UK news This article is more than 20 years oldVictorian masterpiece turns up in Rocky Mountain log cabin
This article is more than 20 years oldA voluptuous Victorian masterpiece by John William Waterhouse, which had disappeared for more than a hundred years, has turned up in a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
The discovery was announced yesterday by Christie's, just days after the news that another lost Waterhouse had been tracked down by Sotheby's to an Icelandic trawler owner.
Cleopatra will be sold next month at a Christie's auction, estimated at up to £500,000, along with another classic Waterhouse, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, which has been in a private collection since the grandfather of the present owner paid £100 for it in 1944.
The picture, an idealisation by Waterhouse of transient, youthful beauty and innocence, went on display yesterday beside his more sultry Cleopatra, which has not been seen in public since 1889.
Cleopatra is depicted smouldering on a tiger skin, glancing up at the viewer from under a heavy gold diadem, with what could only be called a "come hither" expression.
The American owner thought it "pretty and rather sexy", but had no idea it was Victorian, still less that it might be valuable.
He acquired it along with the fixtures and fittings of a building, when he bought some business premises in the 1960s.
He was sufficiently struck with the painting - despite what the Christie's expert described as its "hideous white 1930s frame" - to take it home to hang on the living room wall of his cabin.
Two years ago he read about the £6.6m paid by Lord Lloyd Webber for a Waterhouse painting of St Cecilia, a world record for both the artist and for a Victorian work of art. The penny dropped and he wrote to Christie's including a photograph of Cleopatra.
Christie's senior director, Martin Beisly, immediately flew to New York, and hopped on two internal flights to reach the remote corner of the Colorado hills, hardly believing that it could be the painting officially listed as "untraced" since 1889, when it was bought by a London dealer for 90 guineas.
It was painted the previous year, when Waterhouse was one of 21 British artists commissioned by William Thomas, the founder of the Graphic magazine, to create a gallery of Shakespearean heroines, to celebrate Queen Victoria's golden jubilee.
Yesterday Mr Beisly said: "Scholars knew about the picture, but had no idea where it was and even thought it might have been destroyed."
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