear of removing everything. Lajvardina ware in particular seems to suffer from

"retouching" - in some cases applied over an

original but worn design, in others

freely invented on an old or new plain bowl.27 It is always worrying when the under

lying vessel would make perfect sense without the decoration above.28 Lustreware has until recently been much more difficult to fake. It is nigh impos

sible to apply a convincing lustrous pigment as a cold paint, and to replicate the low

firing technique appears to have been beyond the capabilities of most potters since the turn of the century. Only very recently have bowls with a convincing lustrous sheen of medieval character been suspected as forgeries. One can identify lustres faked with a dull brown pigment fired into the glaze. This does not produce a lus trous finish but can have the imperceptible finish of a true lustre: it is often the style of painting that first raises suspicions.29

25- Hannover, Pottery and Porcelain, p. 64-65. In the early 1970s I chanced into a back room of a

dealer's shop in Teheran, where laid out on ranges of trestle tables were cardboard boxes filled with

sherds of different types of ware - all acquired from all around Iran and sorted by type, waiting to

fill lacunae in more complete pieces, or to be used to reconstruct entirely new objects when stock

was low.

26- Compare the minai bowl in cleaned condition in the Keir Collection, Grube, Islamic Pottery, no. 143, with it in an earlier "improved" state, Pope, Survey, pi. 692.

27 - Out of the 5 pieces of lajvardina in the V&A collection only one appears to have no overpaint

ing. Two others are extensively retouched over worn original decoration; the decoration of the re

maining two appears to be entirely in "restored" overpainting.

28-The carved dish in the British Museum illustrated by Hobson (A Guide, pi. VI) is quite com

plete and plausible without the overglaze red enamel and gilding; these were later found to be mod

ern additions.

29 -Eastern Ceramics, no. 307, is characteristic of a number of pieces where genuine bowl, perhaps with a rather faded lustre design, appears to have been refired with new painting. The lustre is not

524 Oliver Watson

Reproducing a lustre by painting on top of the glaze can often leave the problem of a perceptible layer of decoration - which is never found on a real lustre. Thin brown pigments are sometimes used to reinforce faded or worn

designs, or create

new ones on plain white bowls, especially in 10tn century styles. The famous Freer

Gallery lute-player dish first caught my attention when I noticed signs of a thick

pigment on a flash-photograph I had taken. My suspicions were exacerbated by dis

covering a piece with identical decoration in the Cairo Museum - not only with the

lute-player, but also with the curious and unexplained "symbol" on the left.30 Ex

actly similar patterns always raise concerns in medieval ceramics but here there was

more of interest. Close examination reveals that the Cairo piece is heavily restored

just at the place of the symbol, where a mishmash of foreign sherds and over-painting exist (fig. 11). The Freer dish on the other hand, though broken, was apparently complete. The mysterious symbol is explained by comparison with other dishes -

notably a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art - it is the tail of a bird.31 On the Cairo bowl the restorer has improvised, not understanding the original; the

painter of the Freer bowl has simply copied the Cairo mis-design.32 That the pig ment is not a real lustre has now been confirmed by a detailed scientific study.33 The Freer dish is a perfectly genuine and respectable plain white-ware of the Abbasid pe riod, only the decoration is a modern addition, copied from one of the early pub lished illustrations of the Cairo bowl.

Forging

The forging of Islamic pottery - that is the deliberate making of copies with intent

to deceive - has a surprisingly long history. The first piece to be considered as such -

a turquoise-glazed jar with moulded decoration - entered the V&A in 1876, and it

prompted immediate debate: a note in the register reads "Mr Caspar Clarke lately re

turned from Persia says that about a dozen jars of this design were made in Persia about 30 years ago for a French gentleman, and that he knows the man who made the moulds." This however did not prevent the Museum from acquiring in 1884, a

suspiciously-similar turquoise jar with moulded decoration of figures and mounted

"lustrous", and the style of painting less than convincing. Similar doubts have been thrown on the

tenth century dish with suckling camel in the Louvre, see Koechlin, Migeon, Oriental Art, pi. VI.

30 - Compare Atil, Ceramics, no. 3 with Pope, Survey, pi. 579a.

31 - Jenkins, Islamic Pottery, fig. 5.

32- The Cairo piece was already published, in its present restored form, before the Freer piece was ac

quired in 1925: Vignier, "New Excavations", pi. II; and Pezard, La CeramiqueArchaique, pi. 117.

