On Thursday, a group of art experts and descendants of Betsey Colt Foot gathered at Albany Academy to examine the unsigned and unframed oil portrait of Foot.

The experts and Foot’s decedents gathered to shed light on the mystery associated with the painting. They wanted to examine who painted the portrait and what's the connection to Foot, the guiding force behind one of the nation's oldest single-gender independent schools, founded in 1814.

Foot's husband, Ebenezer, lawyer died just months after the couple founded the girls academy to provide a classical education for their only child, Lucretia. However, her husband was reckless and a gambler and left Ebenezer in deep debt.

The family was spelled as Foote, which made it more difficult to comprehend the riddle. It has been indicated by the records that a noted Albany portrait painter known as Ezra Ames completed a portrait of Betsey Colt Foot in 1815.It was one of more than 500 paintings he finished before his death in 1836.

The portraits of Ames help tell the sequence of events of 19th-century Albany. The portraits hang in numerous museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Art Institute of Chicago.

However, he had a habit of not signing his work and he signed almost none of his more than 30 paintings at the Albany Institute of History & Art, which is the largest single Ames collection. The unsigned portraits have been authenticated by experts, the artist's business ledgers and other records.

On Thursday, the unframed portrait of Foot that was hung in a cottage on an island in Maine was placed side by side with a framed portrait of Foot that was hung at Albany Academy for Girls.

Norman Rice, director emeritus of the Albany Institute of History & Art and an Ames expert, scanned the two canvases with an ultraviolet light to reveal contrasting painting techniques and other irregularities. She revealed that the unframed painting from Maine was made by Ames.