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Similarly, Rembrandt van Rijn ran a mid-17th-century workshop of at least 100 pupils. His best pupil at one time was Anthony van Dyck, who became nearly as famous as his teacher.

It was often difficult to distinguish the masters' works from the best of their pupils'. The paintings were bought, sold and dispersed throughout the Western world, often without documentation. As time went on, the paintings' origins became harder to trace.

By the early 20th century, German-born Valentiner, his colleague Ludwig Burchard and a few others were widely acknowledged as the experts on whether paintings were done by the masters or their contemporaries. They were the go-to guys for art dealers, galleries and collectors.

America's new wealthy class had a big appetite for European paintings but little experience discerning their worth, so the Fords and the Fricks relied on the European experts. The more cautious among them only bought paintings that came with certificates of authentication, according to Kasia Pisarek, an independent researcher in England.

"The money was in America, the expertise in Europe," she said.

Valentiner once marveled in his diary, now stored at the state archives in Raleigh, that Americans were willing to pay any price for art that anyone who hadn't grown up in Europe would have difficulty understanding. And so what should have been independent scholarship was sometimes driven by the marketplace.

Pisarek found this comment by American art historian John C. van Dyke, writing in 1907, about the prevalence of forgeries:

"Our American millionaires, whose brains have stood them in such good stead in the accumulation of money, seem to part with common sense when it comes to the buying of pictures. They are a shining mark for European sharpers, who have found that an enormous price asked is considered a guarantee of genuiness in America."

No one has ever called major scholars such as Valentiner and Burchard sharpers. But they couldn't help being influenced by their relationships with the art dealers and commercial galleries that paid them to render opinions, says Timothy Riggs, curator of collections at the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-CH.

There was an "expansionist" mood among the experts, driven in part by a resurgence of Rembrandt's reputation during the 19th century, Riggs said.

"People were discovering paintings and were very pleased to discover them," Riggs said. "Of course, the owners of the paintings were very happy to have them."

And so were the museums that eventually received them.

Tracking down the real thing

A calamitous mix of anguish and triumph, "Gideon Overcoming the Midianites" hangs in the 17th-century Flemish room at the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh.

Burchard didn't think much of the painting at one time. In 1950, Pisarek found in her research, he warned a colleague not to buy it, saying it looked like it had been painted by a contemporary of Rubens.

Four years later, Burchard wrote a certificate of authenticity to a commercial dealer in London affirming the painting as a Rubens. That's when the Raleigh museum bought it as part of a $1 million spree authorized by state legislators to get the museum started, with Valentiner giving the final OK to each piece.

With estimates of as many as 400 Rembrandts floating around, the art world came to recognize the confusion between work from a master's hand and work from someone else's. The Dutch in 1968 launched the Rembrandt Research Project, which has been re-evaluating and cataloguing the artist's oeuvre ever since. A similar project, Corpus Rubenianum, which focused on Rubens, has been going on almost as long.

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