The phrase "autograph work" is not commonly used in written English and may cause confusion.
It could be used in contexts where one is referring to work that is signed or personally endorsed by an author or artist, but it is not a standard expression.
Example: "The gallery is showcasing a collection of autograph work from famous authors, each piece signed by the creator."
Alternatives: "signed work" or "autographed pieces".
Or they're too implausibly naturalistic to be an autograph work (La Belle Ferronière is too lifelike to be by Leonardo).
If one of them did a painting he liked, he was quite capable of signing it with his own name, keeping it and selling it as an autograph work by "Rembrandt".
Among these was a rare early-16th-century black-chalk drawing of a fashionably dressed young man that scholars have identified as an autograph work by Lucas van Leyden, an influential Netherlandish artist whose engravings have been rated as highly as Durer's.
Carlo Pedretti, the Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, described the portrait as "a magnificent thing, worthy of Leonardo, even if strangely cool and lifeless". If it really is by Leonardo, he said, it would be a discovery comparable to the "early 19th-century re- establishment" of "The Lady With the Ermine" as an autograph work.
It is the only known portrait of a woman accepted as an autograph work by van der Weyden, yet the sitter's name is not recorded and he did not title the work.
The Florentine master's oeuvre is scarce and unquestionably autograph works from this early period never appear in the market.
Though many copies of his portaits were evidently made in his studio by assistants, his own production was not large, and his surviving autograph works number fewer than 150.
In his art the Virgin Mary is always a tall, queenly figure wearing the conventional red robe and blue cloak, but enriched in his autograph works by sensitively rendered accessories.
Among these were a limited number of more or less safely documented works, which were used as touchstones in the sifting of the oeuvre which proceeded on the a priori assumption that there would be a strong stylistic coherence in Rembrandt's autograph works and significant differences among works by other hands in his studio.
In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the Oxford scholar Martin Kemp points out that the artist -- today considered a paragon of productivity -- was in fact rather unreliable, completing fewer than 20 autograph works during his lifetime and leaving such major commissions as the "Adoration of the Magi" and the "Battle of Anghiari" unfinished.
Autograph shows work on a more intimate scale.
