On Fourth Avenue, the auctioneers urge the people to buy, use all the tricks of their much-maligned trade to bring up the price a quarter of a dollar at a time. In the fashionable parts of the city, the auctioneers are well-posed orators who seem to beg the crowds not to buy because they will get so much better prices tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. These auctioneers are studies in themselves. At any rate they are excellent psychologists. And MacCarthy is their great friend. He knows perhaps more than they do. He gives them valuable pointers and he is such a pleasant chap to talk to because he knows stories and tells them well. So I went up to his shop, which really is not a shop but a sort of connoisseur’s den, and asked him about the “ad” he inserted. “Tell me about it,” I cried. “Was the picture stolen from you? How did you ever get hold of a real Gilbert Stuart? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever show it and where is it now?” MacCarthy is rather slow in his movements and in his speech. He settled himself comfortably in an old Chippendale chair, supposed to have been owned by General Beauregarde, and began in his epic manner: “You did see the picture. I had it almost eight years. I had it long before I moved to Lexington Avenue. I bought it at the James Sutton sale. It was catalogued as a painting by Wertmuller, supposed to represent George Washington. Wertmuller was a Swiss painter of fame, who came to this country about 1790. Washington sat for him and later on he made several copies of the original portrait. His picture evidently didn’t interest the public very much during that sale and I bought it for little money. I had it in the shop for years. Many people looked at it, but not one seemed to pay any attention to it. It was not a good painting of Washington; the likeness was rather poor and the whole thing looked unfinished. “One afternoon last year I was looking for some painting in my attic and there I ran across the Washington portrait. I took it downstairs to this room, where we are now sitting. I looked at it for a good long while, perhaps for the first time since I had bought it, and it struck me as strange that Wertmuller should have painted Washington’s eyes as brown, when everybody knows that Washington had blue eyes. The paint seemed very heavy in certain spots and the idea struck me that the whole portrait had been overpainted. I took a little solvent, touched up the eyes and you can imagine how astonished I was to see that the color came off. “I was very careful, of course, but my interest was aroused. I spent the whole afternoon removing the paint from the eyes. My work was rewarded. Beautiful blue eyes were beneath the coat of paint. I tried the solvent on other parts of the picture and soon I found that the whole canvas had been overpainted. In the course of a week I had removed the entire coat of overpaint and beneath it was an entirely different painting.