Certainly, Clark cultivated the air of a man whose worst nightmare would be the loss of a good umbrella. He looked, sounded, dressed and carried himself like a plum-voweled Tory grandee. Vibe apart, however, he was a socialist, if one allows a very English, decidedly unstrident, institution-loving, patrician declension of socialism.

Born into a textile fortune in Grosvenor Square, Clark grew up in ginormous piles in Suffolk and Argyll that made Brideshead look cozy. It was an Edwardian upbringing that he later described as “vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless”. Winchester, then, came as a culture shock. There, at school, he acquired the habits of mind — a certain social conscience; commitment to public service — that his biographer James Stourton described as a kind of Wykehamical socialism, by turns patrician and progressive, of which Rishi Sunak is, after a fashion, a product. The school produced generations of civil servants, diplomats and a surprising number of Lefty intellectuals — Clark mingled with such socialist grandees as Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. “Winchester may not have had the Whig insouciance and Athenian elegance of Eton,” Stourton wrote, “but it had a high seriousness of purpose and an intellectual distinction that has produced generations of ambassadors, permanent secretaries, heads of Oxbridge colleges, and field marshals.”

Oxford added a second education, further nudging Clark towards the Left. An outsized influence was the classics don Maurice Bowra. Outrageous, erudite, and forever teasing the priggishness out of Clark with the delicacy of a surgeon removing shrapnel, he saw himself as the chief of the set he variously called the Immoral Front, Homintern, and the 69th International. Bowra widened Clark’s literary diet — Yeats, Rilke, Turgenev — and cemented his socialism. In later years, they would spend Christmases together. Clark never abandoned his self-styled Bowrista politics. It was a blend of the socialism of Clark’s older lodestars, William Morris and John Ruskin, both patron saints of his adolescence who dissolved his aristocratic complacency, as well as that of the Christian socialist R. H. Tawney, a name to reckon with in working-class reading groups of the Twenties. As a boy, Clark had regarded the local working men’s club as “a different species… as figures of fun” but Ruskin persuaded him by his late teens that beauty belonged to everyone. Art, he decided, was not a private indulgence but a universal right. This was the conviction he took into adulthood.

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Already in his early twenties, Clark had traded the effortless connoisseurship of his class for something more serious. Under Charles Bell, keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean, and the incomparable art historian Bernard Berenson at his Florentine palazzo I Tatti, Clark shed the skin of a gifted amateur and emerged as a scholar. Promotion followed at an indecent pace: Bell’s job at 28, Director of the National Gallery at 31, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures shortly thereafter.

Life at the National plunged him into the social kaleidoscope of interwar London. There were weekends at Port Lympne with Philip Sassoon, whose Cape Colonial fantasia of a country house was the playground of what Clark called the “unorthodox Tory fringe”. It was here, amid Sassoon’s murals and monocles, that Clark acquired his reputation as the token Red in Tory circles and the token tweedy baron in progressive milieus.

War supplied him with a mission. At the Ministry of Information’s Film Division, Clark revealed a surprisingly deft hand for propaganda. Those years also exposed the marrow-deep socialism he rarely owned up to in company. “Every day makes me a more committed socialist”, he wrote to his mother, railing against “the present system, where private profit is the controlling factor”, before remembering that courtesy calls do not ordinarily fan out into plodding treatises: “however I mustn’t turn this letter into a Ruskinian tract.”

Yet a touch of Ruskin was unmistakable during his decade at the National, and even more during the war. It was Clark who orchestrated the evacuation of the entire national collection, hiding it in the slate caverns of Manod in North Wales like some modern monk protecting manuscripts from marauders. As the Luftwaffe reduced London to rubble, he transformed the emptied Gallery into a sanctuary of music with lunchtime concerts and then, with inspired theatricality, brought back one masterpiece each month — one work to remind a battered people that civilization was still flickering.

More radical still was what happened outside London. Clark sent touring exhibitions of masterpieces into the provinces, ensuring that miners in South Wales and factory workers in the Midlands could stand, unmediated, before a Rubens or a Rembrandt. It was redistribution, in a way — of beauty rather than wealth.

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Meanwhile, his wife Jane set about decorating the so-called British Restaurants, those wartime communal kitchens, with murals by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Clark himself lent pictures from his own walls, ladling out high culture with cauliflower and carrots; East Ham alone received 22. His collectivist instinct even seeped into his sexual affairs. Collecting relationships as others did prints, he tangled himself in what Stourton coyly calls “a series of amitiés amoureuses”. Yet through all the flutter, Jane remained the center of his emotional orbit. He was, improbably, an uxorious philanderer.

