The claims of the Swiss-based consortium which owns the painting are supported by Professor Alessandro Vezzosi, who has set up his own art museum in Vinci. He will present evidence alongside Professor Carlo Pedretti of the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at the University of California. The Isleworth Mona Lisa was discovered shortly before the First World War by Hugh Blaker, an English art collector, while looking through the home of a Somerset nobleman. He bought the painting and took it to his studio in Isleworth, London, from which it takes its name.

Art critics conjectured that Leonardo had in fact painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo, with one hanging in the Louvre and the other now with Mr Blaker. He in turn sold it to an American collector, Henry F Pulitzer, who in turn left it to his girlfriend. On her death, it was bought by a consortium of unnamed individuals who have kept it in a Swiss bank vault for 40 years.

But despite claims the Isleworth Mona Lisa is indeed the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford disputes this.

'So much is wrong,' he told The Sunday Times. 'The dress, the hair and background landscape. This one is also painted on canvas, which Leonardo rarely did.' Like the majority of his works, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is in fact painted on wood. And while the lady in the Isleworth Mona Lisa does appear to be a younger version of the model in the more famous painting, Kemp said this did not prove the two were produced by Leonardo da Vinci. 'She might look younger but this is probably because the copyist, and I believe it is a copy done a few years after the Mona Lisa, just painted it that way,' added Mr Kemp.

I think it was done by Ceilia Gimenez.

You probably were not summoned to give an opinion on the Salvator Mundi - now accepted (?) as by Leonardo (certainly by Kemp) - but that is apparently owned by a US 'consortium of art dealers' - therefore a 'dud'?

Just wondering, would you advertise a $35-50 million picture in this way?

And this is the voice of their Contemporary Art front man, Tobias Meyer…. Regardless of what we think about it, I guess it speaks of the core of what Sotheby’s believe most of such millionaire Contemporary Art buyers really look for in a work of art – to enter into another dimension (of space rather than time. Meyer makes that clear – but still, the space needn’t be new). Perhaps this could be a new marketing approach for your Old Masters in order to attract those millionaire buyers? Most serious unfinished/preparatory works do this quite well. Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, Ribera all have this memorising quality. Similar to Rothko, their misty brush work becomes our hallucinogen.

Mission and scope

The Rembrandt Database aims to become the first port of call for research on Rembrandt’s paintings. For this reason The Rembrandt Database collaborates with a large number of institutions in order to add more paintings and more documentation to this website. Our objective is not to present a final set of data, but to develop and grow continually, especially as more documentation becomes available through new research and collaboration with new partners. The Rembrandt Database does not intend to stand on its own but rather to interface with resources already in existence or still emerging.

The Rembrandt Database is not a research project: it does not produce documentation itself, nor does it make attributions. Instead, it presents the various – current and former – findings in this area, together with their sources, and provides a platform for the presentation of new interpretations.

In the early years of the 20th century, spinster sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies spent much of their vast fortune buying the cream of European art as a gift to the people of Wales. When Gwendoline died in 1951, all the paintings in her collection were bequeathed to the National Museum of Wales. Amongst the works most proudly displayed were many by JMW Turner, perhaps the nation's best loved artist. These paintings were the pinnacle of the sisters' collection, carefully selected and greatly valued.

Yet within months of this extraordinary act of generosity, the authenticity of the paintings was thrown into doubt by art world experts who branded them fakes. These prized exhibits were deemed 'unfit to hang on the gallery's walls'. For more than half a century a cloud has hung over three of the landscapes, said by experts to be a hand other than Turner's. But Philip believes this may be a miscarriage of justice. As Philip and Fiona investigate, they enter a murky world as they discover the paintings are connected to Turner's secret lover. In the end it will be down to the latest forensic testing in order to prove if the paintings were by Joseph Mallord William Turner. But will the process restore the Davies sisters' reputations as art connoisseurs and allow the pictures to see the light of day once again?

Experts will present evidence next week claiming to have uncovered a long-lost painting by JMW Turner, bought for £3,700 but now valued by one insurance firm at £20m.

Jonathan Weal, 54, who works for an art investment fund, spotted the seascape eight years ago in an auction at a Kent golf club.

After years of research, his belief in the work – entitled Fishing Boats in a Stiff Breeze – has apparently been backed by art experts and by scientific tests that investigated everything from pigments to the signature. He said Hiscox, the specialist art insurers, had valued the work at £20m.

Dr Selby Whittingham, a Turner scholar and a former curator at Manchester City Art Gallery, has described it as an exciting discovery. He will be among specialists attending a conference on the painting at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on Wednesday.

Tests to be presented include a report by Art Access & Research, a specialist in the scientific analysis of paintings. Its investigations focus on pigments and techniques whose introduction or disuse can be dated.

Its report concludes: "Work thus far has not revealed any features wholly inconsistent with the hypothesis that the painting was executed by Turner in 1805."

An internet petition to keep the repair job garnered widespread support and seizing an opportunity to swell its coffers, the church began levying a 4 euro (£3) entrance fee on visitors, earning 2,000 euros in the first four days.

Lawyers acting for Mrs Gimenez now insist she should be entitled to a cut of the profits, which she wants to go towards a charity of her choice.

"She just wants the church to conform to the law," lawyer Enrique Trebolle said. "If this means economic compensation she wants it to be for charitable purposes".

