text: Marcia Fuqua, pictured second row and third from the left, poses for the Goucher College's 1952 International Relations Club picture. Fuqua, who now goes by the name Martha Fouquet in homage to a French ancestor, was a fine arts major and originally from Baltimore. (Goucher College Archives) 
   
   Robert Musser was living at Marcia Fouquet’s Fairfax County home in the early 1980s when, he said, he noticed a tiny painting with an ornate gold frame. It had a small plaque bearing a name he still remembers 30 years later: Renoir. 
   
   He asked Fouquet where she’d gotten the painting. “She said it came from a museum in Baltimore,” recalled Musser, 61, a mechanical contractor who dated Fouquet at the time and now lives in North Carolina. “She said it was a real Renoir, that she owned a Renoir. . . . She never told me how she acquired it.” 
   
   Musser’s account, along with similar recollections from two other former acquaintances of Fouquet, adds to the uncertainty surrounding the “flea-market Renoir,” a painting whose murky provenance has fueled an FBI investigation and an art mystery. 
   
   The 51 / 2 -by-9-inch landscape, “On the Shore of the Seine,” burst into the national news in September when Fouquet’s daughter, Martha Fuqua, tried selling the piece through an Alexandria auction house, which believed it could fetch as much as $100,000. Known then only as “Renoir Girl,” Fuqua told reporters that she had unwittingly bought the Renoir in a $7 box of trinkets at a West Virginia flea market. 
   
   Days before the September auction at the Potomack Company, the Baltimore Museum of Art found internal records showing that the Renoir had been stolen while on exhibit in 1951. The FBI seized the painting from Potomack and opened an investigation into the theft, which a spokeswoman declined to discuss for this article. 
   
   This handout image provided by The Potomack Company auctioneers shows a painting by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES) 
   
   Now a federal judge in Alexandria has been appointed to decide who should keep it: the museum or Fuqua, 51, a Loudoun County driving instructor. 
   
   Fuqua did not return messages. Her attorney, T. Wayne Biggs, wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post, “Neither my client nor I have any comment due to pending litigation.” 
   
   Fouquet, 84, also did not return phone messages, and her son, Matt Fuqua, demanded that a Post reporter stop “harassing” his family when an attempt was made to speak with her at her home in Great Falls. 
   
   Several weeks ago, someone who identified himself on the phone as Matt Fuqua raised questions about the Renoir’s origins. He told The Post in an interview that his mother had owned the Renoir “for a long time, probably 50 or 60” years. He later conferred with his sister and retracted his statement. 
   
   Musser, 61, said he moved into Fouquet’s home in the late 1970s or early 1980s. At the time, Musser said, he and his wife had separated and he needed a place to live. Musser eventually became more than just a tenant: He dated Fouquet for several years, he said. (People who remembered their relationship suggested that The Post contact Musser.) He also built Fouquet’s studio behind her home, where she held art classes for students and where she reproduced the works of famous masters, including Renoir. 
   
   She had learned much of her technique in Baltimore, where she earned a fine arts degree from Goucher College in 1952 and a master’s degree from what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1957. 
   
   Until his interview with The Post, Musser said he’d been unaware of the controversy surrounding “On the Shore of the Seine.” He couldn’t describe the painting. What sticks in his mind, he said, is the artwork’s tiny size, its gold frame and its “Renoir” plaque. 
   
   Fouquet told him it was an authentic Renoir from a Baltimore museum, he said. If she said which museum, he can’t remember. Nor does he remember if she said how she’d acquired it. 
   
   “She told me it was real valuable,” Musser said. “I didn’t believe it was an original.” 
   
   Musser is not the only one who recalls seeing the Renoir. 
   
   A childhood friend of Martha Fuqua also remembers encountering the painting in Fouquet’s studio in the early 1990s. She contacted The Post in early April after reading a profile of Martha Fuqua, a former physical education teacher who filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after being laid off from her job at a District high school. 
   
   The childhood friend, who lives in the Washington area, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending Fuqua and her family. 
   
   One day, the woman said, Fuqua and Fouquet led her into the studio and showed her the painting, which was hanging upstairs. 
   
