World's Most Expensive Painting Hung in Baton Rouge Home for Almost Half a Century

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Leonardo da Vinci’s rediscovered painting of Christ as the world’s savior, “Salvator Mundi”—auctioned last year for a record-setting $450.3 million—has been owned by British kings and Russian oligarchs. But until now no one knew much about the nearly half-century it spent lost in obscurity in the U.S.

Fresh details have emerged about the da Vinci’s whereabouts and the unsuspecting Louisiana family who lived with the painting for decades before a pair of Old Master dealers bought it from their patriarch’s estate sale in New Orleans in 2005 for less than $10,000. The dealers, Robert Simon and Alexander Parrish, have since successfully lobbied the art world for its reauthentication as a work by the Renaissance master.

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Susan Hendry Tureau, a 70-year-old retired library technician in Baton Rouge, La., only last week learned that a painting her father, Basil Clovis Hendry Sr., had owned was reauthenticated as a da Vinci. She said he acquired the painting after she and her siblings were adults and no longer living with him. Her brother and her niece remember seeing it hanging in the plantation-style Baton Rouge home of her father, who owned a local sheet-metal company, she said. Ms. Hendry Tureau remembers a number of religious-themed paintings at her father’s house, though not specifically the da Vinci.

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Ms. Hendry Tureau said her father, who died in June 2004, inherited artworks after the 1987 death of his aunt, Minnie Stanfill Kuntz. The aunt’s husband, Warren E. Kuntz, ran a furniture business in New Orleans and died in 1968. Ms. Hendry Tureau said her great aunt and great uncle often traveled to Europe, and purchased art and antiques for their collection while abroad. Travel records uncovered by The Wall Street Journal indicate the couple returned from London in the summer of 1958—just as Sotheby’s was auctioning the estate of Sir Francis Cook, including the painting. By that point, the da Vinci had been mischaracterized as a “school of da Vinci” portrait of Christ by one of the artist’s pupils, Giovanni Boltraffio, whose works are not as coveted.

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Mistakenly identified as a "School of DaVinci" painting, family bought the painting from Sotheby's in London for $120 in 1958, sold it for just under $10,000 in 2005 through a New Orleans auction house.

Then the painting sells a few times in the millions, then again recently for a record of $450 million.

Fewer than 20 DaVinci paintings exist today and one was just sitting in BR for almost fifty years.