Rediscovered Guercino Moses joins his David at Waddesdon Manor

A long-lost painting of Moses by Italian Baroque master Guercino has been acquired by the Jacob Rothschild Foundation for the permanent collection of Waddesdon Manor. It will make its English debut on March 20th at a new exhibition dedicated to the artist, Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women. The exhibition will feature five paintings by Guercino, including Waddesdon’s own King David.

The painting was rediscovered in November 2022 when it came up for auction in Paris attributed to a nameless painter of the Bologna school. The auction house’s experts hypothesized it may have been the work of a student of Guido Reni’s. Guercino was another possibility, based on comparisons with a known work of his, Head of an Old Man, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that has a very similar composition: an old man with a cottony white beard looking up, his face bathed in light. There was also a copy of the same Moses by a pupil of Guercino’s, Bendetto Zalone, that sold at auction in 2001.

The presale estimate was a modest €5,000-6,000 ($5,175–$6,200), but when the hammer fell, the buyer had paid 100 times that amount, likely rolling the dice that the unattributed work could be a lost work by the Baroque master. Paintings by Guercino don’t come up for auction often, and the current record for one of his paintings, set in 2010, is £5.2 million ($6.6 million), even more than 10 times the €590,000 ($610,000) Moses went for.

In September 2023, Moses re-emerged at the Moretti Fine Art gallery. It turned out that Fabrizio Moretti, owner of the gallery and Old Master expert, was the mystery buyer. He rolled the dice happily, believing at first glance that Moses was an authentic Guercino. In the ten months since the auction, the painting was professionally cleaned and thoroughly researched to establish its provenance. Experts Letizia Treves, formerly of London’s National Gallery, and Keith Christiansen, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, conclusively attributed the painting to the Baroque master.

Moses is a masterpiece of Guercino’s Prima Maniera – used to describe the paintings he produced in Cento outside Bologna before a sojourn to Rome in 1621-23 – and is datable to about 1618-19, a time in which the young Guercino was greatly in demand producing altarpieces for churches in Cento as well as easel paintings for an ever-growing private clientele. The light, fluid and painterly touch in Guercino’s Moses may be compared to that in his King David, datable to a year or two earlier (c. 1617-18, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) and the Head of an Old Man (c. 1619-20, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which shares Moses’s tightly cropped bust-length format. Guercino appears to have used the same model for the painting as the figure of Elijah in Elijah Fed by Ravens (1620, National Gallery, London), likely using a tracing or cartoon of Moses’s head for the figure of Elijah, reversing it in the process and turning it slightly.

Moses is first recorded in 1624, in the eminent collection of cardinal Alessandro d’Este (1568–1624) in Rome, a patron of Guercino who almost certainly knew him during the period the painter resided in the city 1621–23. Although this period post-dates the execution of Moses, Guercino may have sold or given the painting to the cardinal to strengthen ties with him and his family. Indeed, from 1630 for a period spanning two decades, Guercino enjoyed the patronage and support of the Este in the form of the Duke Francesco I d’Este (1610–1658), the cardinal’s nephew. Following the death of cardinal Alessandro d’Este, the painting entered the renowned Este ducal collections in Modena and remained there until the Napoleonic era, whereupon it was taken to France during the Napoleonic occupation of the Duchy of Modena (1796–97) and all trace of the painting was lost. Prior to its rediscovery, Guercino’s Moses was known through seventeenth-century painted copies, a drawing and engravings, all of which attest to the work’s art historical significance.

The painting, restored to its former brilliance and to its identity, was displayed at Moretti Fine Art’s Paris gallery with a new price tag of €2 million ($2.2 million). The Jacob Rothschild Foundation snapped it up so Moses can keep King David company in the exceptional art collection at Waddesdon Manor, the palatial estate purpose-built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the late 19th century to house his art collection.

Thief of Ruby Slippers thought they were real rubies

The perpetrator of the daring 2005 smash-and-grab theft of a pair of Ruby Sippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, turns out to be surprisingly clueless. Terry Martin managed to steal the iconic shoes, one of only four surviving pairs of the slippers worn by Judy Garland playing Dorothy in 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz, in less than a minute and keep them under wraps for 13 years, even as authorities and fans never stopped searching for them. Despite this appearance of competence, according to a filing made by his lawyer before his sentencing Monday, Terry Martin thought the Ruby Slippers were festooned with actual rubies rather than dyed glass beads and sequins.

