Historian spots long-lost painting while watching 'Stuart Little'

There’s a mouse in the house — along with a long-lost 20th-century masterpiece.

An art historian was watching the movie “Stuart Little” with his daughter — and spotted in the background a painting long believed lost, it was reported Friday.

“I could not believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie,” said Gergely Barki, a researcher at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest who made the discovery on Christmas in 2009.

“Sleeping Lady with Black Vase,” an avant-garde work by Hungarian painter Robert Bereny, was last seen in public in 1928 — and wound up as a prop in the 1999 children’s movie, starring Michael J. Fox (as the voice of the titular mouse), Geena Davis, Laurie and Jonathan Lipnicki.

“A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home,” Barki, who is writing a biography on Bereny, told Agence France-Presse...