Word: duveens
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After eight years of preparation, 21 days of trial, 590,000 words of testimony and 14 hours of deliberation by the jury, the Manhattan trial of Sir Joseph Duveen came, last week, to naught. Grey as the dawn in which they appeared, the jurymen reported a deadlock. Justice William Harman Black of the New York Supreme Court thanked and discharged them...
...Ferronière was still displayed, last week, in a Manhattan courtroom. Was it the work of Leonardo da Vinci? To this question Georges Sortais, French connoisseur, had answered YES, and the owner of the painting, Mrs. Harry J. Hahn of Kansas City, had believed him. But Sir Joseph Duveen, potent millionaire art dealer, had murmured NO, thus preventing the sale of the painting to the Kansas City art museum. Therefore Mrs. Hahn had sued Sir Joseph for $500,000 (TIME, Feb. 18). The trial involved comparisons with the famed and very similar La Belle Ferroni...
...Duveen. For four days Sir Joseph had been a harried witness. He had flayed the Hahn picture, testily calling its left eye "dead," "very dead," and "beadlike." On the fifth day he covered the whole damozel with one more coating of scorn. "She is a fat person!" he gibed. "A peasant type." Then he joyously pointed to a reproduction of the Louvre Belle. "This is a great lady of the period." Reverting to the Hahn painting he described the shoulders as flabby, the arms as puffy, the breast as lacking modeling, the embroidery as untrue to Leonardo's period...
...Conrad Hug, the Kansas City art dealer who has twice mortgaged his home to obtain money to combat Sir Joseph. A withered, white, frail little old gentleman, he told how he had arranged the sale of the Hahn painting to the Kansas City museum for $250,000, how the Duveen dictum had quashed the bargain. He said that he dealt in picture frames, paintings and etchings. Sir Joseph's lawyer, Louis S. Levy, was quick, acid. "The picture frames are a very big part of your business, aren't they?" Mr. Hug's murmurous answer was lost...
Then Lawyer Miller elicited from Witness Duveen the following evidence...