   “There was a lot of artwork on the walls, but none of it was framed, except this one,” she said. “The frame is unusual, and none of the artwork in the studio had a frame like it.” 
   
   She hasn’t forgotten its size or the “Renoir” plaque. 
   
   “I remember looking at it and saying to them, ‘Is this a real Renoir? And one of them said, ‘Yes,’ ” the woman said. “It looked like it could have been a Renoir, but I immediately dismissed it as preposterous. I didn’t ask where it came from because I just assumed they were lying.” 
   
   She added: “I remember thinking that it was too small to be a Renoir, especially if you’ve been to the National Gallery of Art and you’ve seen Renoir’s “A Girl With a Watering Can.” But the ornate frame and the plaque that said ‘Renoir’ is etched into my memory more than the content itself.” 
   
   Another family friend, Bobby J. Fontaine, recounted a similar story. 
   
   Fontaine, 54, is a Lorton artist who has several criminal convictions, including trespassing, stalking and simple assault, according to Fairfax County court records. A self-described environmental activist, he was also convicted in a Texas federal court in 2004 for sending threatening e-mails to energy executives. 
   
   He once was homeless, and Fouquet, who’d been his middle school art teacher, let him live with her, he said. 
   
   He stopped by Fouquet’s home one day in the early 1990s to borrow some canvases and paint, he said. While he was there, she took him up the studio’s stairway and flipped on the light. At the top of the stairs there was a small painting with a gold frame. 
   
   “All of her paintings on the walls didn’t have frames. But this one had a fancy frame and said, ‘Renoir.’ It had a hangover light on it,” Fontaine recalled. 
   
   He said Fouquet asked him what he thought of the piece. “She says, ‘Do you think it’s real or not?’ ” Fontaine said. “I told her, ‘I guess it’s real.’ ” 
   
   Fouquet didn’t reveal whether it was authentic, he said. 
   
   It has been more than 10 years since he has spoken with anyone in the family, he said. But in early April, after the profile of Fuqua was published, Fontaine e-mailed The Post, saying he was familiar with the painting’s history. 
   
   He also sent Fouquet and her children messages via Facebook. 
   
   “I’ve been reading about you, great story actually, although from your side of it, maybe not so much,” Fontaine wrote in early April. “[R]eally though, [it] may be [one of] the best mysteries to ever come out of Fairfax County . . . call me if you want.” 
   
   No one in the family, he said, has replied. ||||| Months before she dubbed herself “Renoir Girl” and made news as a woman who had found an Impressionist gem at a flea market, Martha Fuqua took the painting to a Falls Church auction house with a different story. 
   
   Fuqua, 51, a driving instructor in Loudoun County, carried the long-missing “On the Shore of the Seine” into Quinn’s Auction Galleries on June 1, according to employees of the family-owned business. She was certain that it had been painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and said that she’d obtained it from an estate. She also believed that the small landscape would fetch $1 million at auction. 
   
   There was no mention of a West Virginia flea market or a $7 box of junk — the story that eventually catapulted Renoir Girl and her artwork into the headlines. 
   
   The new details about Fuqua’s appointment at Quinn’s raise more questions about her at a time when she is fighting in federal court to keep the Renoir, which the FBI seized after it was discovered to have been stolen decades ago from the Baltimore Museum of Art. 
   
   “A lot of people come in here and say, ‘I think I have X, Y, Z — can you verify it for me?’ But [Fuqua] was very adamant she had a Renoir,” said the Quinn’s decorative arts specialist who dealt with Fuqua last June and who asked to remain anonymous. “I immediately asked her, ‘Where did you get this from?’ and she said, ‘I got it from an estate.’ A red flag went up. Typically, an estate would know if it had a high-end painting by such an artist.” 
   
   In 2010, Marcia “Martha” Fuqua was interviewed by The Post as she trained to work as a blackjack dealer in West Virginia at the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races. (Tim Wilson/The Washington Post) 
   
   Matthew Quinn, whose family owns and runs the auction house, confirmed his employee’s account of the encounter with Fuqua, based on his conversations with the specialist last year. The FBI, which is investigating the theft of the art, also interviewed the Quinn’s specialist. 
   
   In a brief telephone interview, Fuqua disputed the auction house’s account but would not discuss many specifics. 
   
