The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre

inquiries as to whether any of the local residents had works of art or other antiques they wished to value or sell. Many a bargain was to be found in this way, and the practice enabled Bentley to shed, for a while, the cares and strains of metropolitan life in a bucolic and nomadic quest for art.
    In this particular year, Bentley’s enjoyment of his annual outing had been sharply diminished by a stinking cold which had settled both on his chest, making him cough and sneeze, and on his mind, making him grumpy. On the morning of September 17, Bentley’s ill humor and streaming nose were suddenly forgotten when his researches brought him to the small sitting room of one Anne Maginnis, an elderly English schoolmistress long retired. For there, above Mrs. Maginnis’s fireplace, grimy but unmistakable, was the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Thomas Gainsborough. How the widow Maginnis, who had little money and even less interest in fine art, managed to get her hands on Gainsborough’s famous missing portrait has never been adequately explained. According to one account, the old lady “spoke of it as the portrait of a relative of hers, and that it was bought, not as the picture of the beautiful Duchess, but merely as ‘a Gainsborough.’ ” Bentley never inquired too closely into how she had obtained the great picture, partly out of tact, but largely because he had immediately identified the missing duchess, knew a sucker when he saw one, and wanted to buy it cheap.
    No one can be sure what had happened to the painting in the intervening years. One biographer quotes the Reverend Henry Bate as referring to two Gainsborough portraits of the duchess, “one of which Lady Spencer has, the other, we think, is in Mr Boothby’s possession.” One possibility is Charles Boothby-Skrymshire, also known as Prince Boothby, a man of fashion so named on account of his egregious social climbing and his tendency to “abandon friends as soon as he met people of higher social position or rank.” He was believed to be a close friend of the Devonshires and may have obtained the picture when the duke decided he no longer wanted it. Prince Boothby committed suicide on July 27, 1800, whereupon his “effects were dispersed.” Another candidate for the elusive “Mr Boothby” is Sir Brooke Boothby of Ashbourne Hall, just twenty miles from Chatsworth, a scholar, poet, friend of Rousseau and Charles James Fox, satirist and art collector who owned at least one other portrait of the duchess as well as a crayon drawing and was acquainted with his ducal neighbors. Sir Brooke may have sold the Gainsborough in 1792 when he suddenly ran out of money. Whichever Boothby had briefly owned the Duchess , the portrait had vanished until it cropped up again in Mrs. Maginnis’s tiny cottage under Bentley’s knowing and excited gaze. The elderly woman plainly had no idea what the painting was, or what it was worth, for in a singular act of vandalism some years earlier she had cut off the Duchess’s legs just above the knee, shortening the painting to three-quarters of its original size and consigning Georgiana’s feet to the fire. Henry James would criticize the “very wooden legs” in Gainsborough’s portraits, but that was hardly a reason for burning them and Mrs. Maginnis’s brainless surgery left the portrait out of balance: Georgiana seems almost overpowered by her vast hat. But even in these sadly reduced circumstances, Bentley recognized Gainsborough’s Duchess , admired her still-saucy smile, and scented a bargain.
    Many years later Bentley’s grandson, one Sigismund Goelze, explained what had happened, recalling his grandfather’s discovery in a letter to The Times: “It was then hanging in her sitting-room, over the chimney piece, and, knowing that originally the picture was painted full-length, he asked her how it was that it only showed to the knees. The old lady told him that she had cut it down to fit the position it