What was perhaps the most serious case occurred in New York. Directors of a famous art museum were notified one day in a letter from a law firm that a wealthy gentleman, recently deceased, had willed to the museum his entire collection of paintings. Would the directors care to appear at such-and-such an address the following day to inspect the offered canvases? The directors wrote a polite acknowledgment and the next day dispatched one of their junior members to the address given. Presumably the donor had left them an attic-full of junk, but still there might be something worthwhile there.
The junior member telephoned his colleagues at once. They hastened to the spot. The collection was most remarkable. It covered every wall of every room in an otherwise vacant five-story building, and the directors could hardly call any of it junk, for it duplicated with the most appalling exactitude the entire contents of their own museum. Every last painting was reproduced there, and as if that were not enough, inspection of the basement revealed that for each canvas displayed in the rooms above, a precise duplicate existed in storage.
The directors were aghast. It was Manet and Holbein all over again, but on a scale beyond all imagining. To make matters worse, someone had impudently tipped off the press, and there was a crowd of reporters and photographers, not to mention a number of curiosity-seekers who had wandered in from the street. One of the directors telephoned the museum and ordered it closed immediately, but of course that could not prevent the instant collapse of the values of the museum's collection.
Once more, investigation proved fruitless. The law firm indignantly denied authorship of the letter. Someone evidently had purloined the stationery. The dead man, too, was a fraud, having never existed, and as for the person who had rented the building, the real estate agent could recall only that it was a young man named Smith, who had paid in advance weeks earlier, and had not been seen since.
By this time, the entire art world was in a state of nervous collapse. Dozens of masterworks had been rendered worthless by their sheer profusion. Others joined the list every day. Collectors sought frantically to sell—but no one would buy. Even those paintings as yet untouched by the blight could not be sold, for what buyer could be sure that a hundred identical canvases would not quickly turn up elsewhere? Dealers' offices were closed, museum doors were shut—and most horrible of all, artists were ceasing to paint.
In desperation, the leading museums and galleries pooled funds to hire private detectives. Weeks passed, and the flow of originals continued, but the detectives failed to produce a single positive lead—except for one, and it was so fantastic that the art impresarios angrily rejected it.
One shipment of masterpieces had been traced, through an intricate system of straw parties and other devices, back to the New York apartment of Dr. Cyrus E. Browl. Could the Wizard of Light be the mass-production virtuoso? Ridiculous! Several of the museum directors remembered his fumbling attempts to copy their treasures. It had been pathetic—the old man had been clumsier than the rawest novice, and besides, his eyes were so weak now, he could hardly see across a room!
But one of the art experts was suddenly struck by the memory of that huge easel and the peculiar array of lightless lamps, and hastened off to pay Dr. Browl a visit. He quickly returned, looking much older, and in an unsteady voice made a report: