#Highbrow furniture closed series

He sent an e-mail enumerating his misgivings to the museum’s curators, under the subject heading “Acquisition Dangereuse.” They responded by forwarding his note. “He said, ‘I’m the connoisseur,’ and admitted nothing.” A few months later, Hooreman learned that Versailles had bought the ployants. “I told Bill he’d always been my hero and this wasn’t right,” Hooreman recalls. The following week, he confronted Pallot, who had once been his art-history professor at the Sorbonne. In 2012, Hooreman saw a pair of ployants-folding benches-that were for sale in the Aaron gallery showroom and were billed as the onetime property of Princess Louise Élisabeth, the eldest daughter of King Louis XV, and acted on a hunch. He knew that one of them, for example, was fond of painting a coat of melted-down licorice on the surface of reproductions, to make new wood look old and dirty. “I often use the same people on restorations, and I’m intimate with their strengths and weaknesses,” Hooreman says. It was Hooreman who realized the chairs were new constructions, initially because he recognized in them the handiwork of Pallot’s gilder and carver. And based on Pallot’s imprimatur, the government classified two of his fake lots as national treasures. For decades, Pallot, who ran the furniture division of the Parisian gallery Didier Aaron, had enjoyed a reputation as the world’s leading expert on the works of 18th-century France indeed, Versailles’s decision to purchase the chairs hinged on Pallot’s blessing.

#Highbrow furniture closed series

That was when Pallot admitted to the police that he had masterminded the forgery of at least four chairs purportedly built in the 18th century for France’s royal household and, in a series of transactions via third parties between 20, sold them to the Palace of Versailles. Pallot and Charles Hooreman, rival antiques dealers in Paris, became the two most famous men in the French art world.