Art: The Finds That Cheer

Among art sleuths, nothing raises the after-dinner pulse like, a good tale of a masterpiece rediscovered in an attic—unless it is a tale of one hung in full view for decades but unrecognized until the right eye spotted it. Last week the art world enjoyed both kinds of discovery.

In Spain, Valencia’s City Councilman Vincente Giner Guillot had nursed a private ambition for more than 20 years: to be the one to discover the missing one of three El Grecos that, legend said, once belonged to Valencia’s 350-year-old Real Colegio del Corpus Christi. Councilman Guillot’s main problem was that he knew nothing about the missing El Greco, not even its subject. The clue he needed could not have been simpler. When the director of Madrid’s Museum of Modern Art heard of his search, he remembered seeing, some 20 years ago, an El Greco painting of a Camaldolite Order monastery in the Colegio’s attic.

Guillot feverishly ransacked storerooms, stairways, cubbyholes, turned over 400 pictures before he found at the bottom of a pile of some 60 dusty paintings a gloomy landscape that could have been painted by El Greco. Beneath the grime of nearly 100 years of neglect, the picture proved to be the long sought masterpiece. Said one of Madrid’s Prado Museum officials: “The brush strokes of El Greco are inimitable, unmistakable. I say it, the director says it, the restorers say it. The picture is El Greco.” Valued at $100,000, it will now hang once again in the Real Colegio del Corpus Christi.

In Sir Edmund Castell Bacon’s stately English home, Raveningham Hall, in Norwich, for as long as anyone could remember, one painting, St. Jerome in Penitence Before a Crucifix, attributed to Giovanni Francesco Caroto, a minor Veronese painter, had hung in the library. Sir Edmund liked it so well he moved it to his bedroom, away from the rest of the fine collection of Gains-boroughs, Reynolds, Turners and 17th century Dutch painters. “I often paused on my way to bed to admire it,” recalls Sir Edmund. “I always regarded it as a most beautiful picture.”

Recently London Art Dealer David Carritt, 30, flipping idly through the Bacon Collection catalogue, was struck by a curious resemblance. The lion in the back of the painting was similar to one drawn by Germany’s famed Gothic draftsman Albrecht Dürer. Invited down to tea to examine the painting at first hand, Art Dealer Carritt was certain. Other experts were called in, agreed. The painting, which proved to be in almost perfect condition, was estimated to be worth $560,000. Asked if he intended to sell, Sir Edmund, possessor not only of a Dürer but of a title (Baronet of Redgrave) that goes back to the first Elizabeth, snapped, “Definitely not. We are letting far too many of this sort of thing leave the country.”