She called herself “Renoir Girl,” refusing to reveal her identity and offering few details about her biography. She lived in Northern Virginia, once taught in Washington area schools and was well-known in her community.
What made her irresistible to reporters wasn’t who she was, but what she said she’d found: A bona-fide painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in a $7 box of trinkets purchased at a West Virginia flea market.
The story generated worldwide attention and, for a time, promised to produce a six-figure windfall at auction for its accidental owner. But late last year, the FBI seized the painting, called “On the Shore of the Seine,” after the Baltimore Museum of Art learned it had been stolen in 1951.
Now, to retain ownership of the painting, Renoir Girl has been forced to unmask herself in court papers, as a federal judge in Alexandria determines who should get the painting.
Renoir Girl’s true name: Marcia “Martha” Fuqua. A former phys ed teacher, she runs a driving school out of her Lovettsville home in rural Loudoun County. She is no stranger to legal drama — or to the art world.
In 2010, Marcia “Martha” Fuqua was interviewed by The Post as she trained to work as a blackjack dealer in West Virginia at the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races. (Tim Wilson/The Washington Post) “I am a very private person,” she told The Washington Post in September, when she was still pseudonymous. “I am one of those people that believes that things happen for a reason,” including stumbling on a long-missing Renoir. “It’s all very coincidental.”
Shortly after “On the Shore of the Seine” had been seized, Fuqua, 51, wrote a letter to the FBI, pleading that her flea-market find be returned. Her chief argument: The government should recognize her as the painting’s “innocent owner” as defined by federal law. She had no clue, she said, that the piece — for sale in a box with a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll — was a real Renoir. She had no reason to think the painting could have been stolen art and subject to FBI forfeiture.
“I have a layperson’s understanding of art,” she wrote to investigators in December. “I am not an art dealer or broker, art historian or art collector, and have no special education, training or experience which would give me expertise in the field of fine art or in particular, in the identification of authentic French Impressionistic works.”
But Fuqua, who declined to be interviewed for this story, grew up with a mother steeped in fine arts. Her mother — who goes by the professional name Marcia Fouquet in homage to a French ancestor — is a painter who specialized in reproducing the pieces of several famous artists, including Renoir, according to an online biography and people who used to work at her art studio.
Fouquet, 84, has artistic roots in Baltimore. She graduated from Goucher College with a fine arts degree in 1952 and earned a master’s degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1957. In her thesis, she briefly analyzes a Renoir portrait.
For at least two decades, Fouquet ran an art studio for children and adults at her home in Fairfax County. The Great Falls Art Center offered classes in drawing, painting, pottery, sculpture and art history. Approached there, Fouquet declined to be interviewed.
But Thomas Cranmer, a Fairfax painter and retired financial consultant, said Fouquet’s daughter helped at the studio for several years.
“Martha rode herd on the kids that were there,” said Cranmer, who was the studio’s vice president, and she was present for her mother’s lessons about art history and painting techniques.
Someone who identified himself as Martha’s brother, Matt Fuqua, said he did know about the Renoir. But he seemed confused about its origins.
“[My mother has] had it for a long time, probably 50 or 60 years,” Matt told The Post in an initial interview. “My girlfriend and her friends were cleaning out my mom’s studio, and my sister stepped in and said, ‘Wow, I want this.’ All I know is my sister didn’t just go buy it at a flea market. . . . My sister kind of snagged it out of my mom’s art studio.”
Matt added that his mother and sister “are keeping me out of the loop. It was supposed to be mine,” he said.
But when a Post reporter called him a second time, he said he had just spoken with his sister and was changing his account. “She said, ‘Matt, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I got it at a flea market,’ ” he said. “I don’t know the facts.”
He demanded that The Post share what it knew about the Renoir. Then he asked not to be quoted and hung up. When a Post reporter called him a third time, Matt said someone else posing as him had answered the interview questions and “has been arrested.”
Like her mom, Fuqua became a teacher. In 1998, she was hired by the Fairfax County school system and eventually became a middle school physical education teacher, according to a Fairfax schools spokesman. Then, she taught in the Loudoun County school system before winding up as a physical education teacher at Anacostia High School in the District.
In the fall of 2009, Fuqua was laid off from Anacostia as part of a purging of teachers by then-D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She struggled financially afterward, filing for bankruptcy in Alexandria’s federal court and citing debts of more than $400,000 and assets of about $312,000.
By the summer of 2010, Fuqua was training to work as a blackjack dealer in West Virginia at the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races. In an interview she happened to give The Post at that time, she described the training for her new job as thrilling but also anxiety-inducing.