After the war, he brooded incessantly on Britain’s future: how art and architecture might improve ordinary lives, how the state might support culture without turning it into a bureaucratic terrarium. Attlee’s victory thrilled him, even as he continued to cherish his Tory acquaintances. This delicate straddling of camps confused his contemporaries but is clearer in retrospect. Clark was an elitist who believed art should belong to the many. He never liked Marxism, distrusting historical materialism, but he admired the Marxist art historian Frederick Antal’s learning and found Marxist social history invigorating in small doses. His own view of art history was stubbornly individualist. “My approach to history,” he explained, “was unconsciously different from that now in favor in universities, which sees all historical change as the result of economic and communal processes. I believe in the importance of individuals, and am a natural hero-worshipper.”

At the same time, Clark believed, with an almost touching sincerity, that it was the state’s duty to safeguard the basic conditions necessary for human flourishing. This was not the language of the class warrior but the civil servant prescribing the correct temperature for afternoon tea. His faith in institutions — galleries, universities, libraries, the Beeb — bordered on the devotional. It was in this spirit that Clark, as chair of the Arts Council in the Fifties, inherited the cultural flank of the Attleeian welfare state. Before the war, England had no state opera, no subsidized orchestras, and no government spending on living artists. The cumbersomely titled Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, later the Arts Council, changed all that. “The best for the most,” declared the Observer drama critic Ivor Brown when he joined CEMA, and Clark made it his credo. For him, the arts were not a luxury but a necessity, fully on a par with health and education in their claim on the public purse.

It was Civilisation, however, that distilled Clark’s singular worldview into a single decanter. It was a charmingly improbable premise: 13 prime-time episodes, funded by the license fee, in which a life peer guided viewers through Aquinas, Caravaggio, and the fall of Rome in chiseled sentences that never once insulted their intelligence. The Left accused him of Edwardian pieties; the Right embraced him as their mandarin mascot. Clark, delighted, insisted he had only intended to offer “no more than a sequence of pretty pictures in color”. David Attenborough thought the secret lay in Clark’s manner: “absolute mandarin prose” punctuated by colloquial jolts that revealed he actually knew how ordinary people thought. “People don’t necessarily dislike toffs,” Attenborough observed. “Toffs who speak directly are quite appealing.”

And Clark did speak directly. The miracle of Civilisation was not its grandeur but its assumption that the proles had brains. He presumed the nation could cope with Chartres, Gothic proportion, and the darker recesses of the Dark Ages. Beneath the feline elegance, the whole series was a collectivist sermon: that civilization is sustained by shared memory and shared institutions; that beauty is a public good; that culture is “our inheritance”. One could almost hear Tawney nodding with approval. One could not, however, prefigure Thatcher.

His professional colleagues were uncharitable. A few sneered reflexively at the art historian who elected to live in a castle and liked slumming it on the telly, wafting above their seminars like a benevolent archangel. Clark reciprocated in kind, likening their “scholarly minutiae to knitting”. Later, more assured as a master practitioner of the Reithian tradition of haute vulgarization, he offered a more measured response: “academics were furious at the simplification of their labors.”

Yet the public adored him at the time, even if his star has since faded. He became the national shorthand for art history, as if some kind of ambulant National Gallery. And this, as he knew, he owed to Ruskin, who taught him, above all, the heresy that beauty is everyone’s birth right. Clark carried this Victorian gospel into the 20th century in lapidary prose. But he was, in short, a product of Edwardian England: his socialism was Anglican and ethical, smelling faintly of pipe smoke and polished pews. Small wonder that when asked to tell the story civilization, he politely ended his tale in 1914, as if the guns of August had closed the cultural ledger.

But for all his paradoxes — the socialist in the castle; the elitist championing access; the bureaucrat preaching beauty — Clark believed one thing with utter conviction: civilization does not maintain itself. It requires guardianship. It requires money. It requires institutions. And it requires the shared belief that the best of human achievement belongs to everyone, not merely to the connoisseurs. In an age of conservative philistinism and progressive iconoclasm, that belief seems less reactionary than revolutionary.

That isn’t, of course, meant to be a rude generalization about the individuals who practice art scholarship in London, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Rather it’s a statement about the contrasting house cultures in the three countries — a contrast that has grown even starker this summer as one of the hottest arguments in Old Master history reignites. It concerns a painting that is presented by London’s National Gallery as the original depiction by Rubens of a steamy Old Testament love-scene, featuring Samson and Delilah. It was auctioned by Christie’s in 1980, shortly after emerging from the vaults of a Belgian bank. Supporters call the painting a work of seductive genius; critics call it a sloppy copy of a canvas that was undoubtedly created in 1609 but was probably lost after its owner, the mayor of Antwerp, died in 1640.

Before surrendering to Delilah’s wiles, consider the commendable lesson in open-mindedness that is now being set by curators in the Netherlands. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is one of the finest small art museums in the world — and in a show running till mid-July, it invites visitors to view three famous paintings which were formerly thought to be works of Rembrandt; and then to read a detailed explanation of why two of them probably aren’t by the master and the third is borderline. The process of perpetual re-examination will go on, the curators stress. Rembrandt research never ends. In a similar spirit, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam recently invited the public to follow in real time as it subjected its most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, to a lengthy scientific examination.