33- My suspicions were followed up by a detailed study at the Freer Gallery which has conclusively demonstrated that all the "lustre" painting is recently applied over a plain, and no doubt genuine 9th

century white-glazed bowl. I offer my thanks to Massumeh Farhad and the Freer Gallery for willingly undertaking this piece of research, and I look forward to the publication of the detailed results.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 525

riders.34 It came as part of the extensive and highly revered Castellani collection, for

the not insignificant sum of ? 25/10/- the cataloguing was however cautious and no date was given (fig. 12). And again in 1928 another jar, with the inscription "made

by Harun" and dated 688 H/1289 CE, was offered as a gift, and unquestioningly accepted as genuine. To us now, each piece seems absurdly worse than the last, though each apparently raised less and less suspicion.

An illustration of how forgers have to keep up with the growth of knowledge of their clients is afford by two forgeries of Sultanabad ware. The first, a piece acquired by the V&A in 1913 is, to modern eyes, laughably inept: flimsy material (quite like much Qajar pottery), weak misunderstood shape, and poor draftsmanship of an

atypical design -

everything speaks against it. Yet it was accessioned without com ment for ? 25 as a genuine 13^ century piece (fig. 13). This lack of judgement is

surprising considering how much good genuine Sultanabad was then known.35

Compare this with the forgery identified by TL testing of a piece formerly in the Barlow collection, now at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.36 Suspicion raised

perhaps because it was "too good to be true" - too big, in too good a condition, too

clean and spritely in its drawing.37 Only after confirmation of its recent manufacture do we start to notice, for example, a suspicious uniformity in the drawing, a laborious

detailing of the design... The forgers had learnt much in little over half a century. The mass of fraudulent pieces of Garrus ware are, in every interesting way, for

geries, though technically they may be classified as fakes. The fact that the basic bowl

may be an innocent piece of recent peasant-ware - a

yoghurt bowl or the like, per

haps - does not redeem the decoration now found on them. Though the drawing

style alone is sufficient to condemn many of them, detailed observation shows how new designs were cut through the original glaze into the clay body, and a new glaze applied, sometimes to the whole piece though often to the newly cut decoration alone. In these cases there is a remarkable contrast between the textures of the two

glazes, such as is never seen on original work where a single glaze covers the entire

surface. This calls into question a large jar in the V&A where there appears to be a

definite second application of glaze over the top half of the body; and where the style and manner of carving of the main decoration of animals and inscription stand at

odds with other carved decoration at the neck; and where the inscription is uniquely and inexplicably upside-down (fig. 14). This perhaps started life as a handsome, but

simple storage jar with a brief band of chip-carved decoration round the neck. Other tell-tale signs of reworking include splashes or runs of colour in the original glaze

34- Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", p. 39, fig. 2.

35- See especially Kelekian, Kelekian Collection.

36- Early Islamic Wares, no. 69, illustrated.

37 - It was Geza Fehervari who requested at TL test at the time of the preparation of the Barlow

catalogue in 1973.

5^6 Oliver Watson

which do not flow across the newly cut areas. There was great excitement amongst

collectors for these wares in the 1920s and 1930s when fantastic theories about their Zoroastrian or "Gabri" fire-worshipping association appeared to cloud any connois

seurly judgment (fig. 15).38 The forging of ceramics implies considerable commitment of resources to create

new articles from scratch, and it is not surprising that forgeries tend to come in groups.

"Regular suspects" belong to different identifiable groups

There is a group of pieces made in a hard white fabric with an irregular broadly crackled glaze made in imitation usually of 14^ century Syrian or Egyptian blue and black painted vases, rather ugly in form. A distinctive characteristic is the heavy smok

ing of the foot and glaze to give an impression of old ingrained dirt (fig. 16). Another group probably made in the 1960s when many pieces entered Western

museums, imitates Iranian silhouette and black-under-blue underglaze-painted wares

of the pre-Mongol period. The V&A. recently purchased a piece from this group which copies an original in the Museum (fig. 17). It shows all the characteristics of the group

- a rather clumsy shape in an over-hard fabric, a glaze that tends to crawl

leaving matte areas here and there, the black pigment tending to dissolve into a

patch of tiny dots, and the laborious inelegant hand of the painting. The V&A piece does not have any bands of inscription where the ill-formed hand of the modern

copyist is often most clearly visible. It is probable that the design for this bowl was

copied from the small reproduction of the genuine piece in Lane's Early Islamic Pot

tery of 1947.39 Other pieces from the same group often display a distinctive (and diag nostic) pseudo-calligraphic band.40

