Sleuth
CSI meets Who Do You Think You Are? meets Time Team meets The Antiques Roadshow. Two-dimensional works of art become three-dimensional thrillers.
Philip Mould is an international art dealer who has lived the high stakes game of art sleuthing for twenty years. In Sleuth, we encounter the fascinating dealers, experts, auctioneers and restorers who risk fortunes and reputations to turn overlooked artworks into coveted treasures.
Sleuth is laced with dramas:
• Gainsborough's earliest picture emerges in a Los Angeles saleroom - the author has three days to find the missing facts and decide what to pay.
• The most powerful man in the art establishment, with the influence to elevate a copy into a priceless original, is asked to look at a 'fake' Rembrandt self portrait: if he says yes a £5,000 picture turns into £5 million masterpiece.
• A Vermont professor unlocks the door of a defunct Catholic church to reveal a hidden cache of 300 portraits.
• An auctioneer notices from the upper story of a bus that Damien Hirst's restaurant is being dismantled. He swoops in and sells the fixtures and fittings for £13 million.
Sleuth is a series of stories which not only reveals the extraordinary culture of detection but the people behind it. Paintings and their discovery become a way into the minds, preoccupations and professions of a raft of influential figures beyond the commercial and museum façade - men and women who have shaped their lives in pursuit of truth and profit through art.
Philip Mould OBE is one of the UK's foremost authorities on British art, and is widely consulted by galleries, private collectors and the media. He is the author of the acclaimed Sleepers (released in paperback as The Trail of Lot 163), both published by Fourth Estate. He is also a regular broadcaster, reviewer and writer for the national press. His television work includes writing and presenting the Channel 4 series Changing Faces, co-presenting BBC2's Antiques Show, and as an expert on the ever-popular The Antiques Roadshow (which has a regular audience of almost six million).