Art News

New York Man Says He Drunkenly Lost $1.3M Artwork by Corot

NEW YORK (AP).- Call it the lost art of drinking responsibly: A man entrusted with helping to sell a $1.3 million painting said it disappeared while he was in a drunken haze, according to a lawsuit filed by a co-owner of the canvas. James Carl Haggerty took the painting, noted French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s circa 1857 “Portrait of a Girl,” to a Manhattan hotel on July 28 for a potential buyer to examine, Kristyn Trudgeon’s lawsuit said. Then Haggerty hung out at the hotel bar and was seen on security cameras leaving the building with the painting after midnight, according to the lawsuit. But there was no sign of the portrait on the cameras at his Manhattan apartment building when he got home nearly two hours later, the lawsuit said. And the next morning, Haggerty told painting co-owner Thomas A. Doyle III he “could not recall its whereabouts, citing that he had had too much to drink the previous