THE National Gallery has now finally acknowledged that the painting usually called Quimperle - the Goose Girl is not in fact by V. J. Leech, as had been attributed officially for more than 20 years.
Dr Raymond Keaveney, the director, yesterday issued a statement saying: "Following consultation with Dominic MilmoPenny, I can confirm that on examination of the painting, using a binocular microscope, the remains of a signature `ley ... le' can be identified. This discovery clears the way for a definitive reattribution of the painting to Stanley Royle (1888-1961).
"The National Gallery of Ireland is satisfied that the controversy surrounding the authorship has now been conclusively resolved and acknowledges the contributions of Dominic Milmo Penny and Bruce Arnold."
The painting continues to hang, for the moment, in the large posthumous Leech exhibition in the gallery. As the director says, if it had been consigned to storage and not included in the show, "it is unlikely that its authorship would have been positively determined."
Though Leech's standing has always been high in Ireland, until this exhibition his development and early style were only patchily known to any except a few scholars. Seeing the painting directly in this context, however, its essential difference from his work becomes plain, and there was never any real provenance attaching the so called Goose Girl to Leech in the first place. He never exhibited any painting of that name, and it does not appear in any inventory of his studio.
The publication of Denise Ferran's authoritative catalogue had left little room for argument, and now apparently there is no doubt whatever. The handling of the paint, the quasi symbolist style, the frieze like rigidity of the composition are all untypical of Leech, and it seems that the costume of the girl herself is not a Breton one. So, as Denise Ferran suggests, the work is almost certainly a painting which Royle exhibited in Liverpool in 1925, entitled Among the Bluebells.