When we know that most Flemish painters did not sign their works, that from the end of the sixteenth century they worked with pupils in studios, genuine family businesses handed down from father to son, that the quality of a work commissioned from a single painter depended on the agreed price and the client’s social standing, we will understand the futility of the search for an indisputable attribution! Snobbery and the laws of the art market ensure that a mediocre work attributed to a known painter is preferred to a masterpiece by a less well-known author, a picture from the master’s youth to the dazzling work produced by his most brilliant pupil.*
Evence IV Coppée, son of Baron Evence III Coppée, collector
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At a time when a rising generation of artists is taking a new look at painting and drawing, setting aside the difficult question of what to paint, and greedily seizing upon the shape and pictorial material in order to occupy the socioeconomic space of the art market, as ephemeral and volatile as everything that is based on the emergence of a name in service to market value, at a time too when the collector, who in the past did so much to preserve the heritage constituted by the Flemish and Italian Primitives, admittedly pending the key attribution that would see a cherished acquisition – or an expensively purchased one – rise up from the swamp of artisanal output, the same collector who is content nowadays with a shortlist of fashionable artists while not even trying to become acquainted with the painting his choice will sanctify, it is right and proper to revisit the output of the Flemish workshops of the end of the fifteenth century.**
Alain Tapié, chief curator of heritage, director of the Palais des Beaux-arts and the Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse in 2005
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