It beggars belief, but apparently Mr. Martin, who was 57 years old at the time of the theft and was born nine years after the movie’s initial theatrical release, figured they had to be real rubies to justify the million dollars they were insured for. His cunning plan was to pry the rubies off and sell them piecemeal so nobody would be able to trace their origin. He only realized his mistake when a jewel fence he took one of the beads to broke the news that it was made of glass.

Martin had dealt in stolen jewels and had spent time in prison for burglary, his lawyer said. But he had been out of prison for 10 years at the time of the theft and was living quietly in Grand Rapids, a small city 80 miles northwest of Duluth, when an “old mob associate” contacted him about “a job,” his lawyer wrote.

Martin was initially reluctant to get involved, DeKrey wrote. But “old Terry” beat out “new Terry,” and he gave in to the temptation for “one last score,” his lawyer said. […]

Martin used a hammer to smash two window panes in a door of the Judy Garland Museum and broke open a plexiglass case holding the shoes, leaving behind a single red sequin and no fingerprints, court documents said.

But less than two days later, when the unnamed person who traded in stolen jewels told Martin that the gems were worthless replicas, “Terry angrily decided to simply cut his losses and move on,” DeKrey wrote. “He gave the slippers to the associate who had recruited him for the job and told the man that he never wanted to see them again.”

He was serious about that. Martin was only busted in 2018 when other parties tried to blackmail the insurance company for hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for the shoes. The FBI recovered the slippers in a sting operation, but the blackmailers, who were probably organized crime figures, and the mobster who originally recruited Martin back in 2005 were not arrested. Martin refused to implicate anyone else. He just pled guilty to the theft and is facing his fate alone.

His sentence was gentle. Martin has COPD and is in the last months of his life. He was sentenced to time served, a year of probation and to pay the museum $23,000 in restitution for the theft.

HMS Erebus dives recover sailors’ belongings

The 2023 exploration of the wreck of HMS Erebus off the coast of King William Island has recovered and documented a fascinating array of personal belongings and naval tools from the ill-dated 1845 Franklin expedition for the Northwest Passage.

Parks Canada just released the report on the results of the 2023 dives to document and investigate the ship. In the two weeks between September 5th through the 19th, Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology team conducted 68 dives to the wreck of HMS Erebus, moving through the accessible spaces of the ship and debris field. The aim of these dives is to record details about the shipwreck and the objects it carried to shed new light on naval technology and the daily lives of sailors. To that end, the team explored an officer’s cabin, believed to have belonged to Second Lieutenant Henry Dundas Le Vesconte, and found a wealth of instruments pertaining to sailing and navigation, among them a thermometer, a parallel rule and a fishing rod with a brass reel.

Items of daily use were found in what is believed to have been the storage pantry of the captain’s steward (Edmund Hoar) just forward of Franklin’s cabin. Objects discovered there include a leather shoe, storage jars and a sealed glass cylinder that held some sort of pharmaceutical product. The contents look thick and grey like a less shiny mercury (I hope the doomed Franklin expedition crew didn’t use mercury the same way the doomed Mary Rose crew did). The vial is embossed with the letter “K” and the broad arrow that labelled it government issue.

Brass fishing reel from Second Lieutenant Henry Dundas Le Vesconte's cabin. Photo courtesy Parks Canada.An excavation of a seaman’s chest in the forecastle revealed objects used by regular sailors on the ship. There were some pistols, other military items, footwear, coins, a stoneware bowl and medicine bottles. Only a small selection of the finds were recovered, including the brass fishing reel, the stoneware bowl, the K bottle and one pistol. They will undergo conservation and be studied further in Ottawa before they go on display at at the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven (Uqsuqtuuq), Nunavut.

Out in the debris field, divers documented one of the ship’s spare propellers (first recorded on the seabed in 2015) and found an ice anchor. This is the first ice anchor found from HMS Erebus or HMS Terror.

