The Artist Who Never Was (Armando Montaner Valdueza)
I was immediately intrigued. I stopped my search to focus on her. Her profile is elegantly sophisticated, and the impressionistic treatment of the ruffly collar is particularly appealing. Our mysterious lady seems to be late 19th century/early 20th century at a glance; the ArtUK page confirmed that with a date of 1884. The canvas has obviously sustained damage and wear and tear, but that’s not a deal-breaker.
Off to Google’s reverse-search I went. Maybe it would pick up on a look-alike, or even help narrow down the artist’s identity based on style.
Well, that was easy. Strangely easy.
I hadn’t heard of Armando Montaner Valdueza, but I’m not particularly well-versed in Spanish artists. I decided to search further and see what turned up for him. At a glance it was all legitimate enough. Valdueza appeared on multiple sources and sites, linked to well-known names in the field. He had a whole oeuvre of similarly impressionistic work, although it was a bit unusual that he looked like he could play Sigmund Freud onstage.
I’d already taken a thorough look at his work on WikiArt. There seemed to be similarities between Unknown Woman and the rest of Valdueza’s works, in theme and in style. His portraiture all has a similarly ochre-toned palette and a sympathetically solemn treatment of the sitters. There are a few outliers, like the nude in graphite, but I reasoned, every artist experiments from time to time. It wouldn’t be art if they didn’t.
Valdueza appeared on countless Spanish art informational blogs and a miscellany of art-historical sites scattered around the Internet. So, as is my custom whenever I’ve uncovered anything interesting, I wrote to the museum that owns it. I let the Royal Academy know via email that this painting was allegedly linked to Valdueza, and inquired why the attribution might’ve been removed. They wrote back to tell me there wasn’t much information on the picture, and no mention of Valdueza. In fact, there was no record of how they acquired it at all. They said they were terribly busy right then, but they were curious to take another look at the work eventually, perhaps to inspect the reverse. They were very encouraging, and said: “If in the meantime your research offers further insight on the work or the wider oeuvre of Valdueza I would be very grateful to hear it.”
Well, why not?
How exactly did ”Portrait of an Unknown Woman” fit into the oeuvre? Did it really belong at all, or was I just being optimistic? I took a look at it again, and again. There was a strange amount of stylistic variation in the Valdueza-attributed works. I had been content at a glance to accept the portrait of the lady in profile as fitting in the bunch, but after a second and third glance, and maybe a fourth or fifth, I was actively discontented.
I tried to turn up some solid primary sources. Unfortunately, I failed at the task of acquiring books that mention him. There weren’t any.
Valdueza’s Spanish Wikipedia page was certainly willing to vouch for him, but why was his only external source the WikiArt page, which itself featured information from Wikipedia? This barely passed the journalistic standards of a fifth-grade essay. It was a self-supporting but flimsy loop of freshly created non-credible sources.
Let’s see. When was his Wikipedia page written?
October 28, 2020.
When were his pictures uploaded to WikiArt?
October 26, 2020.
That can’t be good.
By now, this had moved beyond the unlikely to the implausible. I didn’t know if this was some sort of social experiment, or if somebody with a specialty in Spanish art was curious what they could get away with. Or, alternatively, maybe somebody absolutely loathed the field of Spanish art, and thought they’d make a fool out of everybody by pulling a fast one on unsuspecting online denizens.
Unfortunately, they succeeded. Pages for Valdueza now appear on Arthive, WahooArt, SITO (December 2020), Painted Valencians (October 24, 2020), Spanish Masters of Portraiture (October 2020), Spanish Art and Works of Spanish Painters (both December 8, 2021). This International Art Gallery blog (November 2020) adds even more misattributed paintings, including the president of an Australian dental school.
Yes, really.
So, I politely wrote back to the Royal Academy of Arts, informing them that the Valdueza attribution appeared to be incorrect and there was something a bit questionable about this Valdueza character and his absence from credible primary sources. There’s no better way to put it. I would hate to be wrong, and to discover that Valdueza was real after all. But there’s nothing that could convince me, aside from Valdueza himself emerging from his grave and claiming authorship of those paintings.
This is the first and hopefully last time I’ve had the questionable honor of investigating an artist who didn’t exist.
