In the absence of the dean of Delacroix scholars, Lee Johnson, who died in 2006, Kahng turned to the forensic resources of conservators, who determined that, at least as far as the materials used were concerned, the painting checked out. It was the kind of family collection you would expect to find in a château in Neuchâtel - except it was in Montecito,” said Kahng.Īlthough its early provenance was unclear, the unsigned painting supposed to be by Delacroix had been in the family for generations, and the more Kahng looked at it - in person now, not as a JPEG - the more certain she became that it was genuine.

“There were paintings by obscure French painters such as Cherubino Pata, a follower of Courbet, and antique clocks by famous Swiss clockmakers.

As she looked over the rest of the items in the estate known as the Van Asch van Wyck Trust, Kahng was struck by the relative coherence of what she saw. “Most families don’t normally have a painting of a dead guy in a bed,” she told me, giving the subject of the picture in question, “The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius,” its most blunt possible construction. What she saw on her computer screen surprised her. When the descendants of a distinguished Swiss family now living in Montecito contacted Eik Kahng, the chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, to let her know that they had a painting in their home that they believed to be by 19th-century French master Eugène Delacroix, she was interested enough to ask for some image files. While the vast majority of such incidents are false alarms, this case was different. DOWNHILL FROM HERE: In “The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius,” Eugène Delacroix used a famously dark moment in Roman history to comment on the perilous state of affairs in France after the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.Ĭall it Antiques Roadshow syndrome - people who believe they own unauthenticated masterpieces approach curators at major museums all the time in the hope that someone with some authority will finally recognize the real value of what they have.

Delacroix by Various