Smith was extradited to the US and charged on 29 counts for his alleged cleaning and repairing of 22 stolen antiquities for Subhash Kapoor, the dealer accused of leading a conspiracy to loot and offload an estimated $143 million worth of antiquities from Asia onto the New York art market. Another British restorer, Richard Salmon, was similarly accused of helping to cover the artifacts’ true origins. Neither Salmon nor Smith could be reached for comment.
“Without restorers to disguise stolen relics, there would be no laundered items for antiquities traffickers to sell,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in a press release announcing Smith’s indictment. “Behind every antiquities trafficking ring preying upon cultural heritage for profit, there is someone reassembling and restoring these looted pieces to lend the criminal enterprise a veneer of legitimacy.”
A Shiva Nataraja statue that was among the stolen items allegedly possessed and restored by Neil Perry Smith. Credit: Manhattan District Attorney’s Office
This latest investigation is reminiscent of the case of another now infamous British restorer, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who served three years of a six-year sentence in the late 1990s after being convicted of transforming genuine antiquities into garish-looking tourist goods, to enable them to be smuggled out of Egypt. And two of the best-known art forgers — Tom Keating, who died in 1984, and Eric Hebborn (pictured top), who was murdered in Rome in 1996 — also started out their careers as self-styled art restorers.
More recently, the restorer Mohamed Aman Siddique was embroiled in a fraud trial concerning the faking of paintings by one of Australia’s best-known artists, Brett Whiteley. After being found guilty alongside the art dealer Peter Stanley Gant in 2016, he was acquitted the following year, with the judge stating the court was not “equipped” to ascertain the authorship of the works in question.
Code of conduct
“The motivation for such restorers-turned-forgers is often ego, wanting to prove they are as good as the artist they are forging, and perhaps wanting ‘to get one over’ on the art world,” said Simon Gillespie, a leading art conservation and restoration expert based in London. “If they get away with this, they remain invisible and then write their memoirs and become famous.”
Such high-profile cases raise questions as to whether the conservation profession is tightly regulated enough, a question also raised when botched examples of restoration occurs. Most notably, in 2020, the Spanish “restoration” of a copy of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “Immaculate Conception” went viral online after its attempt to recapture the original features fell comically short.
“Normally, in these (botched) examples, they are artists who participate (as) pseudo-restorers, which has very serious consequences for the heritage,” said Francisco Manuel Espejo Jiménez, the president of Spain’s association for conservators and restoration professionals, ACRE, which is pushing for increased regulation of the sector.
Artist Tom Keating standing in front of one of his works, his impression of Constable painting ‘The Haywain’, at a press conference in London. He admitted flooding the market with imitation paintings as a protest against art “merchants.” Credit: PA Images/Getty Images
While there is no regulation of such professionals in the UK, the Institute of Conservation (Icon) runs an accreditation system.
“All of our members also have to abide by a code of conduct and therefore can be the subject of a complaint made against them which is investigated and action taken if needed,” said Sara Crofts, Icon’s chief executive, adding that this happens “very rarely.”
She says Neil Perry Smith was not Icon-accredited and emphasizes the importance of establishing the difference between conservation and restoration when choosing which to work with (the latter better understood as just one type of conservation).
On a more positive note, the role that conservators have played as expert witnesses in art crime investigations and trials is significant, including the $25 million lawsuit the defunct gallery Knoedler settled in 2016 after a couple accused them of selling a fake Mark Rothko painting, among dozens of other works. Experts including the art conservator James Martin were key to identifying inconsistencies in the alleged forgeries.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
