NG6461: The Fake Rubens

In July 1980 London’s National Gallery paid a record sum for a canvas that purported to be Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah (1609). But as the artist and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis has long maintained, the painting is not the work of Rubens at all, but rather a copy of his original. Notwithstanding the formidable body of historical and stylistic evidence that supports Doxiadis’s assessment, the National Gallery has not only continued to defend its attribution of the canvas to R...