Connoisseurship has gone out of fashion—to diversify the canon, it’s time for a revival

This year the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has extended to a week the annual connoisseurship course I teach in London, so I’ve been busy planning extra field trips. The RA is well located for connoisseurial expeditions, with the Wallace Collection and Sotheby’s to the north, and Christie’s and the National Gallery to the south. I calculate that over the week, we’ll cover about ten miles. We always provide torches—an essential tool for the student connoisseur—but now we might need to supply trainers too.

Each year I like to bring a painting from my inventory as a teaching aid, ideally a potential “sleeper” (or miscatalogued painting) I’ve bought at auction. The dirtier and more obscured by old varnish these are the better, since understanding a painting’s condition is an essential element of connoisseurship. A highlight of the course is when the paintings conservator Simon Gillespie gives us a demonstration cleaning test. This year I have what may be a previously unknown portrait by Zoffany to examine. Will cleaning reveal a genuine Zoffany, or a case of attributional optimism?

One of my dud discoveries can be as instructive as a successful one. I stress on the course that learning connoisseurship is not just about studying “good” works of art, for the connoisseur needs to immerse themselves in just as many copies, fakes and works by followers as securely attributed ones, for then the difference between (say) a genuine Zoffany and a copy becomes easier to discern. That said, buying your own copies is an expensive way to learn.

Connoisseurship was once an essential element of any university art history course, but from about the 1980s onwards it became so tarnished by association with the art market, class and “taste” that it was viewed as old-fashioned and even harmful. Many “new” art historians took the view that everything they disliked about the art historical “canon” was largely the product of an elite connoisseurial class, and they rebelled, rejecting a focus on attribution, looking instead at art’s wider contexts.

I think the new art historians were right to rebel. Context is good. The canon was indeed shaped by an elite class of art historians, collectors and dealers, and their taste defined who was a “great” artist, hence the canon comprising almost entirely white, western males. But I also think it was unfortunate to so firmly link connoisseurship—the often mundane, objective practice of recognising artistic techniques—with an elite class and their subjective tastes. Did the anti-connoisseurship rebellion go too far? In her book Art History: a Very Short Introduction (a staple of university reading lists), Dana Arnold begins with a demolition of connoisseurship and connoisseurs.

The RA is now the only place in the UK still teaching connoisseurship. I would gladly teach a similar course at a university, were any interested. It is still best to know the who, what and when of art history before answering the why. Connoisseurship remains one of the best ways to rebalance the canon, as we discover previously overlooked works by female artists. Seven of the 19 oil paintings on display in the opening room of Tate Britain’s current exhibition on women artists, Now You See Us, were identified by connoisseurship within only the last decade or so. I was lucky enough to find three of them myself. It will be up to the next generation of connoisseurs to find more.