George L. Stout, conservator with Harvard’s Fogg Museum of Art in the 1920s, first articulated the three-legged stool approach to art authentication when connoisseurship alone was the standard. Questioning a connoisseur’s opinion, “was as naughty as inquiring about the digestive system of an opera singer…it wasn’t proper. And that was very good for the trade.”((Patricia Failing, “Artists Moral Rights in …
