IS IT or isn't it? Mr Raymond Keaveney, director of the National Gallery in Dublin, put it delicately: "Attribution is not easy to sustain."
He was referring to the Goose Girl, a painting originally attributed to William Leech, the authenticity of which has been under scrutiny since Mr Julian Campbell raised the matter in 1984.
Ms Denise Ferran, of the Ulster Museum, who has written the publication that accompanies the Leech retrospective which opens in Dublin today, is adamant: "Leech was a dramatic painter using broad brush strokes. The Goose Girl lacks both." The composition was undramatic, she added, and a tiny brush had been used. It simply did not have the strong physical effect of Leech's work.
A Mrs Wallace said she saw it in the artist's studio and a writer, Alan Denson, says it is a Leech, but this is flimsy evidence. And why can it not be liked if it is by someone else?
That someone is likely to be Stanley Royle, a Sheffield painter who died three years after Leech in 1971.
The organisers could not find a Royle original, but the two reproductions placed beside the Goose Girl make it hard to argue that they are not his. Lilac Bonnet and Spring Among The Bluebells together seem to result in the Goose Girl.
But the National Gallery will not be pushed further on the matter. It is not important. What is important is the Leech exhibition of 117 paintings, chosen by Ms Ferran from 450, many of them in private hands.
The artist was secretive and left little information behind. He even stopped dating and labelling his work after the early 1900-1910 period. But he always signed the canvas and the Goose Girl carries no signature.
Leech's family was prosperous. His father was a barrister and a professor of law and he got his first commissions painting his brother's and sisters' portraits.
Ms Ferran also uncovers his Bohemian love life and it took her about 12 years to assemble the story.
His early marriage to Elizabeth, an American, came to grief when he started painting May Botterell, a married woman.
The lovers could not marry, but theirs was a relationship which lasted. May died in her 70s and it is not known if Leech's fall from a railway bridge soon after was suicide or accidental.
Though he painted for many years in Brittany, some of Leech's best work was done in his garden towards the end of his life. The retrospective exhibition shows him to have been a much more interesting and talented painter than Stanley Royle.