摘要：When Muffin Stevens reviewed an exhibition of
paintings by Maud Sumner in the Pretoria Art
Museum, she wrote:
A complaint to be levelled at the museum is
that no dates are available either on labels
or in a catalogue. So the viewer is not able
to form a complete picture of the chronology
of the works. Thus an understanding of
the artist's development is frustrated.1
How true. Before I set out to do primary art
historical research I would have made the
same complaint. Once in the field I was soon
to discover that while artists mostly conscientiously
signed their works, they seldom dated
them. Most (like Cecil Higgs who told me so)
seemed to think that a date is unimportant
and irrelevant, while a signature is mandatory.
Paradoxically, however, with a minimum of
knowledge one can usually guess with some
certainty who the maker of an unsigned work
is, but to determine when it was made, is far
more difficult. To do this requires style analysis,
historical research, a certain amount of tedious
detective work and, not least, intuition.
Finally the astute art historian may manage to
date a number of works irrefutably. Many
more dates remain conjectural, and numerous
works of art must simply be annotated in the
catalogue as, at best, `circa', but more often
`date unknown'.