The entire premise of it is still absolutely mystifying. What’s to gain by doing this? Why would somebody go to all of that trouble? One might think it was to pull off art forgery or something equally sinister, but nobody has sold a piece yet as an Armando Valdueza painting. It might be possible now, though, with his fake but thoroughly constructed online profile, which could easily fool any amateur.
Beyond that, his Wiki page even includes a totally fictionalized life story. To hear it told, Valdueza was quite the icon, a man of great character and artistic integrity who rubbed elbows with high society. If he had ever actually lived, I’m sure he would’ve been the subject of a very interesting biography.
But who on earth would bother writing a real life fan-fiction encyclopedia entry about a nonexistent artist?
That remains an enigma. The uploader on WikiArt is the straightforwardly named user “spanishart”; as per a Google search, their edit history dates back to 2013 and 2019 for the artist Alejandro Cabeza. (I don’t know if that artist is real. I don’t think I have the willpower to find out.) The user who wrote the Wiki page is “Restless Calamus,” aka “Cálamo Inquieto” in Spanish, whose profile lists them as an art expert with credentials, but whom I was unable to contact. I’d love to ask them just a few questions.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t go through all of Valdueza’s paintings on WikiArt, one by one, to track down the real sources for them. 19 out of 22 images, misattributed to Armando Valdueza, were confirmed to be by other artists. (Of those, only four were even Spanish at all!) Three others could not be located — yet — but it seems awfully unlikely that those remaining few could unexpectedly show up and turn the case around.
Aggravatingly, I noticed that every single picture had been slightly edited for color and contrast to try to throw off reverse-searching. This was clearly a malicious and purposeful endeavor — and it’s especially odd how widely and disparately sourced they are. Somebody must have gone to a concerted effort to find very obscure pictures that they thought they could pass off as all by the same hand. (Not to mention the many, many other pictures misattributed to Valdueza by the assorted blogs — most of which are so different that they ruin the illusion immediately, at least to anybody who’s ever spent any time looking at art.)
Again I’m stumped on motive. Why? How? Why? Just to see what happened, and whether anybody would notice? I suppose it’s a good thing I did, but I’m mystified how it got this far.
Last things last. Just to be sure, how about the Internet Archive? If Valdueza had ever existed, there’d be some record somewhere in the vast depths of the digital ocean, wouldn’t there?
Unfortunate.
It’s a fascinating study in misinformation. But let’s hope it ends here.
PICTURE COMPARISONS:
1 - “Portrait of knight in armor” shows up on LiveAuctioneers, unsigned, with no further information. He seems rather German.
2 - “Portrait of a Young Couple” appears on 1stdibs with a date of 1860, not 1885. Like the previous picture, there is no information about the sitters. (A note on the back says “Attributed to F. A. Brent.)
3 - “Academic Nude” is directly from ArtUK itself!
4 - “Human Academy” I wasn’t able to backtrack, frustratingly. Every reliable reverse-search tool (Google Images, Yandex, Tineye) failed. I don’t know where this one originated.
5 - “Profile woman portrait” is, of course, our own mysterious lady, who resides on ArtUK. Concerningly, Google’s reverse-image tools were not able to pull up her ArtUK page, and instead returned only results for the fraudulent Valdueza. TinEye did solve the problem, but it’s troubling how the Google results have been polluted by something fictitious.
6 - “Bearded Man” also required TinEye search to solve. He is the product of an unknown German artist, sold by the auction house Von Brühl. It’s remarkable how many of these pictures aren’t even Spanish School.
7 - The first of Valdueza’s supposed forays into Impressionist landscapes, this one pops right up on Invaluable for auction, authored by one GenÃs Capdevila Puig, who has the distinct advantage of being real. Notably, this auction was in 2021 and it was fraudulently uploaded in 2020, so it must’ve been auctioned online before.
8 - “Portrait of argentinian girl” (Valdueza, 1890) is actually “Young Girl with Flower Basket” (Richter, 1867). Another German piece, at that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240703180453/https://www.1stdibs.com/art/paintings/figurative-paintings/unknown-painting-19th-century-oil-on-canvas-young-girl-flower-basket/id-a_4551511/?epik=dj0yJnU9NklzVjF0WjFwWjFvaGlQc3NJbFNzdEpaem1IZ0puUWEmcD0wJm49UXl2SjZUS3NLRndKWFEwLUFJNnVtZyZ0PUFBQUFBR1pjM2w0
9 - “The Seamstresses” is actually by the Italian artist Raffaele Tafuri, and was sold by an Italian gallery at auction. The image editing is particularly heinously obvious on this one. Do note that it’s even signed by the original artist!
