Stuart Little Solves 80 Year-Old Art Mystery

A rare painting, unseen in public for over 80 years and presumed lost, has been rediscovered by an art historian who spotted it being used as set dressing in the 1999 kids film ‘Stuart Little’.

Gergely Barki, a researcher at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, noticed the painting ‘Sleeping Lady With Black Vase’ by Hungarian artist Robert Bereny while watching the comedy with his daughter in 2009.

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The avant-garde painting, which he’d only ever seen in a black-and-white photo of the artwork from its last public exhibition in 1928, was hanging over the mantelpiece in the Little family apartment.

“I could not believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie,” Barki told the NY Post.

“It was not just on screen for one second but in several scenes of the film, so I knew I was not dreaming. It was a very happy moment.”

Barki explains that he wrote emails to everyone involved in the film until he tracked down an unnamed set designer assistant who was able to shed some light on the lost painting.

She revealed she’d bought it as a prop from an antique shop in Pasadena, California for $500 (£320), completely unaware of its significance and had brought it back home from the set after shooting had finished.

“It was hanging on her bedroom wall in Washington,” Barki said. “Within a year, I had a chance to visit her and see the painting and tell her everything about the painter. She was very surprised.”

Barki explains that Bereny was part of The Eight, a collective of avant-garde Hungarian painters in the 1920s. He is said to have fled to Berlin to have an affair with Marlene Dietrich.

He thinks the painting travelled to America before or during WW2 with the original Hungarian owner.

The painting has now been sold to an art collector and it will be coming to auction on 13 December with a starting price of $110,000 (£70,167).

“A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home,” Barki, who is writing a biography on Bereny, told Agence France-Presse.

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Image credits: Rex Features/LeMonde.fr