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Art restorer Lauren Lewis often browses Facebook groups of enthusiasts dedicated to the Wyeth family of artists. She regularly finds posts with images of the Wyeths’ work accompanied by some version of the question, “Is this real?” The answer is almost always no, a conclusion Lewis quickly comes to when he notices the telltale signs of reproduction.
But in mid-May, one of these posts caught her eye. One of the photos showed the back of a painting and showed the label from an art supply company that Newell Convers Wyeth was known to use.
“It kind of made me stop and read the rest of the post,” Lewis told The Washington Post.
The author of the post was a woman from New Hampshire who, while looking for scrap frames at a thrift store in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 2017, purchased what she thought was an unremarkable painting for $4. Six years later, she suspected it might be more than that and drew on Facebook’s collective knowledge. Lewis thought she might be right.
It was, and this month Bonhams Skinner plans to auction the oil painting, which measures about 25 inches long and 17 inches wide. The auction house expects a price between 150,000 and 250,000 US dollars.
“I was really excited to see where it went,” Lewis said, adding that the experience was “a very big deal for me.”
In the late 1930s, famed American artist N.C. Wyeth commissioned Little, Brown and Co. to produce a series of four paintings for the 1939 edition of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” a novel about a half-Native American-Scottish orphan , who lived in Southern California after the Mexican-American War.
Wyeth painted the four illustrations in his studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, then sent them to the publisher. Although experts at Bonhams believe the publisher gave the illustration to an editor or Jackson’s estate, they know little about what happened to the painting until 2017 – 78 years after Wyeth sent it.
In August 2017, a woman was at a Savers thrift store in Manchester looking for old frames that she could reuse, Bonhams spokeswoman Sheri Middleton wrote in an email to The Post. While she was looking through a stack of frames containing mostly old posters and prints, she came across an old, dusty painting. She put it in her cart and joked that it was a real painting. After doing a quick search online and finding nothing, she hung it in her bedroom for a few years and then stored it in a closet.
Little did she know that she was sitting on a long-lost painting by one of America’s most famous artists.
She came across the painting while cleaning in May, prompting her to post some pictures of it on a Facebook page called “Things Found in Walls.” A user suggested she post the images to a Wyeth-specific group, which caught Lewis’ attention.
“I often see artwork that pops up in my thread and I just gloss over it,” Lewis said, “but this one really caught my eye.”
Curious, Lewis responded to the woman’s Facebook post, posing as a painting restorer in Maine and offering her expertise in assessing the condition of the illustration. She didn’t expect an answer.
However, a few hours later, the owner contacted Lewis through her private conservation company’s website. That led to a long phone call and an agreement to meet near the owner and her husband’s home about a month later.
Meanwhile, Lewis continued researching the “Ramona” illustrations and learned that all but one had been missing since Wyeth sent them to the publisher to be printed in the novel. Lewis contacted Wyeth expert Christine Podmaniczky, a curator emeritus at the Brandywine Museum of Art.
Podmaniczky told Lewis that she had been researching for years, trying to track down Wyeth paintings that were commissioned and then fell off the art world’s radar, Lewis said. Back then, it was common for an artist or publisher to give original paintings like those from the “Ramona” series as housewarming gifts to friends or VIP clients, she added. Podmaniczky read through “heaps of them,” but most of them from Wyeth’s “Ramona” series “were hard to get my head around for one reason or another,” Lewis said.
“All of these paintings were in the air and were probably destroyed or simply never resurfaced,” she added.
In mid-June, Lewis drove three hours from her home in Thomaston, Maine, to a neutral location in the Manchester area. After meeting the owner and her husband, Lewis examined the illustration, which she said was “in amazing condition, especially considering it had been lost for 80 years.” Everything about the painting matched what Lewis knew about Wyeth’s art — the signature, the brushstrokes and the “Renaissance” label from art supplier F. Weber and Co. that she had seen in photos. She was almost certain it was authentic.
“It was so exciting to be able to tell the owners what they had … because they really had no idea,” she said.
The painting’s future is uncertain, but Lewis has hopes for it. She is already disappointed that despite its resurfacing, little to nothing is known about what happened to the painting between 1939 and 2017. She wants the future owner not to hoard the artwork, but to loan it to a museum so the public can see and appreciate it.
“I just hope,” she said, “that it doesn’t disappear again.”