She also has a witness account from the late Jan Bosselaers, a banker and art connoisseur, that contradicts the suggestion by the National Gallery that the painting’s back had been glued to a blockboard sheet “probably during the [20th] century”.
Doxiadis has compared, for example, the Venus and Cupid statue shown in the Samson and Delilah with the putto’s back from Rubens’ Minerva protects Pax from Mars in the National Gallery: “It’s just bad craftsmanship.
Daley obtained a document that shows the painting was bought in 1929 by a German dealer from a conservator called Gaston Lévy, a Brazilian who had been part of the Madrid circle of the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.
Doubts about whether Peter Paul Rubens painted the Samson and Delilah picture in the National Gallery have been revived by new evidence.
She said that Rubens would never have chopped off Samson’s toes and that such details differed from contemporary copies of his “lost” original.
