Folds in clothes did not fall right.That the painting could be a fake seemed absurd Never had the provenance of a picture seemed more certain. But then, one day last month, the eldest son of Mr Trachte, Donald Trachte Jnr, went to his father’s old home. He saw a crack in the panelling of one wall, and gave it a shove. There was something slightly off about details of the scene depicting a young man, his face full of anticipation as he heads off college, sitting on the running board of a lorry with his craggy father and dog Colours were wrong.

For decades, it hung in his Vermont home.
Or did it? Mr Trachte died last year aged 85 and, as his sons tidied up the estate, questions began to be raised about the painting, considered Rockwell’s second-most significant work after his iconic Rosie the Riveter, which sold at auction four years ago for $5m.After the picture went off for cleaning prior to being loaned to a museum, differences were noted between it and the image that appeared in the Post. Experts never saw reason to wonder about the piece, Breaking Home Ties, which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1954. The original canvas had been bought by Donald Trachte, a cartoonist and a friend of Rockwell, in 1960. Fans of Norman Rockwell, the 20th century painter and illustrator famous for his idealised portrayals of American life, were yesterday celebrating the discovery of one of his most important works, deep inside the wall of a house Until a few weeks ago, no one even knew it had gone missing. “It is an unearthly feeling, being inside a swirling tube of green water, moving at about 30 miles an hour with the terrifying sound of the collapsing wave behind,” says McCarthy.For the million visitors who puff their way to the highest point of the cliffs there is now another extraordinary spectacle to be seen where the foals leapt to their doom at Aill Na Searrach all those millennia ago.To see the surfers in action visit www.dreamcatcherproductions.ie/film1.html. John McCarthy teaches at www.lahinchsurfschool . Towed in by the jet ski, the surfer would smoothly swing behind the peak of the wave, and then stand tall in the pulsing chamber barreling headlong for the cliff.

We are great friends with these surfers and the photographer,” McCarthy says. “We provided the jet ski without which the wave could not have been attempted, but the commercial imperatives of Rip Curl meant we were air-brushed out of the picture – literally so in Carve magazine.”Since that October day last year, McCarthy and Blount have been out in bigger seas catching enormous tubes. It was, someone commented, as if Sir Edmund Hillary hadn’t bothered to mention that Sherpa Tensing Norgay was with him all the way to the top of Everest.”We were speechless. He says this despite the fact that they bought the jet ski for the express purpose of attempting Aileen’s.The Irish side agree that if it wasn’t for Rusty they wouldn’t have gone out that day But they felt shunted aside. Reduced to the status of blathering Paddys (or “ghillies to the quality” as their forebears would have said), they are bit players attributed with such expressions as: “Aye, fellas, d’ya know what? I’ve only gone and forgot to put some fuel in the bloomin’ jet ski!”The bad feelings increased when Rip Curl, the company sponsoring Smith and Kent, suggested that the two Irish surfers would never have attempted Aileen’s without the expertise of the Californian wave-surfer, Rusty Long.”The Irish guys are great surfers, but without our backing and Rusty Long’s experience, they would never have tackled the wave that day,” Rip Curl’s team manager in the UK, James Hendy, told me. The two Irish surfers found themselves relegated to the role of willing assistants beside the heroics of the American and British surfers.