Imagine, if you will, that next week an art dealer were to suddenly announce that he has discovered that all the paintings everyone thought were done by Pablo Picasso or Claude Monet were actually painted by a relatively unknown painter by the name of, let's say, Bob Wilson.

Would those paintings once thought to be priceless Picassos become worthless Wilsons? No, they probably wouldn't, considering they would still be stunning works of art, apparently signed by someone other that the artist who created them. But think of the upheaval in the world of fine art.

The folk-art world of waterfowl decoy carving appears to be on the brink of just such an upheaval with the recent announcement that one of the legendary carvers of some of the most valuable decoys may not have been the man everybody thought he was.

While not quite on a par with discovering the misattribution of a Picasso or Monet, a local decoy dealer claims to have discovered that two well-known sets of hand-carved bird decoys—at least one of which has sold at auction for several hundred thousand dollars—have long been attributed to the wrong East End carvers.

In a three-part series of articles that started running in the current issue of Decoy Magazine, Jamie Reason, a decoy carver and dealer and Native American historian from Brook-haven Town, has fleshed out a claim that the decoys once thought by most to have been carved by a Shinnecock Indian named Eugene Chief Cuffee were actually the work of an East Hampton man named William Henry Bennett.

Further, Mr. Reason claims to have uncovered very strong evidence that a valued pool of decoys—one of which sold for more than $460,000 at auction last year—long thought to have been the handiwork of an unknown artisan named Bill Bowman were actually carved by a Shinnecock named Charles Sumner Bunn.

"The decoy world has been shaken to its foundations," said Mr. Reason, who researched the history of the decoys with friend and East Hampton native David Bennett. "People are trying to wrap their minds around it still."

Such revelations in the world of carved decoy collections are hardly unheard of. The most valued examples of hand carved decoys can generally be traced back at least several decades and usually have changed hands several times, with only limited oral history offered about their origins before the pieces earned recognition by collectors.

Attributions to specific creators, therefore, are often imprecise and are often debunked when some form of direct or hard evidence, like a photograph or a traceable chain of ownership, surfaces, pointing to another.

"This certainly isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened," said Gary Guyette, co-owner of Guyette and Schmidt Inc., a revered auction house that specializes in decoys. "It won't necessarily be accepted either. It is being treated as a theory for now and other steps will be taken to investigate these claims."

Indeed, much of the evidence offered by Mr. Reason and Mr. Bennett is hardly empirical, based primarily in similarities between the decoys' carving styles and paint patterns. But in the world of decoy carving those two traits are likened to the paint selection and style of the great painters.

Though the connections he details jump between decoy types and evolving skills, Mr. Reason says the inferences that can be drawn from the similarities are sufficiently solid for the new links to be respected, noting that he has already received support from many top decoy dealers.

The saga of the new identities of two of Long Island's best known carvers began almost four years ago when Mr. Reason and Mr. Bennett, both carvers who have known each other for some time, were chatting about a photo of a merganser duck decoy in Decoy Magazine—a leading periodical dedicated to decoy carvings as collectible folk art. The merganser in question was said to have been carved by Chief Cuffee, as he was known.

Mr. Reason recalled in a recent interview that his friend scoffed that it was well known in East Hampton circles that a set of decoys carved by William Henry Bennett, known universally as "Uncle Henry," were on the auction market under the wrong name. Mr. Bennett said that he thought this merganser was one of them.

"The local guys have known for ages that a lot of those birds were Uncle Henry's," recalled Mr. Bennett, a distant relative of the master carver. "I remember Uncle Henry myself. I went with my father when he took our [decoys] to him to be repainted."

So the pair began investigating the background of the decoy in question and the history of Chief Cuffee's decoys as a lot. The "Cuffee" decoys have been recognizable to dealers and collectors for some 20 years. Often sporting beaks or limbs fabricated from whalebone, they commonly fetch between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars and some have sold for more than $15,000. Mr. Reason also thinks that another bird sold at auction for more than $31,000 in the 1990s, with no carver's attribution, was also one of these "Cuffee" birds.

With the aid of Mr. Bennett's connections to his family history, the two men's research led them to the homes of some East Hampton residents who could verify that old decoys they displayed on their mantles had been hunted over by their ancestors and purchased directly from "Uncle Henry" Bennett.

Mr. Reason says that those scattered decoys, found stashed away in homes around Springs and Amagansett, were unmistakably crafted by the same hand that had made the decoys commonly attributed to Chief Cuffee at auction.

In continuing their search—as Mr. Reason details in his first article—the pair made frequent visits to the Shinnecock Reservation but found not a single example of a "Cuffee" decoy. Eugene Cuffee II, Chief Cuffee's great-great-grandson, owns a decoy that was almost certainly made by Chief Cuffee—the carving was shown in an April 2001 article in The Southampton Press prior to an auction at which two other "Cuffee" decoys were expected to fetch close to $20,000 apiece—but is clearly not of the same carving style as the other "Cuffee" birds.

"I am certain that Chief Cuffee was a carver," Mr. Reason said. "But he was not the carver of the birds traditionally called Cuffees. Where the rest of his birds are, I don't know."