10 - This one is an English School product, granting us a brief departure from the Italians and Germans. It appears to be by C. Dunny. At least its title is mostly correct.
11 - The rather forlorn-faced girl in “Portrait of a Girl” did not turn up as easily as I’d hoped. Google Images and Yandex were a wash. Interestingly, however, TinEye gave me one result, linking back to Alamy Stock, which describes the picture as the work of Valdueza…. and that page has since been taken down. Perhaps the stock photo uploader became aware of the deception. The Wayback Machine could not retrieve the stock link.
However, based on the TinEye result, I was able to save the picture of the painting in its frame and search again — or at least attempt to. Predictably, it found nothing there, either. Notably, the images on WikiArt are very high-resolution, which leads me to believe the pictures were stolen from somewhere high-quality. So, the source for this girl is probably out there somewhere.
https://www.alamy.com/retrato-de-nia-por-el-pintor-armando-montaner-valdueza-image383349516.html (dead link, included for posterity)
12 - An easy one here. “Portrait of a Young Boy” is actually Continental School. As per MutualArt, it was auctioned in 2015 and not sold. I do have to grant the fraudster one point of credit: their edit looks much better than the original photo.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240703175109/https://www.wikiart.org/es/armando-montaner-valdueza/retrato-de-nino
13 - And here we find the infamous Self Portrait with that peculiar resemblance to one Austrian psychologist. The alleged Armando Montaner Valdueza, supposedly a Spanish artist, looks an awful lot like he’s about to diagnose his audience with an Oedipal complex. With that in mind, it’s beyond frustrating that I couldn’t backtrack this image anywhere else.
14 - This “marine scene” is by the hand of R. Costa, sold on Invaluable in 2020. Curiously, it seems to be a copy of another painting by Lazzaro Pasini (or maybe Pasini copied the other?) Either way, not Valdueza.
15 - Another marine scene, another attempt at deception. It’s Italian school, anonymous, sold by the same auction house that #10 passed through.
16 - I’m sure you won’t be shocked to find out this next picture is also by an unknown artist, sold at auction some years ago without much fanfare.
17 - This lady was adeptly cropped out of her oval frame. TinEye backtracked her to a website that’s now dead, but was retrievable via Wayback Machine. She is the creation of artist Abel Faivre, a French painter and illustrator. The Wayback link to her specific gallery page did not have the image saved, but offers extra information. This one’s probably the most significant and valuable of the fake Valduezas.
18 - This jovial if loosely painted gentleman was apparently sold in 2017 in an auction from April 9th; TinEye turned up several versions of the website Catawiki in various languages. Unfortunately none of them were archived. At least now I have the picture of it in its frame, but I wasn’t able to find its source page. Nevertheless, it’s clearly not a Valdueza. As we know.
https://subastas.catawiki.es/subasta-de-arte-clasico-espa%C3%B1a/domingo/2017-04-09 (dead link)
- 19 - While searching for “Portrait of Spanish woman” I had a suspicion she wouldn’t be Spanish at all. I suppose we’ll never know, because none of the reverse search tools could find her at all. She was probably cropped out of another picture. I’d like to know someday.
20 - Another Spanish woman. For this one we’ve got a hit! According to TinEye her filename is “Escuela-valenciana-del-siglo-XIX_1599165633_7687-thumb.jpg” but, unfortunately, the website that hosted her image is down. Either way, “Escuela valenciana del siglo XIX” translates to “19th century Valencian school.” I suppose if Valdueza was real, this is the one he would’ve painted.
The other associated link instead pulls up a painting of Virgin Mary; presumably this lady was sold in the same auction and appeared as a preview thumbnail on that page. The page name indicates the Catawiki site again, and adds a date of 17 Dec 2019.
https://static2.lot-art.com/public/upl/4/Escuela-valenciana-del-siglo-XIX_1599165633_7687-thumb.jpg (dead link)
21 - I just knew this woman couldn’t be Argentinian. Turns out (via TinEye) that she’s Austrian, c. 1800, acquired in 2013 by collector Stephen J. Chow.
22 - Another lady, for our consideration. Artnet wisely classifies her as Spanish School (Valencian), sold March 20, 2019. I suppose that’s another theoretical Valdueza. Too bad he didn’t exist to paint it.
