Painting: Whodunits

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When was it discovered? How did it get into the trunk? Why is there a nude man lying in the fields? Does anyone know the woman in the picture? Did the perpetrator leave any other clues behind?

Normally the stuff of detective novels, such conundrums also bedevil scholars attempting to identify works of art whose authors are unknown. No matter how long such a painting has been hanging, the museum director cannot pass it without a worried, questioning glance. Illustrated on the following color pages are four famous mysteries that have resisted every detective effort.

∙ NAGS HEAD PORTRAIT. In 1869, Dr. William Pool treated a sick woman named Mrs. Tillett at Nags Head near Cape Hatteras. For payment, he accepted a trunk full of fine clothes and a portrait of a young girl in a white gown. Who was she and who painted her? Where had the portrait come from? The subsequent search for answers uncovered a grisly and tragic story.

Mrs. Tillett, it seems, had received the oil from her lover, a fisherman who had taken it as part of his salvage from an abandoned ship drifting toward Cape Hatteras. And what was the ship? Apparently the Patriot, which had set sail from Charleston, S.C., on Dec. 30, 1812, passed through the British blockade and then vanished. Her most important passenger was Theodosia, daughter of Aaron Burr and wife of South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston.

Searching out the Patriot's fate, Dr. Pool over the years turned up no fewer than seven deathbed confessions by pirates, all of whom described boarding such a ship, looting it and forcing crew and passengers to walk the plank. One pirate told of a lady passenger who asked for a reprieve while she changed into a white dress, then calmly walked to her death. Were the lady in white and Theodosia the same as the lady in the portrait? The present owner, Wilmarth Lewis, Yale '18 and a Horace Walpole scholar, believes that they were. He points out that the painting was later picked up by a descendant of the Burr family simply because of the likelihood that it portrayed Theodosia. Wilmarth's late wife, who was a Burr-family member, inherited it. The artist very likely was John Vanderlyn (1776-1852), a New York painter who was supported by Aaron Burr.

∙ PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN. The ambiance is that of the 16th century French court at Fontainebleau. "There was something of a topless craze then," explains Daniel Catton Rich, director of the Worcester Art Museum, which owns the painting. In fact, museums in Dijon and Basel have similar paintings —of a woman, half-veiled, sitting at her dressing table. While the pose is the same, each face is different.

The painter of the Worcester portrait was long thought to be Francois Clouet and his subject Diane de Poitiers, the beautiful mistress of France's Henry II. But after the painting was seen in 1904 at an exhibition of French art, critics reluctantly concluded that the style was not Clouet and that the lady did not look like Diane. Most recently, a Paris scholar claimed that the lady resembled Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Director Rich calls that opinion "moonshine" and "absurd." His thesis: "All three paintings go back to a lost original, perhaps by Clouet."