Old Santa Fe Trading Co. - Editorials by Forrest Fenn

Well, What Would You Have Done?
by Forrest Fenn

A few years ago a friend asked me to try to sell a painting for him. He was going through a divorce and………well, you know! It was a 16” x 20” Victor Higgins oil mountainscape with a small adobe house in the background. I loved the great little picture because it had personality oozing from the mellow blues and greens and yellows that were wonderfully composed.

Well, it wasn’t long until I found this well-fed, three-piece-suiter, New Jersey guy, who said the painting was “marginal at best” and started to chisel on my $15,000 price tag. Don’t you just love those guys?

While he talked in a constant patter, I couldn’t help but stare at his unfortunate, over-sized-looking patent leather shoes that were made in some sweat shop in Ubriskiania for all I know. I thought to myself that he probably paid fifty bucks for the pair while the poor kid that sewed them together was making a dollar a week.

Anyway, my price kept getting lower and lower as this guy expounded on his art expertise and the demerits of the poor painting. Finally he wrote a check for 12,200 bucks, gave me an address to ship the painting, and sped away in a big, garish, bright red Cadillac convertible. The guy probably had lace on his underwear, and I would love to have put itching powder in there with him.

I really felt terrible for having made only 200 bucks on that beautiful little painting, but I was so poor at the time that I had to borrow money from a friend just to get out of debt. The good news was that the Jersey jerk had departed my life forever, I thought.

Now, as I was preparing the painting for shipment, I noticed that there were two canvasses on the stretcher bars. No big deal about that because some of the early restorers, in the process of relining a painting, would put another canvas on the back for reinforcement. But I decided, just for the fun of it, to take the top canvas off and see what was under it.

Well, you could have blown me away pretty easily because there, still tacked to the stretchers, was a beautiful Higgins painting with three Indians standing by an adobe wall. The thing was worth every bit of 50,000 bucks, and I was so broke I’d almost forgotten how to count. So I began to think a little:

1. Could I claim this beautiful, newly discovered painting as my very own? (Please say yes). After all, no one knew it was there, and I can keep a secret for a long time if it’s something bad about me. Or

2. Did it belong to the guy who had sped away in his ugly Cadillac convertible? After all, he did buy the whole package, frame and all? Or

3. Did it belong to the friend who consigned it to me and had lived with it for all of those years and didn’t know there were two paintings? I knew his skin was lying pretty close to his bones also.

Intermission

I had finished writing this story by revealing what my decision had been and how it worked out when the thought came to me that maybe I had been wrong. I have yet to find a place where I couldn’t embarrass myself so I thought why not ask the question of Shari Morrison’s Art Talk readers and see what they think before I tell all? She shamelessly brags that they are the best people in the world, and that they would know exactly what is right and what is wrong and maybe even what is maybe.

So here we are. If you want to, send an e-mail to pugnacious1@earthlink.net and let me know what you think. In the next installment of this great magazine I’ll tell you how many people responded and what they decided. And, of course, I’ll also tell you what I actually did, and you will love that part. Trust me on this one, but not too far.

Read the last installment now.