Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Back to Sir Joseph came favorable reports by "expertizers" of the two paintings. Said they of the Lardoux portrait: "Soggy and bulgy ... it resembles in portions a child's balloon . . . mouth too luscious . . . angularity of the 18th century is here translated into the suavity of the late 18th...
Back to Mrs. Hahn came favorable reports. Her experts, unlike Sir Joseph's, were relying on history, measurements, concrete evidence, rather than esthetic considerations. They were rumored to have discovered telltale thumbprints.* In Kansas City, art dealer J. Conrad Hug twice mortgaged his home to obtain funds for the defeat of Sir Joseph...
Attack. For the first few days, Sir Joseph was constantly in the witness box. First salvo for the prosecution was Lawyer Miller's statement of intent: "We hope to show that Sir Joseph has built up an organization which is the finest of its kind in the world and has a strangle hold on the picture business. . . . He has established such contacts with the richest clientele in the world that scarcely anyone else can sell an oil painting. He has built up such a business that when he condemns that picture it is dead, and he knows...
...Sir Joseph knew nothing of pigmentation or the chemistry of .colors. He had pronounced on the Lardoux painting without seeing either the painting itself or -a photograph. Once he stated his dou'bt that the Louvre Belle was by Leonardo, then he retracted and said he was sure of it. He could not find hatching strokes on the Lardoux portrait which he claimed to have seen eight years before; he apologized for his failing eyesight...
...Defense. Sir Joseph volleyed in return. He defined an expert as "a man who knows pictures and can tell a copy from an original." Of the Lardoux painting he said: "The neck is a clumsy cylinder of flesh . . . there are unnatural plates of flesh . . . faulty construction, faulty anatomy." He pointed to "poor" shadows, an off-perspective eye, awkward drawing. He defined technique as the "handwriting" of an artist whereby a "friend" can always recognize his work. Leonardo, he felt, could never have been a botchy anatomist, nor did the picture reveal his technique...