£9,000 painting that's on sale for £180,000... all thanks to a shoe

A family turned a run-of-the mill Victorian painting into a valuable masterpiece from the Crimean war – after the detail of a woman’s shoe caught their eye, the Daily Mail reports. 

For although Christie’s in London once assessed the work as being by an unknown artist, closer examination of the shoe of a maid in the picture suggested the hand of an acclaimed painter who had depicted very similar footwear before.

Buoyed by the shoe clue, Gary and Helen Sutcliffe and their son Jonathan then scoured galleries across the world, before poring over the wooden frame of the picture.

They were delighted to confirm their hunch was right by discovering their chief suspect’s signature tucked away out of sight.

Now the painting – by Jerry Barrett, who famously depicted Florence Nightingale at work during the Crimean war – is on sale for £180,000.

The ‘Shoedunnit’ case began when the Sutcliffe family, who own a gallery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, two years ago snapped up the dirt-covered picture of an elegant English lady being dressed by two servants in Turkey, for £9,000.

The oil painting had some years before been described by a Christie’s expert as merely ‘circle of John Callcot Horsley’, meaning it was believed to be by a student or imitator of the British painter best known as the designer of the first Christmas card.

But the Sutcliffes had a hunch the apparently unsigned picture was the work of another Victorian painter, Jerry Barrett, whose most notable painting, Nightingale receiving the Wounded at Scutari, depicts Florence Nightingale in the field hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War.

Gary Sutcliffe thought the shoe on the protruding and ‘slightly stumpy’ left foot of the maid on the right of the picture looked familiar.

And painstaking research revealed that, as the Sutcliffes had vaguely recalled, Barrett had used a strikingly similar design, and shape of shoe in at least one other painting.

They decided the clincher was the shoe in Barrett’s ‘Sheridan assisting Miss Linley on her flight from Bath’.

Jonathan Sutcliffe said: ‘It was the same type of shoe, with an unusual rosette decoration, as in another of Barrett’s paintings.’

That confirmation of the shoe clue was giant step in the right direction - but it took another six months of detective work, mainly by Jonathan Sutcliffe, to get the case nailed down.

The research involved the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Barrett’s home town of Brighton to make absolutely sure.

Ultimately, the Sutcliffes were delighted to discover the clincher had been there unnoticed all the time.

Finally they found Barrett’s signature hidden out of sight under the frame at the back - and it matched a similarly hidden signature on a Barrett painting kept, but not displayed, in Hove Museum and Art Gallery.

This was the final proof - the picture was Barrett’s long-lost work Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey, based on the artist’s visit to Scutari when he prepared sketches for his Florence Nightingale oil and also Queen Victoria’s First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers, now both in the National Portrait Gallery.

Lady Mary is remembered for her 18th century letters, particularly from Turkey, where she was wife to the British ambassador, and also as a pioneer of inoculation against smallpox, of which she had been a victim.

The cleaned-up canvas will next week be on sale at the prestigious Chelsea Antiques and Fine Art Fair in London, which starts on Wednesday (March 19), with an enhanced price tag of £180,000.

The long-lost painting was exhibited at the National Gallery in 1858 and the elderly woman whose family had owned it for decades took it to Christie’s for appraisal in 1990 when it was attributed to ‘circle of Horsley’.

But thanks to the low price suggested was not put up for sale in 2012, attributed as Christie’s had suggested earlier, and was duly bought by the Sutcliffes for £9,000.

Jonathan Sutcliffe said: ‘It is every art dealer’s dream to come across something like this.

‘It didn’t look much in the saleroom but there were tell-tale signs it was the missing part of Barrett’s trilogy - and we were proved right.’