They have it! Check out 'Fake or Fortune'. Ostensibly, it's about authenticating 'lost' paintings, but they do a lot of figuring out who is in each painting.
Ooo, picture curator! I used to be a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. So I appreciate the mysteries and stories of portraits! Thank you so much for sharing!
I love how the royal society has generally speaking very well documented histories. I just adore seeing the past and peoples thoughts and words. It makes me feel so connected to the past and those people. It transforms historical figures into real people you can imagine having a conversation with.
Wow, that shield in the middle of the coat of arms is the shield of my home city in Germany, Halle(Saale). It's a salt city and the shield with the 2 stars and the crescent represents in vertical order from the bottom the fire, the salt pan and the salt crystals in the pan.
Oooo, maybe the materials in the signature will fluoresce under ultraviolet light. I could 'swing by' with my longwave and shortwave UV flashlights, and we could do a quick test!
The idea of narrowing a portrait down to a specific decade just by the clothing sounds far-fetched, but now think of the phrase "1980s fashion." You see it now, don't you?
Yeah, but good luck distinguishing 1960s from 1970s, or 1990s from 2000s. Also, I thought we had agreed, as a species, to pretend 1980s fashion had never happened.
They glossed over the question of why they thought (or how they knew?) that they were wedding portraits. If they don't even know which wedding doesn't it cast some doubt?
off the top of my head, carbon dating is simply not precise enough to narrow down by decade, much less year... tho there may be some complicated mix of other radioactive elements that could increase precision?
Wonder if you could do a bit of ancestry on these families and track the widow's peak and detached earlobes on children with the different wives. Wouldn't be definitive, but could give a probability.
Counting all main expenses are just artist time, I would guess more or less the equivalent in XIII century money as how it would cost today. Today, big portraits by qualified artists can coust around 10k - 20k , depending on the prestige of the painter. THe smaller ones maybe half of that...
I couldn't find any data for the early 1700s, but around 1775 a portrait of this size by one of the top painters in England would have cost you 30 to 50 guineas. That would be the equivalent of 2700 to 4500 pounds today.