Yet another group, similarly copying silhouette and underglaze-painted wares, is

distinguished by a fragile fabric, made into feeble shapes, and tending to develop se vere cracks; it closely resembles the fabric of standard late-19tn Qajar pots.41

38- Sambon, "Faiences Ivoirines". For particularly absurd and suspicious "Garrus" wares see Wat

son, "Fakes and Forgeries", fig. 7 lh; Fehervari, Islamic Pottery, nos 42-48; Pope, Survey, pi. 617b;

Soustiel, La Ceramique, pis 58, 66 and much elsewhere. Contrast these with convincing examples: Arts of Islam, nos 322-323, excavated at Taht-i Sulayman), Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", fig. 7

rh, and similar.

39- Watson, "Fakes and Forgeries", p. 46, fig. 12.

40- See Wilkinson, Iranien Ceramics, no. 41, for a silhouette-ware jug showing this calligraphy; and Mostra dArte Iranica, no. 382, for an underglaze painted dish with the same trait. This latter

dish copies an illustration of a lustre dish in Objects dArt, lot. 31.

41- A bowl of this type, showing a dancer, in the Heeramaneck collection, now in Los Angeles,

copies an original in the V&A: see Pal, Islamic Art, no. 26, p. 31 and Arts of Islam, no. 339 for the

copy, and Ettinghausen, "Early Shadow Figures", fig. 2, and Pope, Survey, pi. 750b for the original. For Qajar originals, see Centlivres-Demont, Faiencespersanes, pis 9-30.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 527

Other pieces stand condemned, or suspected, alone, as individuals. Some are un

problematic - such as the Barlow Sultanabad bowl mentioned above, or a purported

"Samanid" slip-painted ware, but made in a frit, not a clay fabric, the black slip bleeding a strong blue colour, never seen in the originals, which was once brought in to me for opinion at the Museum. Others are distinctly problematic

- judgements

based on subjective criteria of "feel" or "hand" or "style"; or pieces that simply do not "fit in". Here, we should recall that the early finds of Sultanabad wares, for ex

ample, or the Gurgan finds, were regarded by many as deeply suspicious for many years.42

But is it a problem, to be suspicious? Does one lose more than one gains, by be

ing sceptical, or is it more dangerous to be led astray by a too-accepting nature? Early in his 1936 article, Pope warns us:

[...] a more serious danger [is] that, made over-cautious by the threat of

forgeries, we may condemn genuine objects. The object that is rejected by a scholar or official of standing is generally relegated to the decorative trade where it is likely soon permanently to disappear. Thus the world

may be deprived of some great work of art and historians of some decisive

document.43

How serious a problem is this? My own reaction is conditioned by working in an area so polluted by fakes and forgeries, and an area which is made up of essentially mass-produced objects: the disappearance of a few innocent objects may be a worth while price to pay for getting rid of so much junk that, in Pope's own words, "[...] mislead the public, corrupt aesthetic standards, distort history and waste money."44 I also feel confident that good things unfairly condemned will not disappear for ever, but will resurface for reassessment; for even bad things constantly resurface.45

Pope further admonishes us: "To rescue from oblivion a work of art unjustly con

demned ought to be counted a greater merit than to be the first to have discovered a

42 - Basil Gray remained sceptical about the "Gurgan finds" until the end of his life. Kiihnel (Is lamic Arts, p. 85) records how the first complete Sultanabad wares were received: "These, according to the dealers, had mostly been found in Sultanabad [...] and were regarded at first with some hesi

tation. At the Munich exhibition in 1910 it was pretty generally recognized that the suspicions had

been unfounded, and today we smile at the doubts of those days. This experience with the so-called

Sultanabad wares and the stream of subsequent finds has lulled many collectors into such a sense of

security that they no longer contemplate the possibility of forgeries [...]".

43- Pope, "The Problem of Falsification", p. 177.

44- Ibid.

45- The group of late-nineteenth century copies of Iznik, commissioned by the V&A to be made

in Iran, were mostly sold off in the 1950s as un-needed reproductions -

good candidates for the

"decorative trade". However, they reappear regularly in auctions and the trade, for re-assessment, in

the hope that they might be genuine. See Watson, "Iznik from Isfahan".

