Row Erupts over $3200 picture, resold as lost masterpiece fo
News - June 18, 2004
Art auction rocks Dublin church
By SCOTT BROOKS
Union Leader Correspondent
A 14th-century triptych of the Madonna and child was donated to a Dublin church. (COURTESY PHOTO)
Auction-goers in Dublin made a killing and aroused the town’s ire when a painting they bought for $3,200 at a church fundraiser sold for more than 150 times as much earlier this year.
A Dublin woman, Jessie Hale, donated the painting — which turned out to be the lost third of a 14th-century triptych, or three-paneled picture — to the Dublin Community Church, unaware of its apparent worth.
The panel, which measures roughly 13 inches by 11½ inches, features the Madonna with child and is the work of an unknown Sienese artist. Hale’s family had owned the panel for nearly 100 years.
A Rindge woman, Dawn Ward, scooped up the painting at the church’s Aug. 16, 2003 auction. She purchased it along with two Dublin men, Rick O’Connor and Roy Gandhi-Schwatlo. Both men were members of the committee that organized the auction.
Identifying themselves only as a “private collector,” the buyers put the panel on Sotheby’s New York auction block in January. The piece sold for $489,600, according to Sotheby’s Web site.
As a committee member, O’Connor said last night he was responsible for procuring paintings for the auction. He said he never spoke with Hale about her painting and no one in his group knew its real value before buying it.
“We were all friends and decided we would buy the painting,” O’Connor said. “We just thought it would be a great investment.”
O’Connor said he and his friends had considered offering some of their profits to Hale, but may now their change their minds because of hostility they’ve encountered from people associated with the auction.
“We’re basically innocent people here,” O’Connor said. “Do you come back after you buy something at a yard sale and tell the owner, ‘Oh, geez, we’ve got to give you back half of everything we’ve made on this product.’”
O’Connor, who sells medical chillers for a Keene company, said all of the buyers are “working people.”
Word of the painting’s worth has spread around town, and some residents have said the buyers have a responsibility to donate some of their new fortune to Hale and the church.
“The whole thing’s just unfortunately slimy,” said Charles Pillsbury, who volunteered at the auction. “It’s just too bad.”
Hale’s family has owned the piece since 1909, when it was acquired by her grandfather, Joseph Lindon Smith, according to Sotheby’s. Smith, a famous Dublin painter, collected many pieces of art on his travels through South America, Egypt and the Mediterranean, said Charlie Cobb, the auctioneer who ran the church auction last year.
Hale, who declined to speak for this story, is not a member of the Dublin Community Church but donated the panel as a gift, Blodgett said. Before the auction, she gave it to Pillsbury for safe keeping.
“I had it wrapped up in just a cloth in my pickup truck for a couple weeks, just sitting in the back seat,” Pillsbury said. “I didn’t think it was worth anything.”
Several items at the church auction sold for more than the panel received, with one painting pulling in $18,000, not all of which went to the church. The auction, which was held in the Dublin home of Joseph Patrone, former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, raised $23,000 for the church, Blodgett said.
If Hale had known what the panel was worth, there’s little chance she would have donated it, Pillsbury said.
“It was just a very big, unfortunate mistake made by the lady that gave it,” he said. “It’s just tragic it had to happen to a little community church.”
Sotheby’s dates the panel to between 1320 and 1345. The panel is the central piece of the triptych, and its two wings hang in the Musie de Tessi in France, the auctioneers say.
Since arriving in New Hampshire, the panel has twice been displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and most recently, in 1965, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, according to Sotheby’s.
Much of the town is upset at the three buyers, Pillsbury said.
“They’re having a hard time showing their face in town,” he said.
As members of the auction committee, Gandhi-Schwatlo and O’Connor spent many weeks working to put together a successful fundraiser for the church, said Tom Blodgett, who chaired the auction committee.
“Roy and Rick were very significant contributors to the success of the expo, and are honest and honorable people,” Blodgett said. “I hope that they will rethink their situation and make a personal gesture to the Dublin community, given these extraordinary circumstances.”
Copyright © 2004
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.. the wall was/is still? covered in different coloured cocks of varying artistic skill.
