The location of seven paintings in a renowned series of 30 by the painter Jacob Lawrence is one of the greatest art-historical mysteries in the 20th century. After an ill-advised collector purchased the set and sold the works off individually, scholars have been hunting to unite the missing pieces.
They have now found two of the seven in the space of six months and both were less than a mile away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where part of the series was recently on view. The first one turned up last fall after a museum visitor noticed a striking resemblance between the series and a work on her neighbors’ wall. The neighbors promptly made the trip across Central Park and reunited the work with full series, “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56).
A second painting from the same series has been discovered. When a nurse living on the Upper West Side of New York City checked an app for neighborhood bulletins in the fall, she learned about the recent discovery of a Jacob Lawrence painting in an apartment a few blocks away and took a closer look at a painting in her apartment. The woman’s mother-in-law had given her the painting, which was signed with the artist’s name and had a newspaper clipping about him taped to the back. Her son quickly did some research and found that the Met’s website showed a vague, dark image of the very painting before them, which turned out to be Immigrants admitted from all countries: 1820 to 1840—115,773, panel 28 from the series.
From the third day after the discovery, Randall Griffey and Sylvia Yount, co-curators of the Met’s Lawrence show, and Isabelle Duvernois, the Met’s paintings conservator, were making their second trip to an Upper West Side apartment in the space of two weeks to verify the authenticity of a Lawrence painting that had not been seen publicly since 1960.
The painting, having undergone some conservation work, will now join the last two stops of the Jacob Lawrence show, at the Seattle Art Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, which organized the exhibition. Randall Griffey speculates that the picture may have been offered at the same neighborhood Christmas auction where the owners of the other rediscovered canvas bought theirs in 1960, for just $100.