A 1968 Douaihy returns to Beirut

There are canvases that age out of history. They survive war, but not the peace that follows — lost to the diaspora, sold at uncertain moments, stored in basements that have since been turned into car parks. The 1968 oil on canvas by Stéphane Douaihy was one of these.

For over thirty years the painting changed hands twice in Geneva — first in 1972 at a private sale following the consignor's emigration from Beirut, and again in 1988 through a dealer who specialised in works from the Levant. Neither transaction made the art press. Neither transaction was meant to.

Galerie Janine Rubeiz first heard of the work from a collector in Zurich who had recognised the signature in a photograph shown to her at a dinner. "Douaihy doesn't sign like anyone else," the gallerist recalled. "Even in a blurred image, you can read the hand."

The authentication process took eleven months. It involved correspondence with the artist's estate, a pigment analysis conducted at a university laboratory in Lyon, and — ultimately — a letter written by Douaihy himself in 1994, referencing the composition in the context of his experiments with coastal light during that period.

When the canvas arrived at the gallery, staff noticed it had been re-stretched at some point — the original wooden bars replaced, leaving faint ghost marks in the corners where the original tacks had been. A conservator was brought in. She spent three days with the painting before releasing it for exhibition.

"The light in it hasn't changed," she told us. "Whatever they did to the stretcher, they didn't touch the surface. The coast is still there."

The painting sold in the gallery's spring auction to a Lebanese collector based in Beirut. It is, for now, home.