The Market: The Cinderella Question

Normally it is the auctioneer who points in ecstasy at some modest morselof art and racks his brain for superlatives. And it is the greybeards, full of probity, in the museum pantheon who toll the bell. But roles were reversed last week when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art bid a paltry $225 for a sculpture at a Parke-Bernet auction, then gleefully announced that its new acquisition might be worth more than $500,000.

The Cinderella question was whether the 26-in.-high polychromed bust of a young woman holding primroses was the handiwork of one of Italy’s most famous Renaissance masters. Back in 1920, Art Dealer Edward Fowles had thought so when he purchased it in Rome for upward of $40,000. Considered to be the original for a marble in the Bargello museum, the bust was then attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio or possibly his pupil, Leonardo da Vinci, by the Bargello’s director and the late connoisseur Wilhelm von Bode.

Forgotten History. The bust was next” sold through the fabulous Lord Duveen to a Philadelphia heiress, Mrs. Eleanor Elkins Widener, first wife of a surgeon and explorer, the late Dr. A. Hamilton Rice, for a resounding $200,000. But when the bust arrived at Parke-Bernet its history had been forgotten; it was billed as merely another plaster copy.

But the bust had not escaped the Metropolitan’s eye. Three times, Met Director James J. Rorimer dropped by Parke-Bernet to examine the piece with his hand lens. “We’ve been burned before, and I wanted to be sure,” he explained, then with relish recounted his role: “I just kind of moseyed along, looking casually here and there. When I noticed a man near by watching me examine the statue, I quickly refocused on the tapestry behind.”

Rorimer was not the only one cloaking his intentions in mystery. By chance, Art Dealer Fowles, now 80 and retired, happened by Parke-Bernet, spotted the bust he had bought 45 years before. He decided to buy it for the Metropolitan “so that it would get the glory it deserves.” To hide his hand, Fowles sent his stepson to do his bidding; the Met sent a junior curator. All that kept the price from going sky-high was that each party thought that the final bid had been his; only later did Fowles learn that the auctioneer had awarded the sculpture to the Met.

A Pretty Possibility. Met officials then threw caution to the winds. Said Rorimer: “It is an original work of art, not a plaster cast. I’m convinced it is of the period and of great value.” The Met will subject it to a series of exhaustive tests, but even before the results are in, Met Curator of Western European Art John G. Phillips predicts that it will prove to be the original from which the Bargello bust was made. Furthermore, he believes that it is by Leonardo da Vinci.

All this still left Peter Wilson, chairman of Sotheby’s of London, which owns Parke-Bernet, far from convinced. Said he, in no mood to quarrel with a major customer: “If this proves to have come from the workshop of Verrocchio, Mr. Rorimer and his curator are to be congratulated on being the only connoisseurs to recognize the fact before the auction.” As for the Metropolitan, at worst it was stuck with a sculpture that had once sold for $200,000. And besides, the girl is pretty.