Stuart Little and the Hungarian Masterpiece

An Art Historian from Budapest, Hungary was watching a film with his granddaughter when he recognized a painting in the background. It was a long-lost missing masterpiece from Róbert Berény. In this episode, we tell the story of how the 1928 painting disappeared from Hungary and reappeared on the silver screen. Then we play the quiz game!

There’s something about missing pieces of art that capture the imagination. Art theft – maybe one of the more romantic types of heists out there, besides maybe robbing a bank – has been the subject of countless books and movies. The idea of stealing something that is on public display is daring and has this impact on people that other types of thievery don’t. Our story today isn’t necessarily about stolen art, but art that has gone missing. People love stories about lost treasures. 

In 1990, two Police Officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum in Boston. They told the museum security they were responding to a disturbance call. The men weren’t Police at all, but art thieves, who bound and gagged the security guards and proceeded to steal 13 pieces of art worth a total of at least $500 million dollars. One of them was Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the artist’s only seascape. To this date, all of the works remain missing, including the famous Rembrandt piece. 

One of Vincent Van Goh’s paintings is also currently missing. It’s called Poppy Flowers and it’s actually been stolen twice from the same museum. The first time it was stolen from the Mohamed Khalil Museum in Cairo, it was during a move between two wings of the museum. It was eventually recovered, but stolen again in 2010. The piece – and the thieves still remain at large. 

But one painting that went missing wasn’t stolen. 

Róbert Berény painted Sleeping Lady with Black Vase in 1927 and 1928. It depicts the painter’s wife Eta in a blue dress, sleeping. Berény was Hungarian, but living in Berlin and after World War I, had fled back to Budapest where he painted the piece. It was unveiled in the Ernst Museum in Hungary and was sold to a private buyer the same year, in 1928. That was when the painting was lost.

It’s believed that the buyer was Jewish and fled Europe as a result of the events of World War II. That’s how the painting ended up going missing for the next 9 0 years. 

The painting in the meantime was missed in the Hungarian art world, and although the artist’s works weren’t valued like a missing Van Goh or Rembrandt, it was referred to as Róbert Berény’s missing masterpiece. Historians only had a black and white photograph of the piece of art and no leads as to what happened to the piece after the war. It’s considered the most widely known piece of Hungarian Art in history, but that’s possibly due to the story of its unlikely rediscovery after being considered lost for so long. 

In December of 2009, Gergely Barki, an expert on Hungarian art, was watching a film with his three-year-old daughter. They were watching Stuart Little, a 1999 Rob Minkoff film starring Michael J. Fox, Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis. Barki worked as an art researcher in Hungary’s National Gallery in Budapest. 

In the film, Mr. And Mrs. Little, played by Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis, are seen in their home with their son, played by Jonathan Lipnicki and Stuart Little, a computer animated mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox. And in their home, on a wall – plain as day – Barki noticed the painting. After all these years, he was convinced he was looking at a color version of Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, Berény’s lost masterpiece. 

The painting was in a prominent part of the house in the film – so it appeared a lot. Barki didn’t have any method of recording the movie as he was watching it on television, so he kept watching, waiting for the next time it appeared on screen. By the end of the film, he was positive that this was the real thing. There would be no way for anyone to have duplicated this painting. At the time, it wasn’t well known outside of Hungary and the only known image of the painting was black and white. Barki decided he was now on a mission to track it down.

He immediately started researching production companies in the U.S. and getting the names of crew members and set designers at Sony Pictures and Columbia. He had sent about 50 different emails when he finally discovered the set designer assistant who had the painting. And that’s when we learned a little bit more about how it ended up in a Hollywood Movie. 

So the Hungarian art world knew that the painting had been sold to an unknown person in the lead up to World War II. The best guess is that a Jewish person fleeing Europe had bought the painting and fled to America. That’s how the painting ended up in the United States and was finally rediscovered 65 years later. We only know the next part because the set designer’s assistant – whose name has never been reported – was able to provide a back story. At an art auction in San Diego in the mid 90s, the St. Vincent de Paul auction house sold the painting to Michael Hempstead, an art collector, who made some money on the piece when he realized it was a Berény and sold it for $400. A while after that, it ended up in an antique store on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena. That’s where the set designer purchased the painting for $500. 

It had been used for years by the set designer – and in more than Stuart Little. Apparently there are numerous soap opera episodes, like the show Family Law in which the painting shows up in the background.

By the time the art historian Barki discovered the piece in Stuart Little, it was 10 years after the making of the film and the piece was then hanging in the home of this set designer’s assistant, who had bought it from the studio after Stuart Little wrapped. Barki flew to Los Angeles and met the assistant to confirm the authenticity of the painting. He rushed across the street to a hot dog vendor to borrow a screw driver and started taking the frame apart. His suspicion was confirmed. The painting was indeed the long lost Sleeping Lady with Black Vase.

Now this was all happening as prices of authentic Berénys were skyrocketing. The owner of the painting sold it to an art collector from Budapest for $137,000. It was sold again in 2014 to a private collector for $285,700. 

The painting is considered the perfect embodiment of 1920s European art. And for decades, it was lost to the world. It’s a crazy cinematic story with a turn that even M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t have written. Which is why I was shocked when I looked up the writers of the film Stuart Little: The original book was by E.B. White, but the screenplay was written by Greg Brooker, and you won’t believe this – M. Night Shyamalan. The Internet Says it’s True.

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