January 15, 1931

Thomas Hoving (January 15, 1931 to December 10, 2009) was a controversial and exciting director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That job was one for which he was born, having parents who came from the entitled classes. His father for instance had run Tiffanys.

His book, titled Tutankhamen: The Untold Story (1978) shows Hoving at his most skeptical. He outlines the fact that the team that found Tutankhamen's tomb was so overwhelmed with press attention that they planted fake stories to distract the reporters, including a report that a huge cat, presumably a statue, had been found. Such was not the case but the rush of the reporters to get that scoop out gave the archaeological team some breathing space.

Hoving mentions that the stories that followed Carnarvon's death (the aristocratic funder of the hunt) were inaccurate -- that story that the lights in Cairo went out all over the city when Carnarvon died was witnessed by no one. Hoving proceeds studiously in pointing out that there were in fact very few curses in any Egyptian art. 

It may seem inconsistent then to find Hoving elsewhere trusting the intuition of art connoisseurs in detecting fraud. He himself put his own intuition that a Pollock found in a thrift store was a fake, above the evidence such as Pollock's fingerprints on the back of the canvas.  So one wonders how Hoving is so sure that the story of Carnarvon's dog is phony. 

He insinuates that the story of the Lord's dog at Highclere Castle, howling and falling over dead the moment Carnarvon died in Egypt, is fake, though it was an account supplied by Carnarvon's son, the sixth Earl.  Of course, we don't expect Hoving to have intuited that that castle would become the set for a story called "Downton Abbey."