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Gritt understands the story’s appeal. “People love it when experts look stupid, and when one person is saying up and another is saying down, and there’s a big consequence,” he says. “In this case there’s a thousand-fold leap in the money.”

What Gritt can’t abide is a single word in a headline about the scandal in The New York Times, which read, “With Misattributed Constable Masterpiece, a Rare Look Into the Imprecise World of Art Identification”.It was the adjectival spear of “Imprecise” that stuck in the conservator’s side.

“It’s a word that implies that you shouldn’t have confidence in art historians or the science of attribution, and the issue really is that if it’s done correctly, you can have full confidence in it,” he says.

“It’s the sense of subjectivity,” adds Christopher Etheridge, the gallery curator working on the Constable show. Gritt continues, “It’s the perception that (for) people making decisions about paintings, that it’s all done on a whim, on subjectivity, that it’s all just a matter of opinion.”

Authenticating art is part history and part science and it is precise, though with any discipline the tools can be misapplied. Think of it this way: astronomy is a precise science, but some dimwit can still point a telescope at Venus and say, “Hey, Mars!” Such folly doesn’t make the science unsound, but it sows public skepticism, which is what Gritt and Etheridge want to prevent.

That’s why we’re all sitting in the gallery’s conservation vault, which is the high-security section of the building, and for good reason. Within arms reach of my chair are paintings by Constable, Monet and Delacroix. We’re here to focus on the Constable, and how the conservator and curator know that it is a Constable. Oddly enough, the explanation begins with another painting they’ve wheeled out of the vaults, the first Constable purchased by the National Gallery, in 1935, and later exposed as a fake.