Fiona Bruce brought Mary-Louise Wedderburn’s portrait into the frame on Fake or Fortune? after the retired accountant carried it to the team wrapped carefully in a sleeping bag. The painting, left to Wedderburn in her uncle’s will twenty years ago, is now thought to be by Katherine Read and worth over £100,000.
Charles Greig said the evidence left him certain. In the episode, he called it one of the trickiest paintings he had considered and said the dossier was “incredibly impressive”, then concluded that the work was by Katherine Read.
Mary-Louise Wedderburn’s painting
The portrait shows an Indian woman in formal pose, wearing a string of pearls, a large emerald pendant and a nose ring. Wedderburn had believed it may have been painted by her distant relative Katherine Read, but the attribution had never been settled before the investigation.
Wedderburn said the family link made the result matter to her, and she described the process as “a fabulous journey”. When told the result, she said: “It’s wonderful, it’s unbelievable. Thank you so much.”
Charles Greig’s attribution
Greig said the strongest part of the dossier was the technical analysis done by the Courtauld, along with the similarity to the portrait of Helena Beatson. He pointed to the pigments, the modelling of the figures and the brushwork as part of the case for Read.
He also said the work was “the first painting of an Indian by a European woman artist that is recorded” and called that “extraordinarily important”. Read, an 18th-century Scottish artist, specialized in women and children and studied in Europe before moving in elite circles.
Madras court portrait
Greig said he was “pretty certain” the sitter was a member of the Nawab’s family in Madras. He said that was unusual because many portraits of Indian ladies from the period showed women in European households rather than in a royal court.
That finding gives the painting a sharper place in Read’s career and in Wedderburn’s family history. The portrait now carries both a new value and a new attribution, with Greig’s view turning a long-held family inheritance into a documented work by Katherine Read.
