Tulsa World: October 2019 Archives

While looking for something else in the Oklahoma Historical Society's online newspaper database, I came across this startling headline atop the April 17, 1921, edition of the Tulsa Sunday World:

PRICELESS PAINTING RECOVERED HERE
Beligum Reclaims Ancient Million-Dollar Work of Old Master

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Bristow Tool Dresser
Had Ruebens' Work,
'Descent From Cross'

The story states that R. L. Bolin was with the American Expeditionary Forces mounted police in Europe. He bought the Rubens painting in the town of Baute, Germany: "... the canvas in an obscure and dingy art shop attracted Bolin's eye, and he bought it for a mere song." He cut the canvas from the frame, rolled it up with other paintings, and after the armistice he returned to Tulsa. He took this painting (with two others) to Lester W. Wetzel of the Tulsa Art Store at 620 S. Boston, who restored and reframed it and hung it on the north wall of the store. There it stayed for eight months. No one suspected it was anything but a high quality reproduction.

Bolin left Tulsa to become a tool dresser's apprentice near Bristow. He needed some cash, so he asked Wetzel to sell the three paintings he had left with him, but no one was interested. At some point, he began to think they might have been among those works of art stolen by the Kaiser's forces. Through his stepmother, a magazine writer, Bolin got in touch with Charles W. Thurmond, whom the story describes as a finder of lost art works, including the painting, "Head of Peter," which he recovered from an express office and returned to the Vatican.

The story says that Thurmond had been hired by the Belgian government to find this painting. When he received the letter, he caught the next train from New York, examined the painting, declared it genuine, stayed in the store overnight to guard it, then returned to New York the next day with Bolin and the painting.

The story was picked up by United News wire service, and it appeared three days later, on April 20, 1921, in The Dalles (Oregon) Daily Chronicle, with some changed details. The Tulsa World story gave the date of the painting as 1412; the Daily Chronicle story said 1692, and corrected the spelling of the painter's name, which the World misspelled as Reubens.

The New York Times had the story in the Monday, April 18, 1921, edition, datelined Tulsa, April 16 -- the day that Bolin, Thurmond, and the painting set out for New York. The Times asked an art dealer about the chances that the painting was genuine:

Sir Joseph Duveen of Duveen Brothers, 720 Fifth Avenue, said that the masterpiece of the famous painter, Peter Paul Rubens, was still in the Antwerp Museum when he was in Belgium a few months ago. The report that the painting had disappeared has no foundation, Sir Joseph said. "The Descent from the Cross" was painted in 1612 and not in 1412, Sir Joseph remarked, and added that just as the date of the painting was incorrect in the Tulsa dispatch, so were other statements in it.

It was remarked by one authority on paintings that frequent reports have been received of the existince in different parts of this country of the originals of famous paintings, when as a matter of fact they were only reproductions.

I haven't yet found any follow-up stories that would indicate what happened with Bolin, Thurmond, and the painting. There was a long-time Bolin Ford dealership in Bristow, with the catchy slogan, "Rollin' with Bolin," but I don't know whether there is a connection with the tool dresser's apprentice.

In hindsight, it seems like a story that was "too good to check." A story about an ordinary Oklahoma doughboy, an art connoisseur from New York City, and a stolen masterpiece would sell papers in a booming oil metropolis with pretensions of sophistication. To be honest, I started to write this up as if a Rubens painting really had taken a holiday in Tulsa, but it occurred to me that if that had been the case, it would have made the papers elsewhere.

According to Wikipedia, Napoleon stole "Descent from the Cross" from the cathedral in Antwerp and had it installed in the Louvre, but it was returned after Napoleon's final defeat. There's a possible discrepancy in the New York Times report as well: Sir Joseph Duveen says he saw the painting in the Antwerp Museum, but "Descent from the Cross" was installed in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, part of a triptych. According to the cathedral's website, the central panel is 421 cm x 311 cm, or about 13 feet tall by 10 feet wide, with two side panels that are each the same height and half the width. Like most triptychs, it was painted on a wooden panel, which would have been awkward for Mr. Bolin to roll up for easy carrying. (Even if it had been canvas, it would have been like toting around a roll of carpet.)

According to the website of the Cathedral

How might World reporter Faith Hieronymus have fact-checked Thurmond's story? For a start, the public library or the college library likely had an art encyclopedia that would have the dates of Rubens' career -- as well as the correct spelling of the artist's name. No internet back then, and long-distance phone calls were a challenge, but a telegram to a known art dealer in New York might have confirmed Mr. Thurmond's identity as an art detective. A telegram to a wire service correspondent in Belgium could have been used to confirm that the painting was actually missing. But deadlines are deadlines, and I imagine there was a great deal of buzz around town about the painting, and an editor anxious to exploit the public's curiosity.

It's a good reminder, when mining newspapers for history, to separate the facts of which the reporter had direct knowledge from the claims made by the people she interviewed and from her own speculation and wishful thinking.