“Idon’t have a lot of vices,” says Paul W. Downs. “But I do like the adrenaline of an auction.”
Downs and his wife and creative partner Lucia Aniello—who together with Jen Statsky created Max’s Emmy-winning series Hacks—have stocked their Hollywood home with antiques and artworks. “I’ll be at a party looking at my phone and say to Lucia, ‘I’m checking the game,’ and she knows I’m in an online auction.”
In December 2017, the writer, actor, and director became enamored with a painting, titled, “Repeopling the Earth after the Deluge.” He was attracted to its size—huge, at almost eight-by-six feet—and its dark foreground. It was listed by the digital auction house Material Culture as attributed to Claude Lorrain. He was unfamiliar with the artist, but the auction-parlance catchall designation “attributed to” suggested Lorrain probably hadn’t painted it anyway, which Downs further assumed after a quick Google search revealed Lorrain to be a famous and sought after “old master” painter from the 17th century. So he placed a bid, and with little competition acquired the piece for $5,000.
But when it arrived, Downs recalls, “The driver said, ‘You may want to refuse this.’” Someone had driven a forklift straight through the shipping crate, leaving two tears in the canvas. Now, after five years, two appraisals, and journeys through the bowels of the Louvre, Christie’s, and Manhattan’s probate-court records room, it’s possible the painting—which should actually be titled, “Landscape with the Parnassus”—might be an original Claude Lorrain after all. Given that Christie’s sold one of the old master’s original works for almost £4.5 million, it could be worth more than a thousand times what Downs paid for it.
A comedian with a flair for aesthetics, Downs is the kind of guy who wore Zegna to the Golden Globes, Valentino to the Emmys, and no pants at all to a 2021 appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He comes by his devotion to art and antiques honestly. His grandparents and parents are also what he calls enthusiasts. “Collector is a weird word because we’re also like pickers in a way,” he explains. His childhood home in Sussex, New Jersey was built in 1749 and is chock full of art and antique furniture. “I grew up in a house where you couldn’t really run.”
Downs even included this birthright in Hacks. “There’s a lot of my parents’ love of art and antiques—and by proxy mine—in Deborah Vance,” he explains, referencing the lead character played by Jean Smart. In the upcoming Season 3, Aniello and Downs actually pulled a few items from their own home to be used on the set of Vance’s house.
So the violation via forklift of his most recent acquisition resulted in a kind of existential trauma. The crate, which weighed about 500 pounds, sat unopened in his home until a third-party adjuster could be present. When he saw the holes in the canvas, he recalls, “My heart sank.” The third-party adjuster was so upset, “she got emo about it.” Next step, appraisals. How old is this work, where did it originate, and what is it really worth?
It’s not uncommon for paintings to fall through history’s cracks. “People die, estates are divided, things are sold off,” explains fine arts appraiser Stuart Salsbury. Along the way, a painting’s origin and history can be lost. War is the biggest disseminator of art. Since Lorrain’s time period, countless European works have been lost, whether to the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Italian Wars of Independence, World War I, or the Nazi regime, among other violent disruptions. “A painting getting divorced from its provenance is very easy. In fact, you might say it’s more common than when the history of a painting has been documented at every stage.”
How did this very large, very old, and potentially very valuable painting wind up in a random digital auction out of Philadelphia? Downs was able to trace the work to 1910 London, where it was sold at auction by Christie’s—as an original Claude Lorrain. After learning of this, Downs called CK Swett, an old friend from Duke University, who previously worked for Christie’s. Swett, a colorful New York City gala auctioneer, who’s been known to work an auction in a gold cape, recalls getting the call and wanting to help. But, Swett says, “Christie’s wouldn’t have the sale in their library, not even on microfiche.” Fortunately, he was friendly with one of the interns at the London office, who snuck into the catalogs, tracked down the original bill of sale from 1910, and texted him photos.
