When a figure of the eminence of Sir Dennis bid for a painting the other potential buyers knew that he must know something they did not, so they too put in bids. With a shock Mahon realized that he was looking at the missing Poussin.Īt the auction, he bid for the picture. The other, painted in 1626 for Cardinal Barberini, had disappeared from public view sometime in the 18th century. One was hanging in the art museum in Vienna. Mahon remembered that the great 17th-century artist Nicholas Poussin had painted two portraits of the destruction of the Second Temple. But if what he was looking at was not the Sack of Carthage, then the artist was probably not Pietro Testa. Instead it was portrait of the Destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.
What, Mahon wondered, was a menorah doing in Carthage? Clearly, the painting was not depicting that event. One of the looters was making off with a seven-branched candelabrum. Mahon was struck by one incongruous detail. It estimated that it would fetch £15,000. The catalogue listed the painting as the Sack of Carthage, painted by a relatively little known artist of the 17th century, Pietro Testa. Onians had bought it at a country house sale in the 1940s for a mere £12. The photograph in the catalogue, no larger than a postage stamp, showed a rabble of rampaging people setting fire to a large building and making off with loot. Before any major sale of artworks, Sotheby’s puts out a catalogue so that interested buyers can see in advance what will be on offer.Ī great art expert, Sir Denis Mahon (1910-2011), was looking through the catalogue one day when his eye was caught by one painting in particular. When he died, his children put the paintings on sale by Sotheby’s, the London auction house. Afraid of being burgled, he rigged up his own home-made alarm system, using klaxons powered by old car batteries, and always slept with a loaded shotgun under his bed. So he simply piled them up, keeping some in his chicken sheds. There were too many to hang them all on the walls of his relatively modest home, Baylham Mill in Suffolk. Eventually he collected more than 500 canvases. He used to go around local auctions and whenever a painting came on sale, especially if it was old, he would make a bid for it. Known as an eccentric, his hobby was collecting paintings. It concerns the legacy of an unusual man with an unusual name: Mr Ernest Onians, a farmer in East Anglia whose main business was as a supplier of pigswill. Pes 13 the dynamic library rld dll hatası pes 13 the dynamic library rld.dll failed to initialize e4. Illustrative: Michal Baratz Koren's portrait of the five daughters of Zelophehad, who first raised before Moses the case of a woman’s right and obligation to inherit property in the absence of a male (Courtesy, Michal Baratz Koren)
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