Product Description

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 GBP5,000 picture turns into GBP5 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 GBP13 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 facade - men and women who have shaped their lives in pursuit of truth and profit through art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22689 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
My favourite account is of the little landscape in a sale in Los Angeles described merely as 'Follower of Jacob van Ruisdael', estimated at $4,000-$6,000, but which turns out to be... But that would spoil one wonderful story among many that take in everyone from Rembrandt and Elizabeth I to David Starkey and Damien Hirst ...

Reviewing can make you hate books - the grim spectre of the copy deadline means that any other task (cleaning the fridge is popular) can seem attractive compared with just getting on and reading the book. Sleuth was different. I could not wait to get back to it.

Mould has a sure instinct for plot structure and pace, teasingly unveiling his discoveries until the final glorious flourish of revelation. Appropriately, given that portraiture is his speciality, he is also a shrewd observer of people. He can spot a fake as surely as he does with pictures. As he says, 'like art itself, the market for its products can be extremely eloquent about human behaviour'. --Telegraph, June 21, 2009

About the Author
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).

Customer Reviews

Sleuth The Amazing Quest for Lost Art Treasures
Having seen Mr Mould on TV and liking his presentation style, I was interested in reading his book. However, I was a little disappointed.

The title was a little excessive as there were only a few "cases" mentioned - How the sale of Damien Hurst articles can qualify as lost art is beyond me.

My main criticisms are the poor spelling - spell checkers don't check the context of words. Missing words - these tended to interrupt the flow and by the end of the book it became similar to the Chinese water torture - I was waiting for the next interruption. These problems seem unrepresentative of Mr. Mould's exacting standards.

Apart from these niggles, I found the stories fascinating and would have like more of the same and with a little more detail of the technical side of the subject. I would recommend this to my friends, mentioning, of course, the problems.

Sleuth By Philip Mould
I Really enjoyed this book. Written in a very readable style which conveys the pictures & personalities within the art world. The format is very narrative which makes it read almost like a novel (but unlike a novel its amazingly true). I found myself gazing in on a world I never knew existed and whilst you are learning about the high end of the art market with big money players you can't help feeling that Philip Mould is also teaching us 'the ordinary man in the street' something about art in general; its appreciation, value and meaning. I'm sure there have been many books written on art but not all of them strive to provide you with a litle of the art sleuth's special insight. A geat book - highly recommended.

Streuth!
Having seen this book reviewed in the Sundays and the author performing on A.Roadshow along with my interest in art as a mature art history graduate, the book seemed a must read. I did enjoy it but feel Mould's mix of scholarship, detection, story telling, the contemporay art scene and the authors social circle, was an ambitious one and one for me that didn't quite work. Mr. Mould likes to give lots of background to each of his case histories but frankly I don't care about who the rich buyer was once married to so was constantly willing him to cut to the chase. I would have prefered far more detection examples,his and others. And for the many would be sleuths out there, more advice on finding and reselling pictures. It reminded me in some ways of an undergraduate essay where the student had researched around the question and shoehorned everything into his essay just in case.
Streuth-less would definately have been more with his contexts.