528 Oliver Watson

falsification".46 I would like to do just that - and to dedicate the "rescue" to Arthur

Lane, who, in spite of his few lapses, provided the solid foundations on which our sub

ject is still built. His clarity of thought and expression, soundness of argument, and his intuitive brilliance puts Pope's ever-muddled and partisan preaching to shame.

The "rescue" is of one of the V&A's earliest acquisitions to have been doubted -

the turquoise jar with moulded decoration mentioned above. It was acquired in

1876 and was doubted as soon as it entered the Museum. A similar jar, acquired less than a decade later, was apparently accepted

more readily. It now appears as an inept

modern forgery (see above and fig. 12). Its source? The earlier jar itself, which now

proclaims itself confidently as a splendid example of medieval craftsmanship;47 our own confidence reassured by scientific testing (fig. 18).

Arts of Islam (The)

Aril, E.

Centlivres-Demont, M.

Bahrami, M.

Bamborough, Ph.

Drouot-Richlieu

Early Islamic Wares

Eastern Ceramics

Ettinghausen, R.

Fehervari, G.

Garner, Julian

Grube, Ernst J.

Grube, Ernst J.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Arts of Islam, Exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, London, 1976.

Ceramics from the World of Islam, Freer Gallery of Art, Wash

ington (DC), 1973. Faiences persanes desXIXe etXXe siecle, Berne, 1975.

Gurgan Faiences, Cairo, 1949.

Treasures of Islam, Poole, 1976.

Art d'Orient, Sale Catalogue, Drouot-Richlieu, 2th Sept, Pa

ris, 1998.

Early Islamic Wares, Catalogue of an exhibition, Oriental Ce

ramic Society, April to June, London, 1950.

Eastern Ceramics from the collection of Gerald Reitlinger, cata

logue, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1981.

"Early Shadow Figures", Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, 116 (1934), p. 10-15. Islamic Pottery: A Comprehensive Study based on the Barlow Collection, London, 1973.

"Ancient Potteries from the site of Rakka", International Stu

dio, May (1927), p. 52-59.

"Raqqa-Keramik in der Sammlung des Metropolitan Museum

in New York", Kunstdes Orients, IN (1963), p. 42-78. Islamic Pottery of the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century in the Keir Collection, London, 1976.

46- Pope, "The Problem of Falsification", p. 178.

47- Jones, Fake?, nos 254a-b. A "TL" test of the original jar confirmed its medieval origin.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 529

Grube, Ernst J.

Guest, R.

Hannover, E.

Hobson, R. L.

Jenkins, M.

Jones, M. (ed.)

Kelekian, D.

Koechlin, R, Migeon, G.

Kuhnel, Ernst

Lane, A.

Lane, A.

Lane, A.

Melikian Chirvani, A.

S.

Mostra d'Arte Iranica

Objects dArt

Pal, P. (ed.)

Pease, M.

Pezard, M.

Pope, A. U.

Pope, A. U. (ed.)

Sambon, A.

Cobalt and Lustre. The first centuries ofthe Islamic pottery (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art DC), London, 1994. "A Dated Rayy Bowl", Burlington Magazine, LVIII (1931), p. 134-139.

Pottery and Porcelain: I, Europe and The Near East, ed. Ber

nard Rackham, London, 1925.

A Guide to the Islamic Pottery of the Near East, British Museum, London, 1932.

Islamic Pottery, a Brief History, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Spring 1983. Fake? The Art of Deception, Exhibition catalogue, British Mu seum, London, 1990.

The Kelekian Collection of Persian and Analogous Potteries,

1885-1909, Paris 1910.

Oriental Art: Ceramics, Fabrics, Carpets, London, nd.

Islamic Arts, transl. of German edition of 1963, London,

1970.

Early Islamic Pottery, Monographs on Pottery and Porcelain,

London, 1947.

Later Islamic Pottery, Monographs on Pottery and Porcelain,

London, 1957 (reprinted 1971). Guide to the Collection of Tiles, Victoria and Albert Museum, revised edition, London, 1960.

"From the Royal Boat to the Beggar's Bowl", Islamic Art, IV

(1990-1991), p. 3-113. Mostra dArte Iranica, ISMEO, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo

Brancaccio June-August, Rome, 1956.