When Ernst van de Wetering, the world’s best-known scholar of Rembrandt, died in 2021, obituarists noted that in the Dutchman’s lifetime, and in some measure thanks to him, the number of authenticated Rembrandt paintings had fallen from nearly 624 to just 340. He wasn’t merely a nay-sayer; he upgraded some paintings while downgrading others. And the Dutchman never worked alone, he was a member of, and eventually chaired, a Rembrandt Research Project in which scholarly devotees of the master perpetually compared notes, and argued loudly, about the scope of the oeuvre. Some see this Dutch spirit of creative contention as a legacy of the Nazi occupation, and the subsequent, agonized arguments over who had collaborated; the national psyche somehow absorbed the idea that supposedly eminent figures could make terrible mistakes, and that no individual should be seen as infallible.

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Unfortunately, this glasnost and humility is less evident in Belgium, the homeland of Peter Paul Rubens. Ask Katarzyna Krzyzagorska-Pisarek, a Polish-British scholar who knows the Low Countries. In her doctoral research, she compared the Rembrandt Research Project with the nearest Belgian equivalent: an ongoing effort by the Centrum Rubenianum, a research centre in Antwerp, to assemble a definitive catalogue of Rubens’ work. The catalogue is known as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard — in deference to a German who was the most famous, if not the most reliable, Rubens scholar of the mid-20th century. The Dutch project was vastly broader in the range of evidence it considered, Pisarek found. More important, she identified at least 75 instances of works credited to Rubens by Burchard which had proved to be mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. The Belgian authority had very quietly acknowledged these mistakes, but it did nothing to draw this fact to the world’s attention, and it persists in revering Burchard’s legacy. Pisarek found the Rubenianum equally unreceptive to public dialogue when she urged them, citing a huge body of evidence, to rehabilitate a couple of important paintings which in her view had been wrongly degraded.

How does all this relate to the re-emerging dispute over Samson and Delilah, a work acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million, the biggest amount that a UK public collection had paid for a single canvas? Well, it was Burchard who identified the now-contested painting, which emerged in 1929 in a studio in Paris, as a very-long-lost Rubens; and on that matter, Belgium’s art authorities insist that Burchard was right.

So the London Gallery, faced with a crescendo of challenging voices — raising issues of provenance, palette, composition and the painting’s physical structure — has confidently relied on the Rubenianum to shout down people who contest its 1980 purchase. And indeed, the Belgian art authorities have obligingly done so with a rudeness that outdoes the bitchiest of British art critics. People who question the painting are simply “a small group of flat earth-minded conspiracy theorists who make their money by denying all the facts”, declared the Rubenianum’s (German-born) chairman Nils Buttner when I consulted him about the issue. Bert Watteeuw, director of Antwerp’s Rubenshuis museum, responded with a petulant ad hominem (or ad feminam) outburst when asked by a Belgian reporter about a new book by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an art historian of Greek and Flemish descent, which carefully lays out the skeptical case. “Who is this woman to say those things?” (In fact, Doxiadis has been in vigorous and contentious interaction with the Rubenianum. almost from the year, 1981, when Watteeuw was born.)

On 9 May, the National Gallery suddenly seemed to be taking at least a step in a more emollient, indeed Dutchward, direction when it quietly e-published, for those who knew where to look, a multi-authored 25,000-word pronouncement on the disputed painting. It still affirmed the work’s authenticity but implicitly acknowledged that the skeptics had raised some serious points, including the painting’s poor provenance chain and highly idiosyncratic color scheme. Amidst all the verbiage, many issues were only partially addressed, as Pisarek points out: for example, the problem posed by contemporary copies of Rubens’ original work which differ from the Gallery’s acquisition. Still, the huge outpouring amounted to a big and welcome change of presentational tactics from the previous stance of Sphinx-like silence or “ask the Belgians”.

On one matter, though, the Gallery seems to be digging in its heels. One of the disputed work’s oddest features is that (as all agree) the artwork itself has been planed down to a few millimeters and then stuck onto a cheapish pink blockboard. The Gallery’s curators have always insisted (and they emphatically repeat in their latest pronouncement) that the tawdry blockboard was slammed on well before the work arrived in Trafalgar Square in mid-summer 1980. Yet an ever-growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests that the painting was still resting on a much thicker, older wooden panel when it left Belgium; and its short stay at Christie’s would hardly have sufficed for this massive modification.

