Apparently there is a museum in France dedicated to the works of a late 19th- early 20th century painter, Étienne Terrus.
The museum, located in Elne, France, in the Pyrénées, is full of paintings by Terrus.
Or at least many of the 140 paintings are by the artist.
And even more of them are, as has recently been discovered, fakes.
Experts have come in and determined that 82 of the paintings were not executed by Étienne Terrus, who died in 1922.
One of the clues in one of the landscapes: buildings that weren’t built until after the artist died.
You would think that something like that might be noticed.
But you often don’t see something unless you are looking, even if you’re looking right at it. And arguably there have been hundreds of people looking at those paintings, thinking to themselves, “That’s a nice Terrus.”
As the tagline for this site is not “Gouaches Can Change Your Life,” you are probably wondering what the Terrus Museum has to do with anything.
It got me to wondering about how we actually know whether music that we think has been recorded by an individual or a band really is aural evidence of that.