President Kirkland Is Coming Home

A heisted portrait of early 19th century Harvard President John T. Kirkland, which resurfaced in upstate New York earlier this month, is almost certainly not an original Gilbert Stuart painting, an art historian told The Crimson in a phone interview last night.

Although a similar portrait of Kirkland, painted by Stuart, sold for $182,000 in Manchester, N.H., this past summer, the stolen Harvard-owned version appears to be only a copy and is therefore worth considerably less.

The comments by Emory University art historian Dorinda Evans, an expert on Stuart’s work, mark the latest twist in the mysterious saga of the Kirkland painting, which disappeared from Harvard in 1968.

The painting sold for $7,500 at Stair Galleries in Hudson, N.Y. more than a week ago—as part of the sale of the eccentric and enigmatic William M. V. Kingsland’s estate.

The Crimson first reported on its Web site Thursday afternoon that two long lost Harvard paintings had appeared at the Stair auction.

And The Crimson reported Friday morning that one of the two paintings bore a striking resemblance to Stuart’s 1816 portrait of Kirkland. The other is a 1790 portrait of a British nobleman by the American artist John Singleton Copley.

Stuart is one of early America’s most famous portraitists, best known for his more than 60 renderings of George Washington—one of which appears on the dollar bill.

Born in Newport, R.I., in 1775, Stuart set off for London as a young man to improve his portrait-painting skills under the tutelage of masters. He returned to his native land in the 1790s and ultimately settled in Boston. He painted more than 1,000 portraits before his death in 1828—including illustrious Harvard alums such as founding father John Adams, Class of 1755, and Kirkland, Class of 1789, a clergyman who led Harvard from 1810 to 1828 and presided over the establishment of the University’s law school.

Evans, the author of “The Genius of Gilbert Stuart,” said last night that the Kirkland portrait at Stair Galleries “is not convincing.”

“It doesn’t look like a Gilbert Stuart,” she said. “I don’t think that it’s by him.”

The authentic Stuart portrait of Kirkland shows half of the then-Harvard president’s body, with the sitter holding a Bible, according to a list of Stuart’s works published in 1926.

The 1926 book notes that “a copy of this portrait is in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts.” It is unclear where the painting hung when it was stolen in 1968.

A THREE-DECADE CASE

Harvard University Art Museums spokesman Daron J. Manoogian confirmed Friday that the paintings sold at the Kingsland auction are Copley’s “Second Earl of Bessborough” and a Kirkland portrait that matches an item missing from Harvard’s collection.

But Manoogian could not say whether the Kirkland portrait was an original by Stuart or a copy.

The FBI confirmed on Saturday that it is investigating the sale of stolen artwork at the Kingsland estate auction.

“We’re investigating to determine how many of them were stolen,” said James Margolin, a spokesman for the bureau’s New York office. “We don’t have a complete accounting of what was in the estate.”

STAIR TAKES STEPS

The case puts Stair Galleries in quiet Hudson—a riverside town of about 8,000 people more than 100 miles north of New York City—in the spotlight.

The gallery’s president, Colin Stair, said that Kingsland had no will and no living heirs.

As a result, Stair said, the distribution of his possessions was the charge of a public commissioner. Kingsland’s works were consigned by that commissioner to auction house Christie’s as well as Stair Galleries.

By last Monday morning, Stair said, his auction house had halted the sale of 250 objects from Kingsland’s estate.

But a third of the objects in Kingsland’s estate had already been taken off-site by their buyers.

The gallery “started calling successful purchasers,” Stair said—encountering less-than-enthusiastic responses. “We’ve been cursed in every language,” Stair quipped.

The estate already had generated $250,000 in sales. It is unclear how Kingsland amassed his fortune. In fact, Kingsland’s age, the location of his primary residence, and his cause of death are all unknown, according to news reports.

Stair said that “there was absolutely no way...for any regional auction house to tell” if Kingsland’s belongings were stolen.

Stair added that Kingsland’s paintings were not listed in the International Foundation for Art Research database, which tracks stolen work.

The dealer who had bought the paintings at the Kingsland auction was the first person to discover that one had been in the Harvard collections, Stair said. “He’s in part a hero,” Stair said of the dealer.

—Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.