John Payne Collier, the Scholar Forger

In the first of the four volumes of An Old Man's Diary (1871-2), John Payne Collier, then 82, fondly claimed that an oil painting owned in his youth by his mother and father had so impressed William Hazlitt that he had said it 'might be by Leonardo da Vinci'. The attenuating italics concede that such a remark could only be flattery and that the picture couldn't have been anything of the sort. Yet any collector will recognise a tantalising excitement and a dilemma. Would it be worth investigating the painting – its brushwork, the canvas, possible influences on the style and grouping, its provenance and documentation – in the hope of proving it enormously valuable; or is it best to ask no questions so as not to get disappointing answers? Then again, if the picture had been investigated, who was to judge whether it was or was not by Leonardo? If Hazlitt had examined it thoroughly and written an affidavit in its favour, would his word have carried sufficient weight? And would it still do so today, when we don't have the picture to examine for ourselves?

It is not inconceivable that an art historian might follow Collier's hint and somehow track down a painting that turned out to be by Leonardo, or by a follower or even a forger. Yet present-day researchers are likely to be deterred not only by the inadequacy of the description and the hesitancy of the attribution, but by the cursed name of the diarist who recorded the remark. For John Payne Collier, the nineteenth century champion at sexing up documents, spent much of his very long life enhancing mundane materials to make them interesting. His particular indulgence was speculation on subjects on which he was the acknowledged expert, using sources which were unverifiable. Manuscripts and unique books in his own library were a favourite, for he could then deny access to other enquirers. Alternatively, he would refer to materials in the private libraries of the aristocracy. Joseph Ritson had been tart in an earlier generation about this ruse: 'It is a very common, but at the same time, a very unreasonable practice in commentators and others, to bid their readers see this or that scarce book, of which it is, as they well know, frequently impossible for them to procure a sight'. When it came to the claim about Collier's parents' picture, sheer longevity ensured that it could not be checked. Hazlitt, who probably never said any such thing, had been dead for forty years. Perhaps there was no such painting in the first place. So we are left with a dubious remark on an unspecified occasion, spuriously ascribed and making a tentative but tendentious claim about the improbable attribution of a possibly non-existent picture.

Collierisms were often written in water like this, as when he described a copy of The Owl's Almanac 'upon which an early possessor has noted that it was . . . "by Dekker"': no one else has ever noted seeing this copy, there is little reason to credit the authority or existence of the 'early possessor', and the attribution is generally rejected. Similarly, the manuscript of the four-line epitaph on Burbage by Middleton that Collier printed in 1835 has never otherwise been recorded: it seems that Collier just made it up. But in many other cases physical evidence remains or there are independent reports of what Collier describes. Typically, he chose to interpret the evidence credulously or fraudulently, so as to have something original to say. Novelty seems to have been the crucial factor, even when it is as inconsequential as the hypothesis that John Webster had a daughter called Alice. However trivial the information, Collier liked to father it.

It was when there was nothing new to report or promising to interpret that the physical forgeries began, in half a dozen or more libraries as well as in books of his own. Hardly a handful of people can ever have cared who wrote Pleasant Quips for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen, but to bolster his guess that it was Stephen Gosson...