The rediscovery of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting "Breaking Home Ties" made headline news in 2006. The an nouncement was shocking because no one knew the painting was lost. Lo, these many years, the world had loved an imposter.

The story begins calmly in the summer of 1953 at a Boy Scout camp in Cimarron, N.M. Eating his breakfast cereal, Robert Waldrop saw his supervisor heading his way. Waldrop, an Eagle Scout from Austin, Texas, who was working as a camp counselor, assumed he was in for a scolding. Instead, he was about to be offered a job. Rockwell, America’s most beloved illustrator, was looking for a boy to model for a new painting to grace the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Waldrop had never seen the Post, but the $10 offered was a mountain of gold to a lad two days shy of his 16th birthday. Off he went to a makeshift studio where he was handed a pinstriped suit, a loud tie and brown shoes. In 2006, a 69-year-old Waldrop recalled in an interview with the Austin American-Statesman that Rockwell told him, "This is kind of like you’re going off to college, and it’s breaking your dad’s heart." The boy took a seat and struck a pose as Rockwell’s photographer clicked away.

Back in his Vermont studio, Rockwell tweaked details until the emotional poignancy of the scene reached a finely tuned pitch. "Breaking Home Ties" appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in September 1954 and quickly became one of the artist’s most popular images.

In 1960, Rockwell sold "Breaking Home Ties" to Don Trachte, a friend and fellow illustrator, for $900, a hefty sum at the time. Four years later, Trachte refused an offer of $35,000. "You must be crazy not to sell it," Rockwell wrote him, "but I adore your loyalty." Trachte was generous about lending it to museums and exhibitions until the 1970s, when a divorce complicated his affairs. He and his wife contested the ownership of eight paintings, and "Breaking Home Ties" was the most valuable in the lot. Eventually, the four Trachte children were granted ownership of the works.

Questions first arose about the painting’s authenticity in 2003, when the painting was loaned to the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for its first public exhibition in nearly 25 years. But the experts dismissed the discrepancies between the appearance of the painting in the show and the one reproduced on the magazine cover as the effects of time or clumsy restoration. They were blinded by its perfect provenance.

After Trachte died in 2005, the authenticity of another family painting was questioned. The children began to wonder and searched their father’s house. First they discovered two nearly identical paintings in his studio, then film that plainly showed two nearly identical versions of "Breaking Home Ties." They sent the painting to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, which had cleaned it in 2003, wondering whether any conservation work had been done before that. The answer: none.