In an article for The Guardian published on 15 June, Dalya Alberge quotes an eminent curator as initially admitting and then denying that the blockboard was added at the Gallery. The curator, Christopher Brown, ought to know what he is talking about. As he has recalled in a public lecture, he was put in charge of the Gallery’s Dutch and Flemish treasures in 1971, when he was just 23. Young Brown then had to bite his lip while his boss, the Gallery director Sir Michael Levey, made a terrible mistake by failing to recognize an authentic Rembrandt which a British peer was trying to dispose of. So if anyone remembers what was going in the Gallery in 1980, it should be Brown. Meanwhile a veteran of art investigation, Michael Daley, published online a 16-page essay which meticulously lays out all the evidence that the older back was intact when the work arrived in London.

Why does this blockboard issue matter so much? First because if it emerges that the Gallery has been less than frank with the public about the timing of this draconian intervention, then everything else the Gallery says about the contested painting will lose credibility. Second, as Daley suggests, hard questions arise about the motives for the intervention. The older wooden back would certainly have contained invaluable clues about the dating, and treatment over the years, of the contested work. With the discarding of the older back, important evidence was lost. Might those facts be connected?

As it happens, one of the whistle-blowers on this sensitive point was a Belgian banker, Jan Bosselaers — a director of the defunct Kredietbank in whose vaults the painting was stored. He provided Doxiadis with written and photographic testimony to the effect that the painting’s old back was still in place when it left Belgium: this evidence was only authorized for release after his death. (This was not Bosselaers’ only end-of-life bombshell: he also revealed, very shortly before passing away in 2015, that the bank had once been in negotiation with the possessors of the country’s greatest missing art treasure: a section of a 14th-century altar-piece which was stolen in 1934.)

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If bankers in secretive Belgium can become truth-tellers, at least on their death-beds, might members of Britain’s cliquey art establishment who know about this affair clear their consciences while they still have the chance? One thing emerges clearly from the latest revelations by Daley and Alberge. Individuals who had sight and knowledge of the Gallery’s contested painting, after its arrival in London, have not yet told the full story. We can affirm that with confidence because the various things those individuals did say, back in the Eighties and even very recently, are utterly confused and contradictory. Those multiple confusions and contradictions are laid out in intricate detail by Daley’s latest posting.

As for the Gallery’s recent long pronouncement, its flaws would be forgivable if it had been offered, in good faith, as the start of a constructive and open-ended debate. In fact the Gallery still shows little appetite for debate, or any sort of give-and-take, with the public. When I asked, very courteously, for a comment on how scientific knowledge about the contested painting had moved on as a result of recent investigations, I received no reply. The good thing is that a debate is starting anyway. Art critic Jonathan Jones has stepped in with a passionate defense of the contested painting on aesthetic grounds, as though the skeptics’ case rested on aesthetics rather than hard-and-fast facts about events and testimonies in the late 20th century. He entirely misses the skeptics’ point — but at least a conversation has begun.

Let’s hope it is a Dutch-style discussion, worthy of the land of Erasmus and Spinoza, because British art is long overdue for a puff of fresh Netherlandish air. At the time the contested picture was acquired in 1980, London’s art establishment was even smaller, more introverted and less accountable for its mistakes than it is now: perhaps unintentionally, Brown’s lecture offered a glimpse of that world. Partly because of that defect, London has lost some ground to other cities like New York and Paris as a hub for art expertise and commerce. However late in the day, a bit more openness about that mysterious canvas in Trafalgar Square might do wonders to shore up London’s reputation.

At issue is the work presented to the public as the original Samson and Delilah, painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1609. It was bought by the Gallery at a Christie’s auction in 1980 for £2.5 million: a modest sum now, but it was the most the Gallery had ever paid for a painting and a near record for any Old Master transaction.

I first saw it in 1986 and immediately felt it was a shoddy artefact, lacking the brilliance of my favourite European painter. Who am I — you ask — to judge? Well, I am an artist and art historian. My best-known expertise is the Greco-Roman funerary art of Egypt, and that in turn has led me to a broad study of colour and its application to surfaces ranging from marble to canvas, especially in the depiction of human figures. Now resident in my native Athens, I spent most of my working life in London.

When I came across the Gallery’s dubious acquisition, I was a mature student at Wimbledon School of Art, filling in some gaps in the education I had received at the Slade in London, the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, and the Kokoschka School of Seeing in Salzburg. I was joined in my campaign by two fellow students half my age, Siân Hopkinson and Steve Harvey, who shared my intuition: this could not be a Rubens. As we researched, our doubts grew.

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In 1992, the three of us submitted a report to the Gallery, full of naive enthusiasm. Although we know much more now, our report holds good: “The execution seemed crude, the colour unsubtle and uncharacteristic of Rubens’ palette. The tonal values were incorrect in relation to the light sources. The handling of the paint was very crude, the draughtsmanship was poor and there was weakness in the depiction of textures.”