The major push to document of the site resulted in thousands of high-resolution digital photographs being taken. They will be used to create extremely accurate and virtually explorable 3D photogrammetry models of the site. The models will allow researchers to follow the effects the movement and sediment are having on the wreck. Already parts of Erebus like the upper deck have collapsed, so scientists are keen to explore the dangers posed by the unforgiving environment.

Stolen Picasso and Chagall paintings found in Antwerp basement

Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall stolen from a private collection in Tel Aviv 14 years ago have been found in a basement in Antwerp, Belgium. The two paintings, Tête (1971) by Picasso and L’homme en prière (1970) by Chagall, then valued at $900,000, were taken from the villa of the Herzikovich family in February 2010. The thieves disabled the house’s sophisticated alarm system and broke into the safe to steal $680,000 worth of jewelry. They made off with the jewelry and the Picasso and Chagall pieces. There were other important artworks in the house which were not touched.

The case went cold until late 2022, when police in Namur, Belgium, were informed that a 68-year-old Israeli watch dealer residing in Namur was offering the two paintings for sale. The suspect, currently identified by authorities only as Daniel Z, was placed under surveillance in the attempt to confirm the information in the tipoff. Investigators were able to establish that he was indeed in possession of the stolen works.

On January 10, 2024, police raided Daniel Z’s home and detained him and his wife. They found large amounts of cash in the house, but not the paintings. The home of one of his relatives was also searched with nothing found. The suspect soon confessed to police that he had the Picasso and Chagall in his possession, but refused to tell them where they were hidden. Two days later, police searched another location: a building in Antwerp that once housed a sketchy art dealership connected to stolen paintings. There, in the cellar, the paintings were found inside two wooden boxes with screwed down lids. They were in undamaged condition in their original frames.

Daniel Z was arrested and charged with receiving stolen goods.

Lost 4,000-year-old tomb rediscovered in Ireland

A local folklorist has discovered the remnants of a Bronze Age tomb that was believed to have been destroyed in the mid-19th century. The megalithic structure known as Altóir na Gréine (the altar of the sun) was built on top of a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter, County Kerry, about 4,000 years ago. It was a wedge tomb, a funerary monument containing the cinerary remains of a family or community group but may also have been used for other ceremonial purposes. This style of tomb is typically oriented to the west or southwest and may have had a cosmological connection to the setting sun, hence its traditional appellation.

It was still intact in 1838 when it was visited as a local attraction by Victorian writer and world traveler Lady Georgiana Chatterton. She recounted her visit, complete with a sketch of the “sun altar,” in her best-selling travel memoir Rambles in the South of Ireland.

On the top of the hill were the remains of a very curious piece of antiquity, once an altar, supposed to have been used for offering sacrifices to the sun. We heartily wished we could have had an opportunity of telling the sun, before hand, of our intention of visiting his altar; for a more thick, penetrating rain I think never was experiences, than fell to our lot while poking over the remains of the old stones, and taking the sketch which is here given.

Inspired by Lady Chatterton’s record of her ramble, Kerry antiquarian Richard Hitchcock visited the hill site in 1852 seeking what he called the cromleac (literally “bent stone” meaning a megalithic tomb with two standing stones topped by a capstone) that she had sketched.

I regret to say that this cromleac, or, as Lady Chatterton calls it, “sun altar,” does not now exist, the stones which composed it having been broken and carried away for building purposes, as if there were no others in the neighbourhood! It is, however, fortunate that we have even a small engraving of the monument preserved to us.

That last line proved prescient. The location of the lost tomb disappeared from collective memory and nobody had ever noted its coordinates when it was still apparent on the landscape. It was Lady Chatterton’s sketch that bore mute witness to its presence 185 years later when folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn came across megalithic stones on a tomb-mapping project on the Dingle peninsula run by Sacred Heart University. He was very familiar with the drawing and specifically had it in mind when he climbed the hill looking for the long-lost Altóir na Gréine and filmed the stones he saw there.

When converting the video into a 3D scan he noticed that a stone in the undergrowth resembled one from Lady Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.

He sent the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, which dispatched archaeologist Caimin O’Brien, who confirmed it belonged to a so-called wedge tomb dating from the early bronze age between 2500BC and 2000 BC.

There is a capstone and several large upright stones called orthostats, comprising about a quarter of the original tomb, Mag Fhloinn said on Thursday. “People had assumed it was all destroyed.”