   “I don’t care what you write,” said Fuqua, who was profiled in The Washington Post this month after her identity was revealed in court papers. 
   
   She worked as a physical education teacher, first in Fairfax County and Loudoun and then in the District, before being laid off in 2009. She struggled financially afterward, filing for bankruptcy in Alexandria’s federal court with debts of more than $400,000 and assets of about $312,000. 
   
   Fuqua laughed at the description of her encounter with the Quinn’s specialist. 
   
   “I don’t know what to tell you about Quinn’s,” she said. “They’re going to say what they want to say.” 
   
   Then she hung up. 
   
   The appointment 
   
   When Fuqua arrived at Quinn’s for her appointment, the auction house’s specialist quickly brought up the need to verify the Renoir’s authenticity. But Fuqua, accompanied by a middle-aged man, questioned whether that was necessary. (The Quinn’s specialist does not recall if the man introduced himself. In Fuqua’s brief interview with The Post, she said she visited Quinn’s by herself.) 
   
   The auction house’s conservationist inspected the painting and believed it could be real. The specialist asked Fuqua if she would leave the painting for a few days so more research could be done. 
   
   Fuqua refused to leave the painting and seemed dissatisfied with the specialist’s estimate of what the Renoir might sell for: $20,000 to $40,000. 
   
   “She had this sort of fantasy of $1 million,” the employee said. 
   
   As the appointment ended, the specialist offered Fuqua a chance to meet with Quinn, the company’s executive vice president. Fuqua agreed, and the specialist wrote an e-mail to Quinn: 
   
   “Hi, I met with a woman today who has a potential Renoir. I had [our conservationist] take a look at it, and he’s neither dismissing it nor overly confident,” she wrote. “I went through the discussion of the catalog raisonne, but she would feel more comfortable talking to you about the entire procedure. Would you mind calling her? Or can we discuss this further? Her name is Martha Fuqua.” 
   
   Quinn and Fuqua were scheduled to meet June 12. But when the day came, Fuqua didn’t show. The company called her but couldn’t reach her. 
   
   Three months passed. Then, in early September, Quinn came across the burst of news stories about an anonymous woman auctioning off a Renoir at the Potomack Co. in Alexandria on Sept. 29. 
   
   Initially, Quinn said he was disappointed that his company lost out to a rival. 
   
   “I think, as a supervisor, I can be very hard on people when we lose something to a competitor,” Quinn said. “I just wondered, ‘Why did we lose this deal?’ ” 
   
   But as he and his staff read the stories more carefully, the details astounded them. She was now telling Potomack and the media that she had gone to a West Virginia flea market in late 2009 and wound up with the Renoir only because it came in a box holding items she prized more: a Paul Bunyan doll and a plastic cow. 
   
   She said she bid on the box and won it for $7, then stashed the painting in a shed, her car and her kitchen over the next two years. She took it to an auction house at the urging of her mother, who suspected that it might be real. 
   
   “When it came out that Potomack was selling it, and it’s all over ABC News and [other media outlets], my supervisor and I were like, ‘What’s with this $7 flea-market find?’ ” the Quinn’s specialist said. “We spent a lot of time talking about why would she change her story.” 
   
   Eventually they, along with the rest of the world, learned that the Renoir had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. 
   
   Days before the Potomack auction, The Post found documents in the BMA’s library showing that one of its biggest donors had lent the Renoir to the museum in the 1930s. Then the BMA discovered more internal records showing that its staff reported the Renoir’s theft to Baltimore police in 1951. 
   
   According to the 1951 police report, between Nov. 16 and Nov. 17, “some one stole” the Renoir; there was no evidence of forced entry. 
   
   Potomack, which had told reporters and potential bidders that the Renoir could sell for as much as $100,000, canceled the auction and handed the painting over to the FBI. 
   
   The investigation 
   
   In October, Quinn traveled to New Jersey for a business dinner and wound up talking with Robert Wittman, the retired founder and former senior investigator of the FBI’s art crimes team. 
   
   He told Wittman about his employee’s encounter with Fuqua. Wittman, who had been following the case of the “flea- market Renoir,” was intrigued. 
   
   He passed along Quinn’s contact information to the FBI case agent investigating the Renoir theft. 
   
