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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Jeffrey Chace, post: 411324, member: 8769&quot;]Hello, Jeffrey Chace here who wrote the article about this painting. Indeed, this is similar to the theory that I eventually came up with. Your assumption about the cleaning/restoration is correct. After the article was published I received additional information from the museum:</p><p><br /></p><p>Correspondence from the donor states that she had some restoration done on the painting in the early 1960s by someone recommended to her by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.&nbsp; She writes: “He recanvassed the back and touched up some paint that had flaked off.”</p><p><br /></p><p>I sent this email in reply on 10 August 2018:</p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you very much for the follow-up information. Now that I know this tidbit concerning Dorothy&#039;s background information on the restoration of the painting, I have thought about it a bit and formulated a theory. Originally contemplating that there may have been nefarious intent in the alteration of the signature, I now think that the changes may very well have been of a much more mundane nature.</p><p><br /></p><p>We can clearly see the inpainting around the signature. Assuming that this means that some of the paint-flaking was occurring in this area, perhaps enough of the paint from the &quot;H.&quot; had flaked off that it was no longer recognizable as an &quot;H.&quot; Then, if the restorer made an assumption about who the Chase must have been who painted the work (and assuming that Dorothy herself did not know, since the work had been handed down to her successively), perhaps the restorer was completely unaware of the obscure Harry Chase, and only knew of the preeminent William Merritt Chase. After all, this was the 1960s, and by then, any traces of Harry Chase had all but disappeared. It is not far-fetched then to believe that the restorer made the understandable assumption that this painting was by William Merritt Chase. WMC had visited Holland and had painted many scenes from the country (albeit after 1880, which only after the ground-breaking work of Ronald Pisano and Fred Baker in the 1980s would have become widely known), the canvas and paint were contemporary to his work, and the style was not completely dissimilar to what might have been expected from WMC. Adding to the confusion, from the inpainting, it appears that perhaps only the upper part of the two upright sides of the &quot;H&quot; remained, which interestingly leaves only two other alternative uppercase letters that also have two upright parallel sides: M &amp; N. Assuming that the work must have been by WMC, the restorer may have therefore attempted to faithfully repaint the rest of what he/she thought must have been an &quot;M.&quot; However, not wishing to add anything to the painting that did not already have remaining vestiges, the restorer then very likely would have decided that it would be irresponsible to add the otherwise requisite &quot;W.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>The above theory, if indeed anywhere close to what actually happened, would explain the following: </p><ol> <li>Why the H became an M.</li> <li>Why there is no W.</li> <li>How the painting came to be assumed to be by William Merritt Chase. </li> </ol><p>Cheers,</p><p><br /></p><p>Jeffrey Chace[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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