The sale description reads, “A WOODY LANDSCAPE, with Apollo, the Muses, and a river god.” Someone named Cooper bought it for “26,5,” which could either be £26.50 or £26,500. All of the experts interviewed for this story believe it’s the latter, which would be about $3 million today. The original title accurately captures the scene in Downs’s painting, and the dimensions described in this 1910 auction are identical to Downs’s—which are both slightly different than those of a different Lorrain painting depicting the same scene, which hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland. Yes, there’s another one.
The Gurr Johns appraisal group, which Downs also engaged, declared his acquisition to be a copy without even seeing it in person, says Downs…but the existence of this second painting in Edinburgh, titled, “Landscape with Apollo and the Muses,” actually makes that conclusion far less likely. “If it’s slightly different—that’s important,” explains Salsbury, with childlike enthusiasm. “If somebody is making a copy, they would copy it accurately.” For example, the temple on the far left of the painting in Scotland is missing from Downs’s work, and a deer in the foreground of the former painting is depicted as a horse in the latter. (Gurr Johns declined to comment for this story.)
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Copies were fairly common in the 17th century—“it used to be the way artists learned to paint,” Salsbury explains—but nobody would bother to make one this large. And anyway, Lorrain was known for creating multiples. He worked almost exclusively on commission. “Landscape with Apollo and the Muses”—the painting in Edinburgh—was commissioned by Camillo Astalli Pamphili, who briefly held the position of Cardinal Nephew to Pope Innocent X. An inscription made by the artist suggests the work was bound for the Papal residence. It’s entirely possible that someone saw it, wanted his own, and asked Lorrain to make it, which was common. In such a case, it seems unlikely that the kind of person who visits the Pope’s home would hire a lesser artist to paint the duplicate.
Lorrain made his multiples from source drawings, most of which live at the Louvre—born Claude Gellée, Lorrain was more frequently called by the area of France from which he came. In 2019, while vacationing in France, Downs and Aniello made a point to stop through Paris. “We go to the Louvre, and I say, ‘I’m looking for this drawing. Where is it hung?’” Turns out they don’t hang delicate drawings at all but store them in the archives. Downs was directed to request access, but warned he’d only gain it as a researcher or student, especially on such short notice. However, when he emailed the archivist a photo of his painting, he immediately received an invitation to return the next morning. Downs was thrilled: “It’s the Louvre, baby!”
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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.
If it is a copy, it’s an exceptionally old one. When Salsbury inspected the painting—and remember that Röthlisberger did not—he flipped it over. Based on his research, Downs believes the canvas stretchers date to the 17th century, a time when, again, copies weren’t being made in the way we understand them today and certainly not of this size.
While it’s almost impossible to authenticate a painting, it’s very easy to discredit it. In this case, Salsbury explains with delight, “You have a painting that has not been discredited.”
Does Downs believe it’s an authentic Claude Lorrain? Independent of Nagy’s conclusion, he arrived at the same place: He thinks his work is a study painted by Lorrain before creating the work now hanging in Edinburgh. Recall that Lorrain documented that this work was headed to the papal residence. If the Pope were going to walk past my artwork a few times a day, I’d certainly practice first.
Supposing the work was indeed created by Lorrain, it may be worth millions, even as a study, even considering its past restoration and current tears. “Old master paintings are bulletproof,” Salsbury says. But authentication might not even be possible. The piece is currently in storage in Santa Barbara until Downs decides his next move. Whether or not he seeks proper authentication, he isn’t currently pursuing a lawsuit, and he doesn’t want to sell it. Therefore, you can say it’s worth $5,000 since that’s what he spent.
If it hadn’t been damaged, he would never have known this history. Now, when he and Aniello look at the painting, they also see the adventure of the last six years. “We’ve been upstairs at the Louvre, we had an intern sneak into the archives at Christie’s, we’ve met characters like Stuart Salsbury, and we’ve been in touch with the National Gallery of Scotland. Now the painting has more life.” Does that make him love it more? “I think so,” he opines. “I do sometimes wish the holes weren’t there.”
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