"The right eye is dead," said Sir Joseph Duveen, dolefully. "Dead," he intoned, "very dead."
Surely Leonardo da Vinci had never painted a "dead" eye. Leonardo studied artillery, muscle fibres, ladies' lips, everything that quivered with life, mechanical or protoplasmic. He was the inspired archetype of the small boy who wants to know how things work. Sir Joseph Duveen could not believe that the painted "dead" eye was by Leonardo, nor, for that matter, that any part of the canvas had been colored by that amazing Florentine.
But there was another consideration: if the jury should decide that Leonardo had been the painter, Sir Joseph's remarks might cost him as much as $500,000.
And he had been pondering that possibility for eight years.
History. During the War, Capt. Harry J. Hahn, Kansas City auto salesman, served with the U. S. aviation corps. In France he met and married Mlle. Andree Lardoux, niece of the Marquis de Chambre of Brittany. She brought her husband a natural dowry of dark hair and eyes, Gallic chic. Her property dowry included a painting of a gentle faced brunette whose bosom plumply filled her brick-red velvet bodice. The painting was on two layers of canvas, bore on the back the inscription: "Taken from the wood and put on canvas by Hacquin at Paris, 1777."* It had been acquired by the Lardoux family from an aide of Napoleon Bonaparte. Mile. Lardoux owned it with joy, because, in 1916, Georges Sortais, French connoisseur, had pronounced it in writing to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
In the Louvre was the famed La Belle Ferronière (The Blacksmith's Daughter), most often attributed to Leonardo and almost identical with the Lardoux portrait. Thus Connoisseur Sortais' dictum implied that Leonardo had painted this subject twice. But, since the Louvre painting disappeared in 1848 and later reappeared, there loomed other suspicions. Perhaps the Louvre Belle was a fake. Perhaps the Lardoux Belle was the genuine Leonardo. Perhaps both were by minor artists. Apart from dogmatic critical opinions there was no evidence to show that Leonardo had painted either Belle.
In 1920 Capt. Hahn took his wife and her picture to Kansas City. The Kansas City art museum favored the reputed Leonardo. A sale seemed likely. The price, of course, would be in six figures. The news spread to the correct corridors of Manhattan art dealers.
Duveen. None heard the rumors more quickly than stalwart, ruddy Sir Joseph Duveen. Whenever and wherever art dealers come in conflict over some priceless item, Sir Joseph is usually found sitting sedately nearest the prize with a millionaire look which defines and demands his desire. Duveen is unquestionably the most potent name in art marts of both hemispheres. The Duveen offices in Manhattan have an air of grim impregnability rather than a cordial fagade.
When asked for his opinion of the Lar-doux painting, Sir Joseph's crisp moustache twitched and his mobile eyebrows performed a stately and scornful ascension. "The picture," he declared, "is a copy, hundreds of which have been made of this and other Leonardo subjects and offered in the market as genuine. Leonardo never made a replica of his work. His original La Belle Ferronière is in the Louvre."