Also, the provenance was suspect. Nobody doubts that Rubens depicted Samson and Delilah in a commission for Nicolaas Rockox, the mayor of Antwerp; or that the resulting work adorned the mayor’s salon until his death in 1640. During that time, two diligent copies of the painting were made: an engraving and an oil painting which shows the whole salon, including Rubens’ masterful work. Both copies survive and give an idea of the brilliance of the original. But after 1641, that original disappeared — and as we pointed out, the Gallery’s new acquisition differed significantly from the two careful copies which are the best guide to what Rubens produced.

As for the Gallery’s acquisition, the earliest sure fact was that in 1929, it was bought by German art dealers from a conservator in Paris; the seller seemingly made no claim that it was an original Rubens, but the German scholar Ludwig Burchard, a famous but flawed connoisseur, pronounced that it was the long-lost work of 1609. This verdict made a fortune for the German dealership, whose partners included Burchard’s brother Otto.

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According to the National Gallery, the painting was held by the Royal House of Liechtenstein for two centuries; but the evidence for this, as the three of us determined, was flimsy. Our research was sound, but we were foolish to imagine we could penetrate a mighty fortress such as the National Gallery or indeed the Antwerp Rubenianum, a cliquey group of scholars which shows excessive deference to the opinions of Ludwig Burchard.

Still, arguments about the painting continued to flare, rising to a crescendo in 1996-97. Mike Daley, founder of Artwatch UK and a champion among cultural reporters, wrote incisive critiques, showing how the National Gallery’s Technical Bulletin of 1983, purporting to explain the painting’s physical structure and likely history, was odd and contradictory. At last, Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery, admitted that critics of the painting, who by that time included a fine Anglo-Polish scholar, Kasia Pisarek, might have a point. Pisarek at least has raised serious questions that “I cannot easily answer”, he told The Sunday Times. Meanwhile, the Gallery press office promised an open debate, which never happened.

Ever since, there have been surges of scepticism, which the Gallery has dismissed. In 2021, a high-tech company in Zurich, Art Recognition, used Artificial Intelligence to compare the brushstrokes in the contested work with scores of unchallenged works by Rubens; their verdict was that there was a 92% probability of it not being authentic. The Gallery simply said it would await fuller publication of the research.

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Despite this Sphinx-like stance, I persist. And here, I want to disclose certain episodes of this story for the first time. First, an evening in April 1997. Sir Isaiah Berlin visited Athens to receive an honorary doctorate, and I attended a small dinner marking the occasion. The great Russo-British philosopher had served as a trustee of the National Gallery and knew its internal deliberations. I was excited. Also present was Marilena Cassimatis, an eminent Greek art historian.

When the issue of Rubens briefly surfaced over dinner, Berlin deftly changed topic. But afterwards, as we collected our coats, he approached Marilena and myself and uttered some unforgettable words: “I’ll help you with the Rubens. Write to [my fellow trustee] Sir Keith Thomas… tell him from me that the truth will come out in the end — it always does — and the sooner it comes out the better it will be.” Berlin then returned to his hotel in a taxi accompanied by Marilena and her husband. He and Marilena had bonded as German speakers.

“Your friend is right about the Rubens,” he said again. A few months later, Berlin died at 88. Shaken by his passing, I never contacted Thomas, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. But the implications of Berlin’s words seem clear: did he think the Gallery knew things about the contested Rubens which it had not revealed? Had there been an internal debate about what to disclose, with Berlin advocating glasnost — unsuccessfully? Possibly sensing his mortality, had the philosopher broken the secrecy of the Gallery’s proceedings to give me a word of encouragement?

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I salute his bravery. Meanwhile, a character in this saga who stands at the other end of the truth-telling spectrum is Brian Sewell, who before his death in 2015 was known as Britain’s cattiest and most influential art critic. Sewell always said he put friendship over truth or integrity; he had defiantly sheltered Anthony Blunt, the royal art adviser exposed as a traitor. When his friends in the National Gallery were challenged over the Rubens affair, Sewell responded with personal attacks on me and on Mike Daley. Having previously praised my work, he mocked me as an expert on “portraits on mummified corpses” and jibed: “there must surely be an old proverb warning us against unlikely Greeks expressing improbable opinions.” He went on to scorn Mike as a “dabbler in the dark”. When the full story of Samson and Delilah one day emerges, Sewell may be admired for his acerbic wit, but not as a friend of truth.

Another incident from that period spurs me on. It concerns the day — September 25, 1996 — when to shut me up, the Gallery asked me to its laboratory to watch as a dendrochronologist (a scientist who measures the age of wood) took a sample from the painting to assess its age. I had proposed such a test but for reasons I will explain, I do not believe that the experiment which happened was valid. In any case, something quite different jumped out at me as I saw the painting for the time without its frame.

