He was Paul Swan, actor and artist and dancer, “the most beautiful man in the world.”

She was Isadora Duncan, founder of Modern Dance, the most beautiful dancer in the world.

Maybe they were lovers.

Her eyes alighted on him one night at a Paris ball.

O, beautiful youth, come here to me! Where have you come from? … Who are you? Why haven’t I seen you before?

He came from Crab Orchard, Neb. He likely didn’t tell her that right away. He hated farm life.

This much is certain: In 1922, he painted her portrait. It captured a woman who would rather move around Paul Swan’s studio, or make love, than sit still on a bench.

She wears a high-collared black dress. She looks to the right, away from the artist, as if to mock him.

The portrait dropped off the face of the earth, just as the name of Paul Swan did. Even to people in Crab Orchard, where his ashes were buried in a coffee can in the family plot.

Janis and Richard Londraville wrote “The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol.” After the book came out a few years ago, an antiques dealer  e-mailed them from his home in England.

Enrico Saccone’s family was close friends with the Scarpitta brothers, who were close friends of Paul Swan. Enrico Saccone had the portrait.

And a story:

The year was 1922. Swan had once again crossed romantic swords with his longtime friend Isadora, and, once again, having had her fill, the feckless Miss Duncan left him with the feeling that he’d been used and abandoned. …

Swan stood in front of the canvas clutching a palette knife. Had the Scarpittas not walked into the studio at that moment with the innocent intention of bringing Swan a container of homemade red wine and, in doing so, stopping him from venting his smouldering rage, they said later that they thought he had the intention of cutting the painting to pieces.

They asked Paul Swan to sign it. They took it home, where it hung for years in a place of honor behind the chair of the family matriarch.

Saccone recalled eating many Sunday dinners across the table from the beautiful woman in the high-collared black dress.

And he recalled stumbling across her, years later.

In 1974 I was visiting the second-hand shops in LA. …Hanging behind the till in a shop with nothing much more to recommend it, and looking unloved and forlorn…

Swan’s Isadora, still looking away from the artist.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.