The Louvre has the Mona Lisa. The Hamilton Club has Maria Aiaiar.

Like Leonardo's masterpiece, the Portrait of Maria Aiaiar shows a beautiful young woman in front of a landscape.

The downtown club has owned the painting for 50 years, but no one gave it a second look -- until now.

The 1839 oil, also known as Indian Girl, will be one of the highlights of an important exhibition in New York state.

Hamilton Club member Tom Allen says the club is delighted to be lending the canvas to the exhibition, which is meant to restore the lustre to a 19th-century artist's once-shining reputation.

The painting was tracked down recently by a couple searching for works by James Edward Freeman, an American artist born 200 years ago in New Brunswick.

John and Mary McGuigan's hunt began nearly 10 years ago during a snowstorm in Denver.

"We found ourselves trapped at home in a blizzard, over a long weekend with no power," John McGuigan recalls. "To pass the time, I took out a book that I had only recently come across to read aloud."

It was a volume of memoirs published by Freeman about his life in Rome as an artist and American consul during a revolution. Long before finishing the book, the McGuigans were hooked.

The two art historians decided to pull Freeman back into the limelight by putting together the first-ever retrospective exhibition and catalogue of his paintings.

That meant they had to find them. Easier said than done.

Freeman had an excellent reputation in his time "but had been completely forgotten by modern art history," McGuigan says.

A smaller Freeman painting, Roman Girl, sold in 2006 for less than $5,000 US, according to Artnet's online price database.

Freeman was born in 1808, when New Brunswick was still a British colony. His family moved to New York state and he ended up studying at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

He first went to Italy in his late 20s. Later, he married an English sculptor and they lived in Rome, where he died in 1884.

Given his biography, the McGuigans hoped to find his works in public and private collections in the United States and Europe.

One belongs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. That was easy to locate, as were a few paintings in private hands. But the trail quickly grew cold, and the detective work began in earnest.

Several years of research have turned up plenty of archival material, but the McGuigans have located only a fraction of the paintings they know Freeman produced.

The Portrait of Maria Aiaiar is the only Freeman painting they have traced to Canada.

At first, the McGuigans did not even consider Canada. But after exploring all other avenues, they checked J. Russell Harper's book, Early Painters And Engravers In Canada. According to Harper, a Freeman painting lived in Hamilton.

"With some trepidation, considering that more than 35 years had elapsed between that publication and now, we were able to determine through a series of letters and phone calls that the Hamilton Club did indeed still possess one of Freeman's lost masterpieces," John McGuigan says.

Freeman specialized in portraits and pictures of peasants, liberally sprinkled with sentimentality, a popular genre in the 19th century. But the Portrait of Maria Aiaiar is significant because it taps into three other well-loved themes of that era.

First, it is an image of a North American Indian, which European viewers collected, inspired by Romanticism's idealization of native peoples.

Leaning against a moss-covered stone wall, Maria Aiaiar confidently dominates the composition. The open sky behind her suggests space, freedom, infinite possibilities. The Mona Lisa, by contrast, is framed, grounded and confined by the landscape.

Maria's heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes, thick red lips, long loose hair, earrings and the fur blanket she holds combine to give her an erotic air. That's the second theme.

Third, her pose is old-fashioned, evoking the spirit of the Italian Renaissance.

In other words, Freeman's evocation of the Mona Lisa is not accidental.

Maria's body turns to our left, but her face is frontal. It's as though she has just become aware of the viewer's presence and turns to look at us.

This type of pose creates a sense of lifelike movement. It was exploited by the great Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael to animate many of their sitters.

Freeman painted Indian Girl, the Portrait of Maria Aiaiar, in Albany, N.Y., in 1839, the McGuigans say. They have discovered that it was commissioned by a businessman in Utica, N.Y.

In 1906, his daughter gave it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Half a century later, the museum was culling its collection and consigned the painting to a New York City gallery. The Hamilton Club purchased it in 1958.

It will soon be on its way back to Utica to become part of The Art and Life of James E. Freeman, 1808-1884: An American Painter in Italy. The exhibition is scheduled to open at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art in September 2009.

Meanwhile, the hunt goes on.

As John McGuigan says: "While it seems logical that more Freeman paintings will come to light in Canada, they have, as yet, not surfaced."

Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.

dhaggo@thespec.com