It’s the dream of everybody who has ever browsed a second-hand store, attended an estate sale or watched “Antiques Roadshow” – finding a historically interesting and potentially valuable object others have overlooked.

An Amherst couple believes that’s what they did last month when they bought a large oil portrait that appears to be an overlooked work by Samuel Morse, who was a painter of note before he gained world fame as the inventor of the telegraph and Morse code and gave up art.

In fact, they think they might have bought Morse’s last painting, from 1838, although a lot of work by art authenticators will have to take place before that is certain.

“Just look at it,” said Kevin Bevis, gesturing at the 6-square-foot painting as it sat on the living room floor of the home he shares with partner Susan LeBel. “You can tell it’s by Morse.”

The portrait, according to the label on the frame, is of a watchmaker named George King. King was a friend of Alfred Vail, the man who funded much of Morse’s early work on telegraphs – and who was the subject of Morse’s last-known portrait.

The King portrait appears to have been made in Vail’s house in Morristown, N.J., overlooking Speedwell Lake. LeBel and Bevis think Morse painted it just before he went to Europe and launched into telegraphy work, perhaps to make some money to help fund his research.

Perhaps yes and perhaps no, says Paul Staiti, a professor of fine art at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Staiti was cited by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as the go-to expert on Morse’s paintings.

Staiti said he is asked to judge roughly one alleged Morse painting a year.

“Occasionally a surprise comes up, and sometimes I’m too doubtful to say one way or another,” he said.

Usually, however, the news isn’t so good: an examination of style and supporting documentation leads him to conclude the paintings were created by other people.

Bevis and LeBel will be contacting Staiti soon.

An online find

The story started as many do these days – online.

“I spotted it on the Internet,” said LeBel, a former Goffstown police officer who lives in the Baboosic Lake home with Bevis, a former builder.

The two were vacationing in Florida and saw an estate at a ritzy mansion in Boca Raton. While perusing pictures of the house in the online sale listing, LeBel, an amateur painter of oil portraits, noticed a fine-looking portrait hanging on a wall.

“I spent a long time looking at it, zooming in, trying to see who it was by,” she said.

The painting’s secondary frame, placed over what may be its original 19th-century frame, includes a plaque LeBel was finally able to read. The portrait, it says, was “painted from life” by S.F.B. Morse in 1838.

From the art history point of view, this would be pretty impressive, since the last painting by Samuel F.B. Morse, as he is generally known in the art world, is generally believed to be 1837 portraits of Alfred Vail and Vail’s wife, Alice. Soon after, Morse gave up painting to develop the telegraph.

LeBel and Bevis had never collected art before but say they decided to take a plunge. They showed up at the opening of the three-day estate sale and bought the painting for an amount they prefer not to discuss, although they did let slip that it was “much less” than $15,000. Morse’s better-known works have traded hands for more than $1 million.

They declined to discuss the price because the estate sale was filmed for a future episode of “Big Brian: The Fortune Sellers,” a new reality show from Turner Broadcasting, to show on the truTV channel. The show’s producers asked them to keep the price secret.

They carefully wrapped up the painting and drove it north. Now it sits in their house – inside the large frame, it’s too big to fit on any wall – and they’re trying to decide what to do.

An expert’s opinion

The question, of course, is whether they really have Morse’s last painting. Their main supporting evidence is a 1919 brochure of an art sale, which is now part of the University of Michigan art library and visible via Google Books online. It describes the painting as a work by Morse and shows a black-and-white photo of it.

Queries to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester led to Massachusetts appraiser Louis Shepherd, who said it will take an expert in Morse’s work, not just a general art expert or even expert in American art, to judge the claim.

“The first step is connoisseurship. You can’t do an appraisal until you have a firm belief that the painting is what it says it is,” Shepherd said. “Everything flows after that.”

That leads us to Staiti. He says the brochure isn’t very good evidence, because it was made 80 years after the painting was allegedly made.

Unless rock-solid evidence is found among Morse’s dairies and letters that he definitely did this painting, the judgment is likely to depend on the decision of experts as to whether the brush strokes and other aspects look enough like Morse to be legitimate.

LeBel and Bevis, comparing the picture to photos of Morse’s many other portraits, are quite certain that they do, indeed, have a Morse portrait, noting similarities of style and appearance.

Before the Morse code and the telegraph, Morse was a painter of some renown who made commissioned portraits of businessmen, politicians and a few famous people including John Adams and the Marquis de Lafayette.

They admit they are novices at the art of authenticating oil paintings, but have charged into the field with gusto. They visited the Morris Museum in Morristown, N.J., to check into Morse’s letters and papers, and got more tips.

If it does turn out to be an authentic Samuel Morse, the couple isn’t sure what they’ll do. They’d like to see it on public display at a museum, perhaps in New Hampshire in recognition of his Granite State connection (Morse married his first wife in Concord) or perhaps in New Jersey where so much of his telegraph work was done.

Either way, they say that the whole process has been exciting.

“We’ve never been through anything like this,” LeBel said.

David Brooks can be contacted at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.