As an art collector, Boston Copper Tycoon Quincy Adams Shaw (named for his father's friend, John Quincy Adams) knew what he liked. On a trip to Italy in 1874, he dropped into a small church north of Florence and saw something he liked very much. It was a big, unsigned and undocumented painting of the Nativity, which Shaw felt certain was from the hand of the 16th Century Venetian master, Tintoretto. He bought it and bore it proudly home.
The painting remained in the family until his son, the second Quincy Adams Shaw, offered it to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts four years ago. Museum officials could not bring themselves to refuse the picture, or to hang it either. It was wide as a barn door, and looked far too dull and dark for a genuine Tintoretto. They stored it in the cellar.
In 1948 the museum's official restorer, 72-year-old Alfred Lowe, was asked to look the gift horse in the mouth. With tiny cotton swabs dipped in turpentine and acetone, not much bigger than those used to clean a baby's nose, he patiently and gingerly removed from its 60 square feet of canvas alternating films of candle soot and brown varnish. The job took 18 months.
When it was done, the astonished officials saw a rich, bright picture that had undeniably been painted in Tintoretto's exuberant style. For Tintoretto, the composition was curiously static and as flatly arranged as a department-store window. But the figures were brilliantly conceived. "It's a corker," crowed Museum Director George Edgell. "I don't think I've ever seen so lovely a Virgin!"
Last week the picture finally got upstairs. It was not only a "magnificent unknown masterpiece by Tintoretto," the museum announced, but also "one of [our] outstanding treasures."
Pshaw, said 80-year-old Quincy Adams Shaw: "We knew that all along. My father was no expert, but he always did have a good eye for paintings."