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Suit. The Kansas City museum did not buy the painting. Mrs. Hahn sued Sir Joseph for $500,000 libel.
Ammunition. Then for eight years the trial was held in abeyance while both sides collected ammunition. Expert minions of Sir Joseph and of Mrs. Hahn went to the Louvre, taking the Lardoux painting with them. They peered, compared, photographed, microphotographed, studied old scripts, gathered historical data.
Back to Sir Joseph came favorable reports by "expertizers" of the two paintings. Said they of the Lardoux portrait: "Soggy and bulgy ... it resembles in portions a child's balloon . . . mouth too luscious . . . angularity of the 18th century is here translated into the suavity of the late 18th."
Back to Mrs. Hahn came favorable reports. Her experts, unlike Sir Joseph's, were relying on history, measurements, concrete evidence, rather than esthetic considerations. They were rumored to have discovered telltale thumbprints.* In Kansas City, art dealer J. Conrad Hug twice mortgaged his home to obtain funds for the defeat of Sir Joseph.
Trial. Last week the trial began. Rubberneckers swarmed into the Manhattan courtroom of the U. S. Supreme Court as though legal curtains were about to be raised on the scene of some glamorous crime. The jury, chosen for its ignorance of Leonardo, was composed of a clerk, two agents, two realtors, an accountant, a shirtmaker, an artist, a poster artist, an upholsterer, a vendor of ladies' wear and a man without occupation. Chief counsel for Mrs. Hahn was large, ironic S. Lawrence Miller. His opponent was excitable Lawyer George W. Whiteside. The room was littered with books on esthetics, histories of art. On an easel stood the Lar-doux painting.
Attack. For the first few days, Sir Joseph was constantly in the witness box. First salvo for the prosecution was Lawyer Miller's statement of intent: "We hope to show that Sir Joseph has built up an organization which is the finest of its kind in the world and has a strangle hold on the picture business. . . . He has established such contacts with the richest clientele in the world that scarcely anyone else can sell an oil painting. He has built up such a business that when he condemns that picture it is dead, and he knows it. He has had competitors who have found that he uses the tactics of condemning a picture or a work of art offered for sale by a rival. He is the man who is going to sell all the old paintings."
Then Lawyer Miller elicited from Witness Duveen the following evidence:
Sir Joseph knew nothing of pigmentation or the chemistry of .colors. He had pronounced on the Lardoux painting without seeing either the painting itself or -a photograph. Once he stated his dou'bt that the Louvre Belle was by Leonardo, then he retracted and said he was sure of it. He could not find hatching strokes on the Lardoux portrait which he claimed to have seen eight years before; he apologized for his failing eyesight.