Lost diaries can help solve ‘young Mona Lisa’ mystery

Experts are on a journey to discover the hidden truth.

GENEVA: A package of diaries said to have been posted to the United States from Britain in the ‘60s could provide a vital clue to the origin of a controversial portrait presented in Geneva last month as Leonardo da Vinci’s original “Mona Lisa.”

But in a twist typical of the intrigue-prone world of art, the diaries — notes by early 20th century British connoisseur and collector Hugh Blaker — disappeared and the Washington address they were sent to, seems to have never existed.

“Those papers could well provide the key to pushing back the provenance of this version of the ‘Mona Lisa’ by at least 150 years,” said Robert Meyrick, an academic and expert on the largely forgotten Blaker.

And, of course, to helping establish if the so-called “Isleworth” variant of the world’s most famous painting in the Paris Louvre could indeed be an earlier — and priceless — portrayal by Leonardo of the enigmatic, smiling lady.

Blaker, an unsuccessful painter who as a museum curator and dealer had a reputation for recognising lost Old Masters, found and bought the “younger Mona Lisa” in 1913 — in, he later said, a nobleman’s country house in Somerset in western England.

But Blaker told no one the name of the country house or of the seller. Meyrick, who was invited to the Geneva presentation to talk about the bachelor connoisseur, is keen to solve that mystery for a biography he plans to write.

“I think he must have put the details in his diaries,” he said. “But the very brief published extracts we have, give no clue. If we have that knowledge, we should be able to trace how it came into the Somerset family’s possession, and where.”

“The controversy underlines the importance of the diaries — did all the papers end up as junk, or did the earlier diaries really go to Washington?” Meyrick further asks, who has written widely on British 20th century art.

“Perhaps we will never know, but I plan to keep looking.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2012.              

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