Lapis Lazuli & Kermes Berry

In February 1929, Sir Joseph Duveen (who last winter became at last Lord Duveen) was in a tight spot. After eight years of preparation, Mme Andree Hahn of Paris and Kansas City sued him for $500,000. claiming that he had prevented her from selling a Leonardo da Vinci painting to the Kansas City Art Institute for $250,000. when he pronounced it only a graceless copy of the Louvre's La Belle Fenonniere.*

Twenty-one days of trial, 590,000 words of testimony and 14 hours of deliberation by the jury ended in a deadlock. Neither side was able to produce absolute evidence to prove that either Mme Halm's or the Louvre's Belle was from the brush of Leonardo. Sir Joseph was technically exonerated, but the trial did his reputation no good. An appeal was started, suddenly dropped. Two rumors persisted: 1) that Sir Joseph Duveen had bought Mme Hahn off; 2) that the suggestions of Sir Joseph's business methods when faced by an important art sale from which he was unable to profit, kept Sir Joseph for three years from the British peerage which he so burningly desired.

When Duveen first denounced the Hahn Belle, Mme Harm's husband was a Kansas City auto salesman anxious to help but untutored in the art of expertizing paintings. Last week, while Lord Duveen in his scarlet cloak and cocked hat entered the House of Lords to bow three times before the Lord Chancellor and take his seat as a peer of the realm, Harry J. Hahn reappeared in the New York Press, with every phrase of the art expert's vocabulary at the tip of his tongue. Mr. Hahn was ready to damn Lord Duveen anew and present a trunkful of new evidence to prove that his wife's painting was the Leonardo masterpiece. He said he would shortly publish a book entitled Andree Hahn versus Sir Joseph Duveen.

First disclosure was that Sir Joseph had paid not $5,000 hush money as many papers had guessed, but $60,000 to Mme Hahn. The Hahns settled in Dinard, France, and round pugnacious Harry J. Hahn set himself to studying the chemistry of paint. His new evidence:

Shadows. During the original trial Sir Joseph maintained consistently that the Hahn portrait was an 18th Century copy of the Louvre picture. Dark shadows in Mme Halm's Belle were painted with true ultramarine, a blue-black made from ground lapis lazuli, that richest of blue minerals, found chiefly in Afghanistan and Siberia, now used almost exclusively for jewelry. Harry Hahn has procured documents from the French national archives proving that lapis, expensive but available during the Renaissance, was unobtainable in 18th Century Paris. One was a letter from Louis XVI's minister at Constantinople to Catherine the Great of Russia begging for some lapis lazuli for his court painter, Duplessis, to which the great Catherine replied that she did not have enough for the Russian court as it was. The Louvre Belle's shadows are of lampblack, characteristic of the 18th Century.

Lips. The Hahn lady's lips are red with a dye from the "Kermes berry." Kermes is not a berry at all but a bug -- a reddish, wingless female insect, relative to the cochineal of Mexico, that lays its eggs on oak leaves throughout southern Europe. The insects are killed in a vapor of hot vinegar, dried, and ground for pigment. It takes 10 to 12 lb. of kermes to produce as red a color as one pound of cochineal. The Louvre lady's lips are of cochineal, unknown in Europe before Cortes brought it back in 1523, unknown in Italy for 20 years more. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519.

Hands. The Hahn picture is the same width as the Louvre painting, but 7 1/2 inches shorter. In 1752, the first descriptive catalog of the royal picture gallery described a woman in red, by Leonardo, "holding a piece of lace in her hands." Measurements of this picture are the same as those of the present Louvre portrait which has no hands. The supposition is that when the Hahn portrait was transferred from wood to canvas in 1777,* the 7 1/2 inches at the bottom containing the hands was cut off.

Rothschild Foundation. All these things tended to show that the Louvre portrait is not the original Leonardo, as Louvre authorities have long admitted. What Harry Hahn was looking for was some document indicating that his portrait had once belonged to the royal collection of Louis XVI. He found that this winter in the great art library of the Salomon Rothschild Foundation in Paris: a memoir written by an official Louvre expert in 1847 showing that La Belle Ferronniere, which had been one of the King's pictures at Versailles, was sold by Revolutionary Architect General Auguste de St. Hubert to General Louis Tourton in 1796.

At the time of the Hahn-Duveen trial, the Hahn portrait's ownership had already been traced back to the same General Tourton, banker for the Revolutionary Government.

*Though commonly called "The Armorer's Daughter," Ferronniere actually refers to the fillet worn around the lady's head. Since 1925 when the painting was exhaustively examined, Louvre authorities have never claimed that their Belle, was an original Leonardo. Wrote Curator Gaston Rouches: "That does not make much difference when one does not take the commercial view. The important thing is that the picture is beautiful."

*In the 18th Century only two French experts, Jean Louis Hacquin and one Picault (both employed by Louis XVI), knew the secret of transferring a valuable painting from a rotted canvas or badly warped panel to a new backing, a very delicate operation in which all the original paint is left intact.

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