Her lawyer added that she would want any money made from the painting to go towards Muscular atrophy charities, because her son suffers from the condition.

...we reckon it's right - every part of it 'makes sense', there's a proper sense of depth throughout and the splodges in the foreground - people? - give a proper repoussoir. [...] 

Shrewd souls also say it wouldn't be on telly if it wasn't right.

I dont like the Turner. I think the composition is off and I dont find the colours very turner like either.

I am excited to see what you find out.

In my opinion, the almost Degas-like (or Japanese print-like) composition of the painting makes it impossible to be e real Turner. As far as I know, Turner remained heavily indebted to the way his own master, Claude Lorrain, divided the picture into separete depth planes (leading the eye from the shadowy foreground to the sunny background).

I am going to say that no, it's not a Turner. I think it lacks a dynamic element, and the figures, the pier and boats seem a bit weak. From the photo it doesn't have the bright or bold colours of later works, nor detailed figures that feature in other Margate or harbour scenes. It seems a little constrained by the portrait composition. There's a lot of land featured in this painting- but not much going on there.

I don't think tonight's Turner is a Turner!   It isn't bouncing out of my laptop into my kitchen, as other Turner's do when I google them.    Something about the light not being right, nor the colours.    Just doesn't feel good, as if awaiting more on study, but nothing appearing.  Mind you the light may have been looking unusually flat off Margate on the day 'Turner' painted the picture, and so you have an exceptional Turner to study!   I am used to the light off the Cornish coast - very different to Thanet, nowadays, anyway, so I wouldn't put money on my instinct in this case, but we await 7pm with baited breath ...

Art and cultural property crime—which includes theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines—is a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually.

To recover these precious pieces—and to bring these criminals to justice—the FBI has a dedicated Art Crime Team of 14 special agents, supported by three special trial attorneys for prosecutions. And it runs the National Stolen Art File, a computerized index of reported stolen art and cultural properties for the use of law enforcement agencies across the world.

Spotted high up on a wall at Sotheby’s last year, the painting of a shipwreck and its survivors was attributed to “the Studio of Claude-Joseph Vernet”, a French artist who catered for the 18th-century romantic taste for the “terrible” and the picturesque. Although signed, it was thought not to be by Vernet, but by one of his studio assistants. Consequently, it was knocked down to London dealer Theo Johns, for just £25,000.

Since then, Johns has had the painting cleaned to reveal one of Vernet’s trademark lighthouses perched on a cliff (pictured above), which, for some unknown reason, had been painted over in the 20th century. Johns then tracked the painting’s exhibition history and found it had been included in the 1926 catalogue raisonne of the artist’s work. It is now on offer for £400,000, which is par for the course for a large, early shipwreck scene by Vernet, an artist who is represented in museums the world over.

This is not my hoped-for exhibition of pre-Pre-Raphaelites and the boys’ responses to them, nor of their early work  before the idea of Pre-Raphaelitism seized them, nor of the changes wrought by whatever was in their unwritten manifesto; of the 175 exhibits listed in the catalogue only 20 represent the five years of the Brotherhood’s existence. Had these been hung together, combining in their impact to engender acute insights in terms of realism, emotion, colour, light and technique, we might have identified the probable declarations of the absent   manifesto; but they are instead scattered to illustrate such imposed themes as Salvation, Beauty and Paradise, all chronology discarded.

Even with so few there are significant absentees from the precocious Millais’s tally — The Proscribed Royalist, several portraits and landscapes, and above all, The Bridesmaid (with which he set a pattern for the half-length sensual women of his peers); and had his boyhood masterpiece of 1846, Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, been included to demonstrate how great was the leap to his Isabella and the Pot of Basil of 1848-49, it would have been worth a thousand words of exegesis. This last, dubbed by Hunt “the most wonderful picture that any youth of 20 years of age ever painted”, perfectly demonstrates the Brotherhood’s infatuation with Italian art and literature before the High Renaissance, the subject Boccaccio’s tale of love and murder, the costumes pseudo-Quattrocento, the realism and the differentiated profiles wholly of Millais’ 19th-century day. We can almost hear the scrotum crunch of the walnut in the cracker, and we fear for the sleeping dog under the murderer’s tilted chair. Always illustrated in seemingly misleading brilliant colour, it is so tonal as to suggest a substantial layer of grime — an impression heightened by the curators’ comparison with the scrubbed Lorenzo Monaco borrowed from the National Gallery.

In terms of tone and colour, Millais proves to be surprisingly inconsistent, Hunt far less so — indeed Hunt in this exhibition emerges as a pure Pre-Raphaelite for far longer than Millais  and never as drab (except in The Awakening Conscience); visitors may be surprised too by the drabness of Rossetti’s watercolours. Poor visitors — the Tate last offered them a comprehensive review of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1984, yet after a lapse of 28 years, all will leave this exhibition in confusion as absolute as mine in the year of their centenary, indeed worse, for they will have no idea of what is meant by the subtitle, Victorian Avant-Garde. Comparing Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd, the bright peasantry blatantly lustful in the meadows between Kingston and Ewell, with the mysterious dooms and glooms, romantic, symbolic and Wagnerian, of The Perseus Cycle by Burne-Jones, 35 years later, they will discover no connection, for by then the essential fire of the Brotherhood had long since fizzled out.

The online version of our journal occasionally has to run articles with no pics as (c) owners won't license for online use!