I should first explain that one strange feature of the work is that it now rests on a cheap pink modern blockboard. In the Nineties, as Mike Daley and others rattled the Gallery’s cage, there was much contention over when the blockboard was added and why. Was it done to cover up, perhaps in more than one sense, the work’s origins? The Gallery adamantly insists that some time in the 20th century — well before its own purchase — the painting, originally on oak, “was planed down to a thickness of less than 3mm” and then stuck onto the blockboard. I have grave doubts over whether such a planing-down is physically possible.

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What I saw in the laboratory that day was the familiar work, pasted on a tawdry pink blockboard, which to my surprise extended 10-14cms beyond the painting on all four sides, a feature which the frame, newly installed by the Gallery, had concealed. This protrusion was in stark contrast to the testimony I had gathered about the state of the painting before its arrival in London in 1980, when for several months it was mostly in the care of a Belgian bank. Before 1980 an older wooden backing, several centimetres thick, was intact, and above all the painting and its backing were co-extensive, nothing stuck out. So this much is clear: at some late stage in its chequered existence, the painting was tinkered with. The Gallery does not deny having put on a new frame, which was itself a deviation from conservation practice. I now ask: did it tinker with the painting in other ways, and if so, why?

To be clear, I don’t consider the Gallery’s Samson and Delilah a fake. It is a copy — made in good faith by a person who had studied one or both of the surviving reproductions of the Rubens original. I believe I know who made the copy.

Let’s start with some background. An unwritten law among artists is that if you copy an Old Master painting, you omit or alter one element, to show you are not aiming to deceive. This painting is a case in point. We also know that learning-through-copying was much practised in Madrid’s art school, the Academia Real de San Fernando in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Students produced hundreds of diligent but inexact copies, and Rubens was a popular prototype. I believe that the scrupulously inexact rendering of Samson and Delilah that now hangs in London is the work of one such Spanish-trained artist. And I think I have pinpointed exactly who that is.

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It was Mike Daley who discovered a hand-written note by Ludwig Burchard in which he names — as Gaston Lévy — the Paris-based conservator who sold the contested painting to visiting German buyers in 1929. But which Gaston Lévy? The name is common. Tragically, my initial investigations revealed the details of at least 15 French Jews of that name who had perished in the Holocaust. Finally, thanks to the digitised archives of the Smithsonian Art Museum, I discovered a bearer of the name who fits perfectly into the story of this painting as I reconstruct it. Born in Brazil but educated in Madrid, he was a beloved pupil of the Spanish neo-impressionist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida; he later moved to New York, where he spelt his surname Levi, and became a famous conservator.

I believe that this Gaston Lévy copied Samson and Delilah with the encouragement of his teacher. That helps explain why the palette and brushwork in the contested work are so close to Spanish neo-impressionism, and so far from 17th-century Flanders. I think I know too how Lévy worked. In Madrid in the early 20th century, he could never have found a vast oak panel. Budding artists made their copies on canvas. I believe the Gallery’s painting is on canvas, stretched over wood, and I challenge the Gallery’s current masters to prove me wrong.

Until that day comes, I have a working hypothesis as to how Lévy proceeded. When he moved to France in the Twenties, he simply rolled up the canvas in order to transport it. (Had his copy been on oak, it would have been difficult for a penurious artist to move.) On arrival in Paris, Lévy must have stuck the canvas onto six veneer-thin panels of oak, and then supported the whole structure by adding bits of thicker wood underneath. He put a trellis on the back to complete the look of a traditionally cradled painting, ready to be sold on the Paris market — not as an original Rubens but as a fine old work of art. Lévy’s elaborate backing was at some — rather late — stage replaced by the cheap blockboard. I ask the Gallery to tell us when and why.

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My hunch that the Gallery’s painting is in fact executed on linen canvas, stuck on wood, has grown with every year since I saw it, unframed, in the laboratory. It looked excessively thin and somehow “ironed on”.  Two eminent conservators recently told me, after seeing high-resolution images, that they too believe the painting to be on linen. Yet another clue is the Gallery’s own artless admission that when first inspected in its lab, the paint showed widespread “blistering”. That is exactly what you would expect if an oil-painted canvas was heat-sealed onto wood.

Of course, on that question, our hypothesis needs to be tested. With today’s technology, the Gallery could ascertain the exact material structure of the painting in a few minutes. Why won’t it do so? Could it be because that would risk exposing the dendrochronology test, on which the Gallery still relies, as irrelevant: if the painting was on canvas, the age of any underlying wood does not matter.

Honest investigation could embarrass some very grand personages. But to them, I simply repeat the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin: “The truth will come out in the end, and the sooner it does, the better it will be.” To the best of my ability, I have shared my thoughts about the story. I make no claim to omniscience. Will the other protagonists, who like me are in the evening of life, follow the great philosopher and share theirs?

