Would Rubens Paint a Bird?

Amidst a buzz of rumors, the Cleveland Museum of Art paid an estimated $550,000 in 1959 for Rubens' Diana and Her Nymphs Departing for the Chase. Last week Oil Billionaire Jean Paul Getty said he had gambled more than $400,000 that Cleveland has a fake. New Year's guests at Getty's Sutton Place mansion near London saw, on a wall of pale green silk, an 8-ft. by 6-ft. canvas that Getty said was the real Diana and Her Nymphs. And it is generally acknowledged that Rubens never painted the same subject twice.

Cleveland traces its Diana back to 1796, when Amsterdam Widow Elizabeth Hooft sold it. The painting was authenticated in 1959 by the late Dr. Ludwig Burchard. then the greatest living Rubens expert, who flatly discounted rumors that it was really the work of Rubens' assistant, Frans Snyders. Burchard. pointing out the dog that Diana caresses, said that Snyders "could never have created on his own an animal so highly expressive both in movement and feeling." The birds in the background, the flowers in the foreground, the "freshness and luminous color," he concluded, stamped it an early Rubens original.

Getty boasts an even longer pedigree for his Diana, tracing it to 1655 (Rubens died in 1640), when the Marquis de Leganes. Spanish Ambassador to Brussels and a friend of Rubens', listed the work in an inventory of his collection. Getty's Rubens expert, Columbia Professor John Held, argues that the Cleveland painting has the sort of minor details--the birds, the elaborate ironwork on Diana's lance, the foreground foliage--that "are not infrequently added by copyists to make their pictures more superficially interesting." In one matter Getty's canvas is more detailed: Diana, who is barelegged in Cleveland's version, wears sandals and leggings in Getty's. But even this, said Held, proves its authenticity, for in a painting that is admittedly a copy of the Rubens Diana, at the Picture Gallery in Kassel, Germany, the huntress wears leggings and sandals. Finally. Held detected several pentimenti. or ridges of paint that reveal a painted-over design, on the Getty canvas. These, he said, are "a sign of spontaneous execution characteristic of an original version, while a neat finish that does not betray the trial and error of creation is more typical of a copy or studio version." His conclusion: "The London canvas represents the original conception of the Master, and the Cleveland painting is a fine and certainly quite pleasing and handsome creation of Rubens' studio."

Cleveland stood its ground. "We have no doubt our picture is genuine," said Museum Director Sherman Lee. "It is conceivable that Rubens painted two Dianas, but what the other one might be is somebody else's problem."

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