End of the Black Boy

The art dealers and cataloguers of three continents last week scratched the name of a famous painting from their lists of the world's masterpieces. It was Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of the 4th Duke of Rutland, long known in art circles (by an analogy with Gainsborough's much more celebrated Blue Boy} as the Black Boy. Along with two other valuable paintings--Gainsborough's landscape, The Wayfarer, and a portrait of Charles the Bold by an unknown Flemish artist--the Black Boy came to an unworthy end.

Vienna-born Marie Hauser, 45, was deeply attached to the wife and family of her employer, Captain Daniel Sickles, art-collecting official of Langley Aviation Corporation of Port Washington. But she hated the Captain, whose collection of paintings was the pride of his Manhattan apartment. Three weeks ago, while Mrs. Sickles and the family were vacationing in Bermuda, the Captain ordered Marie to ready up his country place at Hampton Bays, Long Island, for weekend guests.

Brooding over a fancied insult in connection with the order, Marie got a razor, slashed the Black Boy from its frame, toted it, with the other two pictures, to the Hampton Bays estate. There she built a fire in an outdoor oven, burned the Black Boy and Charles the Bold to a crisp, scattered the half-charred remains of the Wayfarer on the beach, where the tides of Shinnecock Bay soon swallowed them. The Black Boy was insured for $25,000, the other two for $19,000. Last week, recovering from a suicide attempt in Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital prison ward, Marie babbled incoherently that she thought the Captain had been keeping bad company in his wife's absence. Murmured she: "I wanted to hurt him."

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