Fiona Bruce and art dealer Philip Mould reopen cold cases of attribution, chasing bills of sale, X-ray fluorescence and the faintest whiff of a catalogue raisonné from Castle Combe to New York. A single episode can hinge on a conservator finding 1890s Prussian blue beneath a later over-paint, or on the heirs of a Jewish collector still hunting a 1938 forced-sale receipt. When the committee for Monet finally signs off, the picture’s value can leap from attic dust to seven-figure daylight; when they demur, the canvas goes back to the spare-room wall and the owners swallow the cost of a forgery report.
The format grew out of Mould’s 2009 book Sleuth after a £30 Homer surfaced at a rubbish tip and the pair realised television could bankroll proper laboratory work. Each sixty-minute film treats one work (or, occasionally, a group of pieces) like a crime scene: micro-samples of ground-up lapis are matched to quarries in Afghanistan, dendrochronology dates panel boards to within five rings, and infrared reflectography exposes abandoned under-drawing. Courtauld professor Aviva Burnstock has fronted the science since series six, replacing the departed Bendor Grosvenor after a scheduling turf war over BBC Four’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces.
Failure is part of the draw. A putative Churchill from series four was rejected in 2015, accepted in 2020, then still left Mould calling the saga “unsatisfactory”; a Giacometti sculpture in series seven remains neither authenticated nor dismissed. The programme’s refusal to stage a tidy reveal keeps owners, experts and Sunday-night viewers suspended in the same state of polite, scholarly agony.
Production Details
BBC One / 13 Seasons / 53 Episodes / 2011 - Present
Showrunner(s): Judith Winnan, Ben Gale
Producer(s): Nicky Illis, Sebastian Barfield
Music: William Goodchild
Main Cast
Fiona Bruce as Self - Presenter
Philip Mould as Self - Presenter
