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. 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. 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. “I immediately asked her, ‘Where did you get this from?’ and she said, ‘I got it from an estate.’ A red flag went up. 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. “I don’t know what to tell you about Quinn’s,” she said. call me if you want.” 
 
 No one in the family, he said, has replied. 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. One day, the woman said, Fuqua and Fouquet led her into the studio and showed her the painting, which was hanging upstairs. What sticks in his mind, he said, is the artwork’s tiny size, its gold frame and its “Renoir” plaque. The FBI seized the painting from Potomack and opened an investigation into the theft, which a spokeswoman declined to discuss for this article. “I didn’t believe it was an original.” 
 
 Musser is not the only one who recalls seeing the Renoir. 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. 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. “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. Wainstein said she and her staff were more concerned about whether the piece was real and whether it had been stolen. “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. (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. 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. 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. “There was a lot of artwork on the walls, but none of it was framed, except this one,” she said. “It looked like it could have been a Renoir, but I immediately dismissed it as preposterous. The specialist does remember one thing: During his interview, the FBI agent seemed especially interested in the man as well.
– 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.