An early 20th century painting that had been lost for more than 60 years was returned to the University of Montana (UM) last month after unexpectedly reappearing.
In the winter of 2022, a man from Kentucky came across the work Portrait of the Clifford breeding as he perused his late father’s possessions. His father had indicated that he wanted the painting returned to the University of Montana, so the man contacted the director of the Montana Museum of Art and CultureRafael Chacón, who immediately recognized the work after seeing a photo.
“He said his father bought the painting at a garage sale in Missoula for $25. Nobody knows how it ended in that garage sale,” Chacón told the Missoula Current. “I didn’t ask any more questions. I just said ‘thank you’. We are so grateful to have him back.”
The striking portrait of a boy wearing a hat and smoking a cigarette disappeared from the University of Montana sometime in the 1950s. No one could discern exactly who had got away with the artwork, and it was even featured in a 1990 newspaper as one of Montana’s “all-time most important lost works of art”. It was painted by Fra Dana (1874-1948), a regionally renowned Impressionist woman who studied with William Merritt Chase and Mary Cassatt.
“It is a very important portrait for Fra Dana’s career,” Chacón said in a statement. “Not only do we see her at her best as an impressionist in the way she wields composition, light and color, but we also see her interest in subjects from the Ashcan school, an American movement from the coast Is a turn-of-the-century that focused on common topics in an honest and sincere way.In this sensitive portrait of an indigenous boy living in two cultures, Dana brings the Ashcan to Montana.It’s a statement powerful”.
The return of the portrait coincides with the transition from the museum to a brand new building on the UM campus, scheduled for completion this fall. It will be the museum’s first permanent home since its inception in 1895. The institution quickly outgrew its allotted space, and from 1900 it existed only in fractured iterations, growing from one building to the other—when not relegated to storage—for more than a century.
“Throughout its history, the museum has experienced periods of explosive growth and long periods of neglect,” Chacón said, which has exacerbated the collection’s vulnerability to undocumented loans and thefts.
“Calls for a new building date back to the early 20th century,” Chacón added. More than 50 community volunteers have been hard at work examining about 400 art objects from the collection — the museum’s “greatest hits,” in Chacón parlance — in preparation for reopening. Portrait of the Clifford breeding will be among them.