   A few weeks later, the agent met with the Quinn’s specialist. 
   
   “He wanted to know which date she came in,” the specialist recalled. “And he was interested in the ‘estate’ aspect of her story.” 
   
   The FBI declined to comment about its investigation. 
   
   Elizabeth Wainstein, the founder and president of the Potomack Co., said Fuqua has never strayed from her flea- market story since she called the auction house on July 17 to make her first appointment. 
   
   No one at Potomack pressed Fuqua on which flea market she visited, or which vendor sold it to her. Wainstein said she and her staff were more concerned about whether the piece was real and whether it had been stolen. 
   
   That’s why, she said, Potomack contacted Bernheim-Jeune, the Paris art gallery that keeps a compendium detailing the ownership histories of Renoir’s works, and the London-based Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of stolen and lost art. The Paris gallery confirmed that the painting was real, and the Art Loss Register reported that it was not on the register’s list of stolen goods. 
   
   In an interview with The Post in early September, when she was still using the Renoir Girl pseudonym, Fuqua said that she’d called a New York auction house earlier but that the firm didn’t seem interested. She also mentioned that she’d visited another local auction house but declined to give any details. 
   
   “As soon as I walked in,” she said, “there was some teenage girl who said it’s probably not real.” 
   
   The next step 
   
   Now, an Alexandria federal judge is set to decide who gets to keep the Renoir. It may come down to Fuqua or the Baltimore Museum of Art, which was lent the painting in 1937 by one of its largest donors, the late Saidie May. 
   
   In court papers, Fuqua argues that the government should recognize her as the painting’s “innocent owner” as defined by federal law. 
   
   She claims that she has only a layman’s understanding of art and that she had no clue the painting she unwittingly bought was a real Renoir and subject to possible FBI forfeiture. 
   
   But Fuqua’s mother, Marcia Fouquet, 84, ran an art studio for decades at her Fairfax home, where Fuqua helped out for several years. 
   
   Her mother, who graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore with a fine arts degree in 1952 and earned a master’s from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1957, specialized in reproducing the works of famous painters, including Renoir. 
   
   Although the FBI is still investigating the case, the statute of limitations on the art theft has expired. But other related charges, such as possession and transportation of stolen property, could be filed, according to Robert Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in art theft. 
   
   Fuqua’s attorney, T. Wayne Biggs, would not comment. 
   
   The Quinn’s specialist still wonders about the unidentified man who came along with Fuqua. All she can recall was that the man was short. He looked middle-aged. He might have worn a ball cap. 
   
   The specialist does remember one thing: During his interview, the FBI agent seemed especially interested in the man as well.
target: – The case of the Renoir supposedly purchased at a flea market for $7 in 2009 continues to unspool dramatically: Now the Washington Post finds three witnesses who say On the Shore of the Seine hung in Marcia Fouquet's Virginia home in the 1980s and 1990s. That would seem to dispute the story Fouquet's daughter, Martha (or Marcia, depending on which article you're reading) Fuqua, has given about her lucky find. The painting was discovered to have been stolen from a Baltimore museum in 1951, and now Fuqua is fighting to hold onto it. Robert Musser, who dated and lived with Fouquet in the 1980s, recalls the small, ornately-framed painting adorned with Renoir's name on a small plaque attached to the frame. "She said it came from a museum in Baltimore," he says. "She said it was a real Renoir, that she owned a Renoir. ... She never told me how she acquired it." He assumed it was a fake. An anonymous childhood friend of Fuqua's says the mother and daughter showed her the painting in Fouquet's studio in the 1990s and said it was a real Renoir. "I didn't ask where it came from because I just assumed they were lying," she says, but the "unusual" frame and Renoir plaque stuck in her memory. Bobby J. Fontaine, a former student of Fouquet's who lived with the family for a time, also remembered Fouquet showing him the painting in the 1990s. "She says, 'Do you think it’s real or not?'" he recalls. "I told her, 'I guess it’s real.'" But they spoke no more about it. This follows last month's news that a few months before Fuqua claimed to have found the Renoir at a flea market, she took it to be appraised at an auction house—where she reportedly told an art specialist that she had gotten it from an estate.