It was less than a year after acquiring our first American Scene painting, Jerry Farnsworth’s Working Girl, that I attended an auction preview at Shannon’s, a fledgling fine art auction gallery on the Connecticut coast.  I was drawn by the striking Internet image of a lovely dancer in a diaphanous turquoise dress framed by a trio of café patrons in the foreground and a formidable band in the background.  All of the dozen or so figures were African-American, and the scene screamed of the Jazz Age in Harlem.  Catalogued as Harlem Renaissance School: The Nightclub, the painting was unsigned and unattributed.  It was also five feet high, its canvas surface dubiously adhering to a large slab of plywood.  Even worse: evidence of water-staining was visible along the bottom edge of the plywood and there was no frame.  

     A babe-in-the-woods in the relatively uncharted field of Depression era art, I did the inconceivable.  I bid on the painting.  The stunning image, and the conjecture that the work was the product of an as-yet-unidentified African-American artist, drove up the price.  In the end, the race or identity of the artist was less important than the incredible image peeking out from that compromised length of canvas.  When the bidding was over, I realized I had spent over $9,500 on a reclamation project by an unknown artist. Was I crazy?

     The purchase was just the beginning.  The painting needed restoration and a frame.  That meant, of course, doubling down on my already questionable investment.  I was either an idiot or a genius.  At the time, I was leaning toward the former.

     I took the painting to Mark Sirdevan, a very capable fine art restorer in Waltham, Massachusetts.  The plan was to remove the canvas from the plywood support, reline and remount it to a new aluminum stretcher, and clean and retouch where necessary.  I’ll never forget the phone call from Mark a few weeks later in which he informed me of the substantial possibility that the adhesive binding the painting to its plywood support was lead-based, rendering the process particularly problematic both because of the extreme hardness of the adhesion layer and, more critically, its toxicity.  If the adhesive was indeed lead-based, Mark informed me, he wouldn’t be able to perform the restoration.  

     As luck would have it, the adhesive was not, in fact, lead-based, and the restoration went forward as planned.  I recall my sense of utter amazement when I retrieved the painting. It was absolutely sensational. And, of course, it needed an equally sensational frame (ka-ching!).  In consultation with framer Sturdy Waterman of Page Waterman Gallery in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a beautiful white-gold frame was selected to enhance the fully-restored artwork.

   One last issue remained.  Could we ever determine the identity of the artist?  Despite my efforts, attributing authorship was a needle-in-a-haystack undertaking.  But once again, we were fortunate.  A chance conversation with art dealer David Cowan of Acme Fine Art on Boston’s Newbury Street, with whom I shared a photo of our painting, yielded the impossible: a strong conviction (based on his familiarity with the Provincetown school of artists) that the work was by William J. L’Engle.  David put me in contact with L’Engle’s grandson, Daniel L’Engle Davis, who reviewed an emailed image and assured me that the painting was "absolutely done by William, my grandfather," pronouncing it "a great painting!"  With this information, I was able to relate the painting to other works produced by L’Engle in New York City during the same period (see, e.g., Fig. 1 above).  

     In the end, my courage (or recklessness) paid off: our sow’s ear has become a silk purse.