Objects dArtAnciens de la Perse, Collection de M. J. M...,

Hotel Drouot, 5th - 6th May, Paris, 1922.

Islamic Art: The Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, Los Angeles

County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1973.

"Two Bowls in One", Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, XVI (1958), p. 236-240 + 7 illus.

La Ceramique Archa'ique de LIslam etses Origines, Paris, 1920.

"The Problem of Falsification in Persian Art", in Memoires du

IIP Congres International dArt et dArcheologie Iraniens 1935,

Leningrad, 1939, p.177-195. A Survey of Persian Art, 6 vols, Oxford, 1939.

"Les Faiences Ivoirines de Sendjan de la Dynastie Boui'de", Le

Musee, December (1925), p. 113-122.

530 Oliver Watson

Soustiel, J. La Ceramique Islamique: Le Guide du Connaisseur, Fribourg, 1985.

Vignier, C. "The New Excavations at Rhages", Burlington Magazine, XXIV (1914), p. 211-218.

Watson, O. "Persian Lustre Ware from the I4tn to the 19tlT Centuries",

Le Monde Iranien et TIslam, III (1975), p. 63-80.

Watson, O. "Persian Lustre-Painted Pottery: the Rayy and Kashan Styles", Transactions of The Oriental Ceramic Society, XL (1976), p. 1 19.

Watson, O. "Iznik from Isfahan", Apollo, Sept. (1981), p. 76-179.

Watson, O. "Fakes and Forgeries of Islamic Pottery", The V&A Album

(London), 4 (1985), p. 38-46.

Watson, O. Persian Lustre Ware, Faber Monographs on Pottery and Porce

lain, London, 1985.

Wilkinson, C. K. Iranian Ceramics, New York, 1963.

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery

Fig. 3-Minai bowl, fritware with overglaze enamel decoration, Iran (Kashan), early 13 cen

tury, restored with spurious date 640/1242, V&A C.81-1918

532 Oliver Watson

Fig. 4-Detail of reverse of fig. 3, showing "date" written on part of a plaster restoration

Fig. 5-Dish, fritware with lustre decoration, Iran (Kashan) late 12th century, V&A C.7-1947; as "restored"

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Po ttery 533

534 Oliver Watson

Fig. 8-Two spittoons, fritware with lustre decoration, Iran; (left-hand) 17th century, V&A

959-1876; (right-hand) purchased new in 1909, V&A 797-1909

Fig. 9-Dish, fritware with underglaze painting, Itan (Kashan), early 13th century, Ashmolean

Museum, Oxford, 1956-167; the discontinuities of inscription and pattern, and unnatural

break-lines of the sherds show how it has been cut down from a conventional round bowl

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Po ttery 535

Fig. 10-Dish, fritware with lustre decoration, Iran (Kashan), signed by Abu

Zayd, dated 604H/ 1207CE; the decoration of the horseman has been inserted

from another vessel or tile

Fig. 11 -Detail of a dish, earth enware with lustre decoration over a white glaze, Iraq, 10th

century, Museum of Islamic

Art, Cairo, showing restora tion with foreign sherds and

overpainting, transforming a bird into a sceptre

536 Oliver Watson

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Po ttery 537

Fig. 14-Jar, with moulded decoration under a turquoise glaze, Iran, 19th century, V&A 673

1884, acquired as a mediaeval piece

538 Oliver Watson

Fig. 15-Two Garrus bowls, earthenware with carved decoration under a transparent glaze, left-hand: Iran, decoration cut in modern times, V&A C.211-1926; right-hand: Iran, proba

bly 12th-13th century, V&A C.285-1927. Green splashes in the left-hand piece occur on either

side of outer band of cut decoration, but no longer flow across it!

Fig. 16-Jar, fritware with

underglaze painting in black

and blue, unknown place of

manufacture, 20th century, V&A

C.176-1980. This piece was of

fered as Mamluk 14th century at the Sothebys Islamic sale

in London, April 1980; after a

TL test which indicated mod ern manufacture it was pre sented to the V&A

Fakes and Forgeries in Islamic Pottery 539

\ Fig. 17-Bowl, frit ware with painting in

black under a blue

glaze, probably Iran, 20th century (proba bly 1960s) in early 13th century style,

V&AC. 179-1984

Fig. 18- Jar, fritware with moulded

decoration under a turquoise glaze, Iran, 13^-14* century, V&A 2433

1876