SPRINGVILLE — A month ago, I wrote a story about a Normal Rockwell painting of Ichabod Crane that hangs in Draper Elementary School and was purchased by the school’s students in 1951 for $800 and is now, according to its owner's estimates, worth nearly $2 million.
In return on investment, that ranks up there with Larry Miller’s purchase in 1985 of the Utah Jazz for $22 million (estimated value in 2016: $875 million) and George Hearst buying Park City’s Ontario Mine in 1872 for $27,000 (resulting in $50 million worth of silver and lead).
But now comes the rest of the story.
“Ichabod” isn’t worth $2 million. It’s probably worth $5 million. Maybe $6 million.
This, according to no less an expert than Vern Swanson, the onetime BYU football player (he was a linebacker on the Cougars’ conference championship team in 1965) who recently retired as director of the Springville Art Museum after 32 years at the helm.
The Springville museum is where "Ichabod" was on display when the Draper schoolkids saw it in the spring of ’51, sporting a $1,200 price tag. As one of those Draper students, Luana Guymon, explained last month, the ninth-grade class pooled the $800 they’d raised at car washes and bake sales and appealed to Norman Rockwell’s soft side, who lowered his price so the kids could have it.
Before that sale was consummated, though, students at another school — Springville High — first had their eyes on Ichabod. They wanted to buy the painting in the fall of 1950 when it first came to Springville as part of a traveling exhibit hosted by the town museum.
Their enthusiasm was killed when the museum’s art committee told the students Norman Rockwell was an illustrator and not a serious artist. His painting didn’t meet the museum’s standards for acquisition.
This history is detailed in the book “Springville Museum of Art,” written by Vern Swanson, Ashlee Whitaker, Jessica Weiss and Nicole Romney and published in 2012, the year Swanson stepped down as museum director.
“It wasn’t considered ‘aht,’” said the effervescent Swanson last week as he and the museum's current director, Rita Wright, dug through the museum's basement archives to find the painting that the 1950 art committee gave the thumbs-up for instead of Ichabod.
Titled, “He Said, She Said,” it’s a modernistic painting done by Iver Rose that the Springville High students purchased for $800 and hung in the museum.
“Now it’s worth $1,200,” said Swanson. “Accounting for inflation, it’s lost money!”
Probably no one in Utah is more qualified to speak on art history, and occasionally poke fun at art critics, than Swanson, whose career has taken him to galleries and exhibits around the world. He has written or co-written no less than 16 books about artists and artwork, and after his retirement as Springville’s full-time director he remains a consultant to both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s largest auction houses.
He more than tripled the Springville Art Museum’s collection during his 32 years there, in addition to building a new wing and supplying an inexhaustible passion that revitalized the museum that earned Springville the sobriquet “Art City” in the first place.
He’d love to have the Rockwell still on premises in Springville. To his way of thinking, “Ichabod” should never have left. It got shanghaied by what he calls "an unnecessary sense of seriousness" by the art committee.
Today, it would be one of the museum’s crown jewels — by far its most valuable piece.
Tempting as it would be to sell, he wouldn’t think of it.
He does not feel the same way, however, about the painting when it’s tucked out of the way in an elementary school’s media room in Draper.
“Oh, if I was the school I’d sell it in a minute,” he said. “Take it to auction and get a good price.”
Why?
“Because they’re not an art museum. The Ichabod painting is an orphan; it’s out of context. It’s like having the Empire State Building in the middle of the Salt Flats.”
Besides that, the problem with schools owning paintings is “the curator is often the janitor.”
Swanson remembers once trying to buy a painting for the Springville museum from a high school in the northern part of the state. They turned him down on the basis that the artwork was part of their legacy. Several years later he inquired again about the piece and learned that, during a remodeling, the painting was stored in the boiler room, where the janitor burned it.
The same fate may not await the celebrated "Ichabod," but “think what the school district could do to aid their own school art programs,” if they had another $5 million or $6 million to spend.
In the meantime, "Ichabod" remains a testament to art being in the eye of the beholder.
Swanson remembers a subsequent Norman Rockwell exhibit that traveled through Springville, featuring Rockwell’s numerous paintings of Boy Scouts.
Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a longtime Scouter, was invited to the event. There, a member of the media thrust a microphone at President Hinckley and asked him if he considered Rockwell an illustrator or an artist.
After thinking a minute, President Hinckley said, “When he was alive he was an illustrator; now that he’s dead he’s an artist.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com