Five years in the freelance galleys have made me familiar with every imaginable formula wielded by salaried cheapskates in order to acquire work, knowledge and ideas for nothing. The digitally-driven age of “free”, in which a vast expansion of corporate and institutional power rests on the exploitation of barely-paid or even unpaid casual labour, has compounded the ancient toxins of Grub Street with a fresh poison of wheedling, entitled hypocrisy.

“Precarity” — a clumsy word for an ungainly state — has always shadowed working life outside the walls of guild, cloister, palace, office, studio or college. And technological upheavals have regularly tilted the balance of the seesaw that links producer and client.

The media evolve, and the money that backs them moves around. What remains constant is a tetchy stand-off between makers and the intermediaries, the patrons, publishers and distributors, who stand between them and their consumers. The mindset of the self-employed artisan or artist — proud, prickly, jealous, at once eager to please and quick to take offence — has endured to jump the centuries between Gutenberg and Google. Visit the National Gallery’s new exhibition devoted to Dürer’s Journeys, for instance, and you meet an artist-entrepreneur who pioneered both the role of the lone creator as hard-bargaining, self-sufficient pro — and found ways to fight back against mean or crooked clients and rivals.

Curated by the gallery’s Dr Susan Foister, Dürer’s Journeys takes as its focus the career-enhancing trips that the Nuremberg-born painter and printmaker took around Germany, over the Alps into northern Italy, and up the Rhine into the Low Countries, at various times between the mid-1490s and 1521. Paintings, drawing, prints and books both by Dürer and his peers present the artist as a shrewd, tough and even cantankerous travelling salesman, avid to collaborate but flintily convinced of his own worth. The National plays with a straight, scholarly bat. So you won’t encounter much of the airy extrapolation that this kind of article routinely indulges. I rather enjoyed the stern rejoinder in one of the catalogue essays that Dürer’s personality “should not perhaps concern art-historical research”. That’s telling me.

But… with my 21st-century, gig-economy spectacles on, it becomes sorely tempting to see Albrecht Dürer, son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in free-trading Nuremberg, as patron saint of the stroppy modern freelance. From Venice to Antwerp, he modelled the novel Renaissance costume of the artist as celebrity. He designed his own logo, cultivated his own brand, and harnessed the new technology of print to spread his fame through engravings and woodcuts to thousands of clients who never saw a painting of his. His sympathy for the humanistic learning of Erasmus (of whom he drew a wonderful portrait in chalk, later engraved) and the reformist theology of Luther partnered a pursuit of professional autonomy, as maker and merchant alike.

Prints and their cross-Europe distribution brought freedom from the capricious arrogance of single patrons: the bishops, dukes and princes who expected you to flatter and fawn for a commission, then paid late and little, if at all. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian did grant Dürer a 100-florin pension in 1515, but cannily offloaded its funding onto the Nuremberg city council. The artist struggled for years to get it paid. His triumphant year-long stay in the Low Countries in 1520-21 began with an in-person plea to Maxmilian’s successor Charles V to renew the stipend — but soon morphed into a high-profile business venture, based in cosmopolitan Antwerp.

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Dürer saw early that print technology might allow him to make a better living from a hundred merchants than one snooty margrave. His first popular series, the 15-strong Apocalypse woodcuts of 1498, capitalised on the end-times anxieties that gathered as the half-millennium of 1500 drew near. The star illustrator needed a grasp of public hopes and fears, as well as the negotiating nous to strike smart deals. By 1512, after engravings of Christ’s Passion had become a cross-border sensation, the writer of a Description of Germany could state that “merchants across the whole of Europe are buying impressions for their artists”. Dürer attracted not just punters, but copyists too.

His images – intricate, enigmatic, dream-like – not only sold far and wide. They bedded down into the collective unconscious of his era, and of posterity. It’s no accident that Dürer remains unique among Renaissance masters in that a selection of his graphic works – such as the so-called “Master Engravings” of the 1510s, “Knight, Death and the Devil”, “Melencolia I” and “St Jerome in his Study” – are more familiar than any oil painting he ever did. Save, perhaps, for the cocky Munich self-portrait of 1500; sadly, not in the NG show. In it, the 28-year-old artist gazes out at us with a withering stare from underneath his flowing mane: part-Messiah, part-hipster, all-round superstar.

Mass-produced engravings and woodcuts earned more in the long run than work in traditional media (one set of prints might sell for the same price as a small portrait in oils). They pushed Dürer’s fame into new markets all over Europe. While his mother helped market the product around Nuremberg, his wife Agnes acted as his agent elsewhere in the German lands, especially at the huge Frankfurt fair. Crucially, the print market gave him all the bristling dignity of independence, financial and professional. “Here I am a gentleman,” he wrote from Venice during his Italian sojourn of 1506: “at home I am a parasite”.

