Sotheby's to Auction La Belle Ferronnière by
Follower of Leonardo da Vinci
By STAN PARCHIN
January 11, 2010
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| Follower of Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait of a Woman, Called "La Belle Ferronnière" (probably before 1750). Oil on canvas. 55 x 43.5 cm (21.7 x 17.1 in.). Collection of Jacqueline Hahn. |
Sotheby's New York will auction
Portrait of a Woman, Called "La Belle Ferronnière" (probably before 1750), a controversial copy by a later follower of Leonardo da Vinci, on January 28, 2010. Anticipated to sell for an estimated $300,000 to $500,000, the beguiling image of a woman in three-quarters profile is one version of a famous work (ca. 1496-97) in the
Musée du Louvre. Believed to be a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli (1452-1508), a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (1452-1508), the original oil on wood composition was painted by Leonardo (1452-1519) with one of his pupils. The painting takes its name from a type of decorative headband worn by women in Renaissance Milan.
A Wedding Gift and a Trial
La Belle Ferronnière was given as a wedding gift in 1920 to Harry Hahn, a World War I American serviceman and car salesman, and Andrée Lardoux, by Louise de Montaut, his French bride's godmother. Despite the work's authentication by a French art expert not skilled in Italian Renaissance painting, the newlyweds tried to sell the painting to the Kansas City Art Institute for $250,000. A reporter from
The New York World heard about the supposed deal and telephoned Sir Joseph Duveen, then a leading art dealer, on June 17, 1920 at 1:00 AM, to get his opinion. The sleepy Duveen's instant dismissal of a painting he had never seen as a fake caused the institute and other parties to lose interest in purchasing the
Hahn Leonardo. It also triggered a much-publicized legal battle between Andrée Hahn and Joseph Duveen for slander and damages amounting to $500,000.
In the lawsuit, Hahn claimed that Duveen's assertion about the painting's authorship was intended to remove the picture from the art market and increase the revered dealer's international prestige. The American jury at the 1929 New York State Supreme Court trial was not impressed by the scarce concrete evidence provided by European experts and connoisseurs who appeared in Duveen's defense. After a vote of nine to three in favor of Hahn, Duveen settled out of court for $60,000. Years later, science proved Duveen to be correct.
After the trial,
La Belle Ferronnière was consigned to a bank vault. In the last half of the 20th Century, the painting remained unable to be sold because of its discredited reputation among scholarly circles.
Recent Scientific TestingJacqueline Hahn, daughter of the painting's owners, submitted
La Belle Ferronnière last year to the
J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California for examination. Scott J. Schaefer, Curator of Paintings, agreed with conservators' pigment analyses of the work. The composition, an oil on canvas, was probably executed before 1750, perhaps by a French artist.
Update: La Belle Ferronnière was purchased for $1,538,500.
"Portrait of a Woman, Called 'La Belle Ferronnière'" will be exhibited at Sotheby's Los Angeles office on January 13, 2010 and the auction house's New York showroom beginning 10 days later.
Source
Brewer, John. The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art, and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.