UNC professor leads team to art discoveries with NCMA

Thanks to art history professor Tania String, Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Art has made discoveries in 500-year-old British art.

String, who has collaborated with the N.C. Museum of Art through UNC for six years, convinced fellow international art experts to come to Raleigh to analyze nine paintings from the Jacobean and Tudor eras at a symposium that took place Monday through Wednesday.

Among the researchers who attended were fashion historians, art historians and conservators.

Before String looked at the collection of portraits in 2010, the paintings had been in storage for 50 years.

“I don’t think that anybody would have been interested in exhibiting them had we not worked so closely with the NCMA to say how interesting, how important, how unusual these portraits are,” String said.

David Steel, curator of European art at the museum, said String brought together some of the most knowledgable people in the world to analyze the paintings.

“Lots of (the portraits) had names attached to them,” Steel said. “Pretty much every single person who we thought was depicted turned out to be wrong.”

String said analyzing the styles and costumes of the portraits helped the researchers date them and conclude the portraits were not of the people identified in the inscriptions.

He also said conservation treatments helped the experts make discoveries invisible to the naked eye.

“(In one portrait), everything but the son was painted at one time, but they actually left the part blank where the son was, but then the son was added,” Steel said. “But it could’ve been even a year or two later.”

Because of the symposium, String said discoveries about the identities of the artists were made as well.

“The naming of one of the artists, possibly even two of the artists, has come to light by comparison to other works of art that are known to other specialists,” String said.

Steel said even a historian was stunned when the researchers discovered one of the portraits was embroidered with a snail, honey leaves, silver and gold.

The full exhibit, “History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection,” will be open until March of 2017.

“We’ve had a collaboration with UNC and Duke, and I know it’s been a very productive collaboration which has resulted in this conference bringing people of international reputation together,” said Larry Wheeler, director of the museum.

String said UNC graduate and undergraduate students analyzing the paintings are given an opportunity to work hands-on with British art — something American art history students are not often able to do.

“We usually work on books or on digital images,” String said. “For UNC students to have the chance to work with the actual primary object is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

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