“My knees are going to be knocking. My hands are probably going to be shaking, and my mouth is going to be dry,” she said about her debut. “It’s a good nervous; it’s not a bad nervous. I’m ready.”
In small, historic Lovettsville, Fuqua is well-known for her home’s elaborate Halloween and Christmas decorations, but mostly for her Safety First Driving School.
“She’s friendly and has a hip look,” said Kris Consaul, a neighbor and musician. “My son, who has a driver’s permit, says he wants to do his behind-the-wheel with Martha.”
At one time, Fuqua was engaged to one of the town’s most high-profile business owners: William Walden, the owner and chef of a French restaurant.
But the restaurant, Fleur de Lis, became a source of tension between the couple, who split. In 2003, Walden said his restaurant company was sued by Fuqua, who alleged that he didn’t pay her when she worked at the now-closed eatery as a hostess and manager.
“We produced every single document and every single paycheck,” Walden said, and the Loudoun General District judge dismissed the case. The court has since destroyed the paperwork connected with the lawsuit.
Before his relationship with Fuqua fell apart, Walden said he displayed her mother’s paintings at Fleur de Lis so they could be sold to interested diners. “The mother sold several paintings at my restaurant,” including one for $20,000, he said.
Earlier this year, Walden said, Fuqua called him to catch up.
“She just said, ‘I had to hear your voice.’ I said, ‘Wow. How are you doing?’ ” recalled Walden, who now lives in South Florida, where he is opening a new French restaurant.
But she didn’t say anything about the Renoir. “She never let on that this was happening,” said her former fiance.
The press release from the Alexandria auction house served up a juicy story: The Potomack Company was selling a “lost” Renoir found by a Virginia woman at a flea market.
The news ricocheted from the New York Times to the BBC to “Good Morning America.” As part of its marketing blitz last September, Potomack arranged phone interviews between Renoir Girl and the media. Her tale was serendipitous: In late 2009, she got bored one day, drove to a flea market off Route 340 in West Virginia and spotted one vendor’s box of kitsch.
She said the box had a small painting with an enticing gold frame. The painting was unsigned but had a “Renoir” plaque on its frame. She never thought something lying around like that could be an actual Renoir.
“I bid on the box and won the box,” she said in her September interview with The Post, although she could not remember the name of the flea market nor who sold it to her. Vendors at the Harpers Ferry Flea Market off Route 340 in West Virginia said they did not recall selling the Renoir, but they did not rule out the possibility that it could have been there.
Renoir Girl said she stowed the painting at her home (and, at one point, in a shed), practically forgetting it was there. It wasn’t until early 2012, she said, that her mother urged her to get the piece authenticated.
“[My mother] has an art history background. She said, ‘You might want to get someone to look at it,’ ” she told The Post. “She said that the whole canvas was not filled with paint, and Renoir was famous for that.”
Renoir Girl carted the painting to Potomack in a plastic garbage bag. Potomack verified the piece’s authenticity with Bernheim-Jeune, the well-known Paris art gallery and dealer that had originally sold the Renoir to Herbert L. May in 1926. His wife, Saidie May, was a major arts patron who donated heavily to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
As the Sept. 29 auction date loomed, bidders from Europe and Asia were calling Potomack, debating whether to fly in or compete for the Renoir by phone.
But days before the sale, a Post reporter uncovered documents at the BMA’s library showing that Saidie May had lent the “lost” Renoir to the museum in 1937. Armed with those records, the BMA then found more paperwork proving the museum had reported the painting stolen on Nov. 17, 1951. And that the company that insured the painting paid the BMA a $2,500 claim.
The auction house was floored and alerted the FBI, which later took possession of the painting.
But the biggest mysteries linger: Who stole the Renoir? And how did it wind up, by Fuqua’s account, for sale at a flea market?
Jacqueline Maguire, an FBI spokeswoman, said the bureau’s investigation into the art theft is pending.
Doreen Bolger, the BMA’s director, hopes the Alexandria federal judge will enable the museum to get “On the Shore of the Seine” back into its galleries.
Ryan Russell, an assistant general counsel at the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, which paid the insurance claim on the painting, said the company wants to return the Renoir to the BMA, for free.
Fuqua’s lawyer declined to discuss the legal struggle over the painting or any other aspect of the case. Even if the judge allows Fuqua to keep the Renoir, the six-figure payday she once expected isn’t likely.
In court papers, a certified fine arts appraiser told the FBI that the painting is not worth even close to $100,000. The appraiser put the fair market value of the Renoir at about $22,000.
Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.