art circles. But that wasn’t what Anderson wanted. Having established one of the best-known auction houses in the country, he promptly sold it, and in 1908 he took his profits and went to Europe to buy paintings. “My ambition was to become the possessor of at least one good, authentic picture, by one of the acknowledged great painters of the world.” He did better than that: in a few months he was back in New York with dozens of Old Masters, among them a van Eyck, a Raphael, and a previously unknown Rembrandt, The Entombment of Christ.

In 1916 he issued a magnificent illustrated catalog of these paintings and put the entire collection up for auction, producing at the same time a lengthy defense of the paintings’ authenticity. The New York Times critic was impressed by Anderson’s erudition but said: “There still remains the impression of authority made or not made by a picture, and the present writer must confess to missing the luminous shadow quality and the inner glow of light which characterize the finer examples of Rembrandt’s undisputed work.” The Raphael and the van Eyck “also fail strongly to make an authoritative impression.”

No one else was much impressed either. When the paintings went on the block in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, “it was,” the Times said succinctly, “not a night for old masters.” Thomas Sully’s Head of Rembrandt went for fifty-four dollars. A Velázquez called Happy Spanish Beggar brought two hundred dollars, and the Rembrandt Entombment sold for twenty-five hundred dollars to the sole bidder.

This wan showing probably did not distress Anderson for long. For by now all his formidable energies were taken up with the quest that had begun a few years earlier, when he made the most important discovery of his life. While studying a group of twenty drawings he had recently purchased, he found that “one of them bore Turner’s signature and date, in a place and manner that clearly indicated his intention to have it remain hidden.” He scrutinized the other drawings. Sure enough, the artist’s secret signature appeared on all twenty. “In possession of a key that might unlock the hidden treasury of Turner’s art, I determined to make a thorough and systematic search in Great Britain for his drawings and sketches.…”

It took years, but it was worth it; nearly every week Anderson turned up “new revelations of Turner’s marvellous and all-embracing art. I found that the same brain and hand which evolved and executed The Fighting Temeraire’ was also responsible for a series of comic sketches, a street representation of ‘Punch and Judy,’ and a design for wallpaper!”

For Anderson’s Turner was not merely the author of boiling seascapes and gleamy, light-charged views of the English countryside. Anderson’s Turner had cut paper silhouettes of Dickens characters, painted on French silk, done a watercolor portrait of Lola Montez, mapped the Lakes of

Killarney, and turned out a deck of humorous playing cards. All of them with the minute, hidden signature.

Anderson had found that signature on fifteen thousand paintings by 1926, the year he published the summation of his life’s work, The Unknown Turner. Throughout the big, handsomely produced book, the tone is calm and lucid, the author indulgent and even sympathetic toward those who do not accept his claims. Utterly secure in his greater knowledge, he quotes John Ruskin with irritated amusement: “Hunt could paint a flower but not a cloud; Turner, a cloud, but not a flower.” Wrong. Anderson has a Turner flower, fifty of them, in fact, done with the greatest fidelity to nature. He even defies Turner himself. The painter once wrote his friend Thomas Moore: “But Ireland, Mr. Moore, Ireland! I have often longed to go to that country, but am, I confess, afraid to venture myself there.” In fact, says Anderson, Turner had already made six visits to Ireland; the paintings prove it. The artist simply enjoyed “mystifying his friends.” Indeed, Anderson had discovered paintings from many countries where Turner’s biographers never knew him to visit —Russia and Persia, Palestine, Egypt, and Dalmatia.

The Unknown Turner is illustrated with dozens of pictures, some quite skillful, some not. There are fussy architectural renderings and works clearly turned out by young English ladies at a time when some training in watercolor was as much a social staple as a knowledge of the spinet; there is a stiff duck-hunting scene, a portrait of somebody’s country house, and an ingenuous charcoal scene of a stream and a tree labeled in a copperplate hand: “sketched with Burnt Wood.”

It is probably not necessary to say that the book was published at Anderson’s expense.

He kept on ferreting out Turners for the rest of his life and had gathered twenty-nine thousand by the time he died in 1941. His wife, Mary, to whom he dedicated his book, helped sell off the collection. When W. G. Constable, curator of paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, went “through some five thousand of these,” he “could only find three or four which could conceivably be by Turner.”

Anderson would merely have been amused by this verdict. After all, Mr. Constable just didn’t know how to find the signatures.

My wife and I left Christie’s and went around the corner to have lunch. As we sat down, I bumped the portfolio sharply against the edge of the table. “Be careful,” said Carol, “of the McGillicuddys.”