John

Okay, I've been on a bit of an eBay jag lately. There's a vast amount of dross, a few things which appear to be outright forgeries, and the occasional masterwork.

For obvious reasons I'm hesitant to mention great items which are still available, but here's a drawing signed "Greuze" that sold recently for $835.00 that was really remarkable. To my eye, it seems completely typical of Greuze. The face looks familiar but I can't put my finger on where I may have seen it. I crawled through every Greuze resource I could find online, plus 3 books on Greuze from the library, and I found plenty of extremely similar drawings but nothing that this could have been a direct copy of.

I refrained from bidding, for a couple of reasons...
1. Drawings are fragile, and if you keep them on display then you have a steadily deteriorating asset. If it was real, I'd feel obligated to keep it filed away from light and oxygen.
2. As usual, the drawing was being sold without any provenance, basically on an as-is, take-it-or-leave-it basis.
3. The catch (and on eBay it seems there's always one "catch") is that J.-B. Greuze did not normally sign his drawings (frequently his paintings either). The drawing looked flawless to me, but I couldn't get over the anomalous signature.

Anyway here's the drawing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, or on buying art on eBay at all.