Hesitant to announce his contention without following up on the history of what he felt was an incorrect attribution, Mr. Reason set out to figure out how these birds could have come to be credited to Chief Cuffee.

What he found was that almost every attribution to Chief Cuffee's work referred to an article by a Robert Gerard, re-published in Dr. Gaynell Stone's comprehensive text on the history of the Shinnecock tribe, that said a single decoy, of a long-billed curlew, had been consigned to "a famous Massachusetts auction house" and bore a label identifying Chief Cuffee as the carver.

But Mr. Reason says that a search of auction house catalogs from that year has never showed that any such lot ever existed.

"We've never been able to find it anywhere," he said, hinting that the reference could have been fabricated. "And anyone who challenges our identification … inevitably goes back to the Gerard article. Obviously nobody has done any research on this stuff."

Very little in the way of evidence has been found to dispute the attribution of these "Cuffee" birds to Uncle Henry Bennett, Mr. Reason says. With the nearly indisputable proof that at least some of these birds were made by Bennett, and the striking similarities to all the other "Cuffee" birds, Mr. Reason says that there is sufficient documentation to change the attribution of the entire lot.

While the Cuffee/Bennett conflict is certainly of interest to collectors, especially those who may have paid several thousand dollars for one of the birds, Mr. Reason and Mr. Bennett's research into their origins accidentally led to a very similar but likely far more significant discovery.

While researching Shinnecock history, Mr. Reason flipped through the pages of Shinnecock historian John A. Strong's book, "The Algonquin Peoples of Long Island." On one of the pages Mr. Reason noticed a photograph of a Shinnecock man with a display of hunting equipment, including a large pile of decoys, at the National Sportsman Show at Madison Square Garden, circa 1920. The caption gave the man's name as Charles Sumner Bunn.

Mr. Reason knew the name from his research into Chief Cuffee's background. The two men were cousins, and Bunn was known to carve decoys as well. Mr. Reason looked closer and, he says now, immediately recognized the decoys as being of the same hand as carvings long thought to have been made by Bill Bowman.

In the spring of 2000, a Bill Bowman likeness of a curlew—a type of long-billed shorebird—sold at auction for $464,000 and Mr. Reason says that he knew as soon as he looked at the picture that the attribution was wrong.

"It was like a jolt of realization. It's a slam dunk," Mr. Reason recalled emphatically this week, referring to the pieces carved by Mr. Bunn. "The heads, the bodies, everything. They were Bowmans. Nobody would mistake them."

Again the bulk of Mr. Reason's support for his claim is based primarily on details that might be evident only to the keen eye of the expert. Hard evidence about the decoys in the auction market today that are still attributed to Bill Bowman being of someone else's hand is rare. Only the picture of Charles Bunn sitting among a heap of decoys that look like them is available.

But, as with the Cuffee/Bennett birds, equally importantly is the lack of evidence to support the original attribution to Bill Bowman. The sole connection Mr. Reason says he has been able to find of a Bill Bowman to any sort of hunting paraphernalia is two short references to the name in the hunting diary of a wealthy sportsman named Harold Herrick in the late 19th century. The references only mention that Mr. Herrick hunted with the man, and not that he was a professional hunting guide, like Charles Sumner Bunn, who might have been making his own decoys.

"There is a particular lack of evidence of attribution to these former carvers," Mr. Reason said. "With Bowman there is basically none at all. It's a surprise that no one had raised serious questions before."

So again, Mr. Reason, beginning only in the last few months, began trying to sell the idea that a long respected carver was not who everyone thought he was and, in this case, might not have been a carver at all. In his research since announcing his finding in the Decoy Magazine article about the Chief Cuffee decoys, Mr. Reason says he has gathered accounts from relatives of Orson D. Munn, a former hunting acquaintance of Charles Bunn and owner of many of the "Bowman" birds. These accounts, he says, claim the late Mr. Munn purchased his "Bowman" decoys directly from Charles Sumner Bunn.

But the greatest piece of supporting evidence for his claim continues to be the picture of Bunn with decoys that more than one seasoned eye has said closely resemble the "Bowman" decoys. Mr. Reason says that his second claim has also been welcomed by dealers and, predictably, by the descendents of Mr. Bunn.

"I think it is very exciting and a tremendous honor," said David Bunn Martine, Charles Bunn's great-grandson and director of the Shinneock Cultural Museum. "He joins a grand-master category of artists nationwide. He's getting the recognition he's always been due."

If Mr. Bunn is indeed the creator of these fine decoys, he will immediately become the most sought after Native American artist known. In Guyette and Schmidt Inc.'s April auction, two Bowman/Bunn birds will be on the block and are expected to fetch upwards of $75,000 and perhaps $100,000 each.

"I think his bird was undervalued at $400,000," Mr. Reason said. "I've always thought they are the best anybody ever made anywhere. Nobody carved like Charles Bunn. They are some of the best pieces of American folk art ever made."

Mr. Reason, himself part Native American, thinks the loss of Charles Cuffee from the ranks of respected carvers—though he concedes that other great carvings may someday come to be identified as by Cuffee's hand—is offset or even boosted by the realization of Bunn as one of the four or five most sought after carvers in the nation.

"The Shinnecock are losing one great carver, for now," Mr. Reason said. "And gaining another, even greater, one."

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