Great artist’s painting was hanging in home

Associated Press

PARIS

It’s been hanging on people’s walls for almost 170 years without drawing much attention, but a painting showing a group of women has turned out to be more than meets the eye.

The most recent owner of the picture, a Parisian woman, has found out that what she has is a long-forgotten painting by 19th century French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix.

“A woman walked into the gallery with a painting under her arm, telling me she’d just visited the Delacroix exhibit at the Louvre Museum ... and that she thought her painting shared some resemblance” with the artist’s “Women of Algiers in their Apartment,” said Philippe Mendes, director of the Mendes Gallery in Paris.

“I took a look at the painting, which was dirty and with a very thick yellow varnish, but I felt it had Delacroix’s very particular style. So I said, let’s clean the painting and let’s see what comes out of it,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.

“After we cleaned it, the radiant and extraordinary colors typical of Delacroix really stood out and we knew we had to start doing some real research.”

The painting, now hanging in Mendes’ gallery as he negotiates with a U.S. museum seeking to buy it, shows a woman seated and an African slave standing next to her, looking at her. The same scene is captured in “Women of Algiers in their Apartment,” which Delacroix painted in 1833-34.