Art and Science: A Da Vinci Detective Story by John Brewer This is the story of the most sensational art trial of the first half of the 20th century, the case of Hahn versus Duveen. It begins in 1920, when a reporter from the New York World telephoned Sir Joseph Duveen, the self-described most powerful art dealer in the western world. Duveen, an English- man, was in New York, where he habitually spent half of the year, having recently arrived from his London office. (His firm also had a gallery in Paris.) Suave, cigar-smoking, and turned out in the finest suits, Duveen was always available to the press, which he was prone to see as the publicity department of his firm, Duveen Brothers. The business thrived on the titillating gossip and sensational revelations he leaked to the newspapers. During the interview Duveen was asked about a painting that had recently been offered by the French wife of a young American airman to the Kansas City Art Institute for a vast sum, rumored to be either $225,000 or $250,000. Harry and Andrée Hahn claimed that their picture was a Leonardo da Vinci, the original version of the picture known as La Belle Ferronière. The version of the picture in the Paris Louvre was therefore a mere copy. The claim was, of course, sensational. In 1920 there was no authenticated painting by da Vinci in any American collection, either public or private, and the arrival of a work of the master in a Midwestern city would have been an incredible coup, quite apart from the satisfaction it would have given Midwesterners to pull one over on the grandee collectors and galleries of the East Coast. But Duveen, much of whose wealth had been made supplying those grandees with Old Master art, was having none of it. Though he had never seen the picture or even a photograph of it, he condemned it, adding for good measure that any expert who Erich Lessing/Art Resource Inc. authenticated it was not an expert at all. The real Which of these is the real Leonardo da Vinci? Is it the painting of La Belle Ferronière on the Belle Ferronière, he told the reporter, was in the left that hangs in the Louvre, or the one on the right owned by Andrée Hahn? Louvre and not on its way to Kansas. Mrs. Hahn sued Duveen in the New York courts for slander of title, claiming his reckless and irre- 32 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE NO . 1 / 2 2 0 0 5 Andrée Hahn and her Belle caught the imagina- tion of the media, who saw them as two similar, beautiful, foreign ladies. The lllustrated London News even framed Andrée Hahn’s photo in their four- page spread on the trial. (Courtesy of the Illustrated London News picture library.) sponsible act had ended negotiations in Kansas and made it virtually impossible to sell the picture else- where. She hired herself a fancy New York lawyer, the improbably named Hyacinthe Ringrose, and sued Duveen for the enormous sum of $500,000 in compensation, a figure endlessly repeated in the newspaper reporting on the case. Duveen had always been a newshound, but in the Hahns and Mr. Ringrose he met his match. They set out to fight him not only in the courts, but also in the columns of the press. They spent a good deal of time painting a wonderful back story for their Leonardo. They claimed that the picture had been a wedding gift to Andrée from her aris- tocratic aunt, the Comtesse Louise de Montaut. It had been smuggled out of France and into Belgium in a basket of washing, before being shipped to the United States. Andrée herself was portrayed as a French aristocratic beauty, gallantly rescued as a war bride by Harry, the dashing Midwestern aviator, sometimes said to have been on General Pershing’s staff. She and the woman portrayed in her Leon- ardo—foreign and beautiful—became as one. The Hahns’ romance and the romance of Leonardo were intertwined. While Ringrose sought sympathy for the young couple, he also encouraged Duveen and the experts he employed to examine the painting. Duveen obliged by paying a succession of American experts to visit Ringrose’s office, where the picture was displayed. He also sent photographs to many of the European experts he used to authenticate pictures. Within a year he had a fat file of experts’ opinions, all condemning the American Leonardo as a copy. Armed with this information but confronted by the possibility that any attribution or opinion based on photographs would be challenged by Ringrose, Duveen decided on a publicity coup. He would ship the American Leonardo to Paris, take it to the Louvre, and place it next to the French Belle Fer- ronière. His experts would then evaluate the two pictures. The plan was not easy to accomplish. The 2 0 0 5 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE NO . 1 / 2 33 A courtroom scene during the trial. Louvre, as one might expect, was not happy about commented to the New York Herald, he “did not this stunt, and it required all of Duveen’s clout to consider that the European experts’ opinion would allow the highly publicized comparison to take hold much weight with the American jury.” Even- place. The Hahns wanted a fat fee (they got $2,000 tually the case came to trial in the supreme court and all expenses) to allow the picture to go. But in of New York in February 1929. A jury of ordinary 1923 Duveen overcame all obstacles, and assembled New Yorkers—including two real-estate agents, a star-studded panel of 10 experts to examine the a hotel receptionist, and a vendor of women’s pictures. These included Bernard Berenson, the wear—had to decide on the authenticity of the most famous art connoisseur of the day; Roger American Leonardo. No juror had any pretense to Fry, artist and Bloomsbury denizen who had been art connoisseurship or expertise. curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New The trial lasted for six weeks and ended with a York; and the directors of the London National hung jury: the press revealed that nine of the jurors Gallery, the Irish Free State Museum in Dublin, were in favour of Mrs. Hahn and her picture, with the Imperial War Museum, and the Rijksmuseum only three on the side of Duveen. Shortly before in Amsterdam. A number of well-known amateur a retrial was to take place, Duveen settled out of experts on Renaissance art, such as Maurice Brock- court for the not-inconsiderable sum of $60,000 well and Sir Herbert Cook, also testified, together plus legal expenses. with one scientist, Arthur Pillans Laurie, professor As I have emphasized, the struggle between of chemistry at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, Duveen and Hahn was carried out as much in the who was not on Duveen’s original list but had newspapers as in the courtroom. No art case was volunteered his services. As the New York Tribune ever more extensively reported. In an age which put it: “Such a confluence of eminent authorities was far more richly endowed with newsprint, on art as was never seen before on land or sea filed stories ran not only in the big-gun newspapers of within the sacrosanct enclosure of the Louvre this New York, but in almost all the major cities in the morning.” The experts were interrogated by lawyers United States, as well as many, many smaller towns. Duveen gathered his from both sides, and a huge transcript of their In Europe the French, Italian, and German press, experts together at the deliberations was returned to New York for submis- but above all the papers in Britain, carried extensive sion at the trial. Almost without exception they coverage. Copies of the two pictures were displayed Louvre so they could denied that the Hahns’ picture showed the hand of in Midwestern department stores, and Macy’s sold examine both versions Leonardo. versions of the picture—“we admit it’s a copy”—for of La Belle side by side. The case dragged on a further six years. Duveen $17.95. There were huge queues of people wanting seems to have expected the Hahns to settle or to attend the trial, and papers reported that in the (Courtesy of the Illustrated withdraw from the case, but they felt, as it turned final days, before the verdict, the courthouse was London News picture out quite rightly, that they had made serious inroads filled with the cream of New York society, or, as the library.) into Duveen’s experts’ testimony. As Mr. Hahn New York World put it, “Boiled Shirt Gallery Waits Verdict of La Belle Jury.” Why was the case of such extraordinary inter- est? To understand this, we need to backtrack a moment and look at what was happening in the art market in the 1920s, and how the work of Leon- ardo fitted within it. The case happened during what was the art market’s greatest ever peacetime boom. The emergence of new wealth in post–Civil War America, particularly during the Progres- sive era, together with the decline of wealth in Europe radically transformed the global market for 34 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE NO . 1 / 2 2 0 0 5 Corbis / Bettmann © Old Masters. In the late 19th century European of art. But these famous, often obsessive collec- agricultural rents collapsed as cheap grain imported tors, the men and women Duveen liked to work from the United States produced a precipitate with, were only the most visible manifestation of fall in food prices.