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A painting authenticated three times in forty years fails on the fourth, and every prior signature belongs to the same family.

It takes nine seconds. That is how long a conservation scientist holds a handheld instrument against the sky of a Hugh Treadway landscape in a basement in Philadelphia, three weeks before her museum closes a two hundred million dollar campaign. The spectrum says titanium, in a picture the file dates to 1911.

Doctor Hollis Ashby has been chief curator of the Meriwether for seventeen years. He signed the third authentication of that painting in 1998, when he was thirty, and it has been quoted in every appraisal of the object since.