While abroad, he drew and painted in return for favours as well as cash. If the Nuremberg master turned up to dinner with a spectacular drawing of the host, and asked for nothing at the time, he would expect the bill to be settled in other ways. After a foray to Brussels, he records tartly that “six people have given me nothing for doing their portraits”. Dürer’s motto might have been “quid pro quo”. Something-for-nothing belonged to the old feudal order he despised. One hard-headed adjective pops up time and again in the revealing journal of his Low Countries travels in 1520-21. Whether a banquet, a robe, a painting, a house, a jewel, if Dürer rates it, it’s köstlich: not pricey or kostspielig as such, but exquisite, lovely, precious, though always with a hint of sheer cash value.

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Dürer may have sought to break the chains of royal, noble or ecclesiastical patronage. But, like artists of various kinds today, he did not operate in a pure consumer economy. For reasons of prestige, if not turnover, he needed that imperial pension – which Charles V did finally extend. Likewise, he yearned to secure a splashy, high-end commission from Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands. She consistently failed to deliver – in fact, she even rejected his gift of a drawing of her father, Maximilian. As his stint in the Low Countries ended, Dürer snarled to his journal that “I have lost out, and quite especially with Lady Margareta, who in return for what I presented to her and gave to her has given me nothing”. Herr Quid-Pro-Quo of Nuremberg kvetches again.

This portrait of the artist as a pennywise hard bargainer, if not a surly old grump, may dismay romantics. It should give comfort to any of his successors, in whatever medium, who would rather ply an honest trade than kiss the hem of patrons – whether the prelates and princes of the 16th century, or the jargon-stuffed arts bureaucrats, conformist dons and trend-crazed plutocrats of today. Dürer’s progress, though, holds another salutary lesson for his freelance heirs. New cultural technologies may carve new pathways between artist and audience. Equally, highwaymen may lurk along them, ready to pounce. More prints meant more forgeries, more imitations, more deceptive pastiche and passing-off.

Famously, Dürer devised and applied his “AD” monogram as trademark and signature: not the only Renaissance artist to do so, but the first to make the logo really shout. Just look at where he puts it, too: hanging from the tree on a placard in the Garden of Eden in his “Adam and Eve”; prominently propped up beneath a skull beside the horse’s hooves in “Knight, Death and the Devil”; right under the dedication on a panel next to the great scholar’s hands in the Erasmus engraving; even on the nails driven into Christ’s hands on the cross. How handy, too, for such a tireless self-promoter that he should share initials with the Latin tag – Anno Domini – that marked humanity’s passage through post-incarnation time. Every year could be the year of Albrecht Dürer.

The trouble with logos, though, is that fakers or competitors mimic and purloin them. When it happened to Dürer, he fought back hard. In Venice in 1506, he brought perhaps the first case for copyright infringement, against one Marcantonio Raimondi. A clever print-maker who sailed close to the wind, and once got himself jailed by the Pope as a pornographer. Marcantonio had republished Dürer’s set of prints depicting the Life of the Virgin – AD monogram and all. Dürer sued, but with mixed results. Marcantonio could go on reprinting the engravings, but only as acknowledged copies with the logo removed.

When he published his own edition of the Life of the Virgin in 1511, the ripped-off artist prefaced the pictures with this blood-curdling warning: “Hold! You crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains. Think not rashly to lay your thievish hands upon my works. Beware! Know you not that I have a grant from the most glorious Emperor Maximilian, that not one throughout the imperial dominion shall be allowed to print or sell fictitious imitations of these engravings? Listen! And bear in mind that if you do so, through spite or through covetousness, not only will your goods be confiscated, but your bodies also placed in mortal danger.” Exhilarating, hands-off-my-livelihood rhetoric – even if, like aggrieved content-creators then and now, Dürer overstates the likely penalties in intellectual-property lawsuits with that bit about “your bodies also placed in mortal danger”. If only…

In terms of business acumen and artistic renown, Dürer’s zealous policing of his image and brand paid handsome dividends. His work has never faded from view. When he died in 1528, he left Agnes an estate valued at 6,874 florins – a more than tidy sum. As for those “crafty ones, strangers to work, and pilferers of other men’s brains”, they stayed on the scene.

Non-payment, low payment, late payment and promises of jam tomorrow, or at some unspecified future date, bedevil the freelance life as they did five centuries ago. Across arts and crafts, marketplaces remain as patchy, flawed and skewed as ever. Patronage – now more often corporate than courtly – stands ever-ready to wrap shivering talent in its cosy, stifling embrace. Thieves and tricksters infest cyberspace just as they once skulked around the fairs and print-shops of Renaissance Europe. Revisit Dürer’s work, and you come face to face with a proud innovator who saw how technology and trade conjoined might let his vocation flourish as a profession and a business, too. I’ll be thinking of his grinning skulls the next time someone asks to pick my brains.

Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist continues at the National Gallery, London until 27 February 2022