ON SAME CANVAS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 9

ON SAME CANVAS

TWO WORKS OF ART DISCOVERY BY OWNER. DUST OF CENTURIES REMOVED. Master painters’ works have a habit of appearing in unexpected places througuuut tne world .and creating interest upon discovery or re-discovery long after the masters have departed. A raw days ago a work of Hoppner, a celebrated painter of portraits of Englishmen and Englishwomen during tile latter part of tne eighteenth century, was discovered in a trunk in the possession of a woman whom the police had suspected and watched for a considerable period. The woman was arrested on tne Continent, and the police at last decided that they had evidence to go to trial involving tlio woman in the theft of the picture. Mr J ouii E. Nixon, a New Plymouth landscape artist, possesses a strange work oi art, or two works of art upon the same canvas —the one a beautifully executed pastel credited to John Crome portraying Hercules and Umphales, Queen of Lydia, and the other a portrait in oils of an unknown subject, clad in the costume of the Hoppner - Gainsborough - Crome period. Mr Nixon confesses that he is unable, because he is unqualified to pronounce the author of the portrait, nor is he able to confirm that tne pastel is the work of John Crome. He purchased the strange canvas in the shop of a Russian Jew, a diamond merchant. The pastel appealed to Mr Nixon, for it was the best work in pastel that Mr Nixon had seen. The vendor’s story of the origin of the picture was that it had once formed part of the collection of the Duchess of Westminster, who during the war gave property, including several pictures, to the Bed Cross Society to raffle. The gifts of the duchess were apportioned between the branches of the Bed Cross in India, Canada, and New Zealand. The pastel was one that was raffled.

The frame of the pastel was unsuited to the picture, and so Mr Nixon decided several weeks , ago to remove the back and to reframe the pastel. There was a quarter of an inch of dust and accumulation of rubbish between the back of the canvas and the frame cover. He applied cloth, soap and water, and the dust of generations, as it seemed, gave way to the strange portrait of the unknown gentleman appearing, not unlike Captain James Cook. Possibly the portrait had originally been stolen and eventually used as a canvas for the pastel work, the oil being covered up. The oil evidently ig the work of a bold and accomplished artist, the fullness of the features and the high lights having been secured with wonderfully even layers.