The Comedian, The Painting, and the $5 Million Forklift Mistake

The couple was led to a closed library upstairs where the drawing was brought to each individually. “They didn’t want us talking in front of it because of droplets,” he explains. “And they only let you see it once, ever. They were like, ‘You get one shot.’” 

The drawing’s dimensions are the same as Downs’s painting, not the one in Edinburgh. And like his, the temple is also missing from the far left. But the animal in the foreground is a deer, not a horse. So that further cements theory one: Downs’s painting is a commissioned multiple painted by Lorrain himself.

Our second theory takes us to 20th-century Manhattan. The 2017 digital auction that sold Downs’s painting did so as part of an estate sale. The work had belonged to Alexander Raydon, owner of the Raydon Gallery at 1091 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. When he died in 2005, so did the gallery. A visit to New York County’s Surrogate’s Court revealed Suzanne Nagy as the art appraiser assigned to his estate. “I know which piece,” she said with a knowing tone, the moment I mentioned it. She recalls it had hung in the gallery, where it covered a whole wall but was only partially displayed due to so many other works stacked before it. Turns out Raydon was not only a collector and gallerist but a hoarder.

His apartment on 114th Street was also filled to the brim with art as was a house in Scarsdale, which he used for storage. Recalling her first visit to the Scarsdale property, she says, “We were not able to go in because the artworks were on top of each other.” It took her and a team of graduate students two years just to reach the second floor.

Raydon was born Radunski in Lithuania. Before World War II, his family had been in Paris, where his grandparents worked as art dealers. As the Nazis gained power, they fled and landed in New York. At the time of death, his only surviving family members were a sister in Australia and a niece in Israel. The latter was to inherit the estate and Nagy was told to sell it all. She didn’t finish until 2018 but made quite a profit for his niece. A collection of Russian art, hidden on the second floor of the Scarsdale home beneath a mountain of less valuable work—his DIY security system—sold for more than $7 million at MacDougall’s in London, Nagy says. “Some of them were record prices,” she recalls, who’s also an artist.

“Everybody knew Alex,” she says. Sotheby’s and Christie’s invited him to shows. He traveled to visit smaller galleries and auctions. His opinion was often sought by gallerists. “He knew what he was buying.” With the help of additional researchers, she tried to authenticate everything in the collection, including Downs’s painting, before offering them to museums, auction houses, or galleries.

When she and her team first inspected the potential Lorrain, they believed it was authentic—because it’s so large and is constructed of two canvases, which was not uncommon in the 17th century. All of this suggested it had been a special order or commission. But because the painting was so large and couldn’t be authenticated, Nagy says, major museums and the big three auction houses all passed. Instead of being authenticated—a process that she told me costs between $3,000 and $5,000—the painting instead went to the small house Material Culture, which listed it at digital auction under that catchall “attributed to.”

The extensive restoration work done on the painting, however, provides another clue. “Claude Lorrain has incredible details,” Nagy explains. “The leaves are each like a little jewel on their own. When you look at this painting, it doesn’t have that all the way. So either it was very damaged and then restored. Or it’s a study.” Ultimately, Nagy has come to believe the latter. Theory two: The painting is a study done by Lorrain in advance of creating the work hanging in Edinburgh.

The last theory takes us to the public library. In 1979, the preeminent Lorrain scholar Marcel Röthlisberger published a catalog raisonné (a kind of encyclopedia meets index) of Lorrain’s work. At the end of its entry on the painting in Edinburgh is a section titled, “Version,” that is four sentences long. Here, Röthlisberger mentions the 1910 Christie’s sale of the painting now belonging to Downs and writes, “Now untraceable. Copy of the present work? (Different proportions.)”

Röthlisberger died in 2020, but Downs tracked him down in 2018 and got him to acknowledge that he never actually saw the painting in person. (Swett, the auctioneer and Downs’s friend, explains, “Paul is persistent if he’s nothing else, and he’s many things.”) But Röthlisberger had valid reasons to have his doubts, from the lack of history about the painting before that 1910 auction to the fact that it wound up in a frame with a plaque bearing the wrong title. That leads us to theory three: It’s an English copy.