Have I got an Edward Hopper for you

Big Edward Hopper fan here.

I love his Ashcan School works, and pretty much all of his New York paintings. I love "Portland Light." I love "Nighthawks." I love his Gloucester paintings, and the Cape Cod ones. 

If I had a kabillion to spend on art, Hopper would be right up there as the object of my affection and purchase.

A friend of mine owns a garage sale painting that is likely a Hopper.

It's one of the New York works, unfinished, unsigned. It's not especially attractive. It's no "Nighthawks." It's no Orleans, Massachusetts, Esso station. 

When I saw it on my friend's wall, I was struck by it and thought it looked rather Hopper-esque. I kept coming back to it. 

When I asked my friend about it, he laughed and told me he'd gotten it, for ten bucks, at a garage sale at a Truro house that Hopper had spent a summer in on the Cape. 

He has never had it evaluated. Unfinished, unsigned, unproven, it's probably not worth all that much. But if you saw it, you'd know it was something. 

So is the 1903 self-portrait - done when Hopper was a very young man; just 21 - that is owned by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which rarely exhibits it. 

And Hopper wasn't wild about it, either. having "kept [it] far from public view at his childhood home in Nyack, N.Y." Maybe one step up from the one hanging on my friend Joe's wall. 

But the self-portrait has quite a story behind it. 

This humble self-portrait, however, is enmeshed in one of the art world’s more unusual disputes. Leading Hopper scholar Gail Levin insists this painting is a prime exhibit in what she claims was a vast swindle by the late Rev. Arthayer R. Sanborn, whom she says stole hundreds of early Hopper works when he lived near the family home in the 1960s. (Source: Boston Globe)

Turns out Levin's allegation that Sanborn was some sort of master art thief may be, for all her glowing Hopper-scholar credentials, nothing more than a bee in her bonnet.

Sanborn was a Baptist minister who lived near the Hopper home in Nyack, and frequently took care of Hopper's sister Marion during her old age, and also looked in on Hopper's widow who lived in Manhattan. Sanborn wasn't secretive at all about how he came into possession of hundreds of early Hoppers. They were, he said, gifts from Marion, who pretty much told him to take what he wanted and always said that her brother had no interest in his early work.

The Whitney Museum in New York, having been the beneficiary of the Hopper estate, houses the bulk of Hopper's "museum-quality work." The Whitney doesn't buy the Sanborn-as-swindler theory. Just because the works lack the detail of a modern provenance tracing every step of artist to gallery to owner to gallery to owner to museum doesn't mean they weren't gifted to Sanborn. 

The Whitney, in fact, has worked closely with the Sanborn family, and even: 

...established the Sanborn Hopper Archive in 2017 following a family gift of some 4,000 objects.

“The Museum is aware of decades-old claims that it was entitled to additional pieces,” the museum told the Globe in a statement. “The Museum has found no basis to pursue the matter and considers the issue of Hopper’s estate closed.”

Boston's MFA doesn't buy Levin's allegations, either.  

They came into possession of the Hopper self-portrait because Sanborn had gifted it to his friend and fellow-Baptist minister, William Brittain, and Brittain's wife, Katherine. It hung in their suburban-Boston living room for years until they sold it to the MFA to help fund their retirement. 

...the MFA curator [Victoria Reed] charged with researching such claims called Levin’s assertions “a hypothesis,” adding she doesn’t see “any real red flags.”

So, despite the fact that neither the Whitney nor the MFA wants anything to do with Levin's assertions, Levin is refusing to do a Frozen and "Let It Go"

 “I’m not making these accusations out of thin air,” said Levin, an art historian at Baruch College in Manhattan. “I have evidence.”

The "evidence" seems to be that, when it came to later art works, the Hoppers were meticulous in terms of documenting where it went. 

“There’s no legal way he got that art,” Levin alleged. “The MFA is asking us to suspend credulity.”

In making her allegations, Levin has not just besmirched the name of Arthayer Sanborn, she has "has publicly written that Brittain, a fellow minister, was "“a fence” for Sanborn."

Levin does have some supporters who think she may be onto something but, interestingly, neither the Whitney nor the MFA buys her theories.

“I don’t know that there’s any indication there of theft,” said Reed, who has presided over several high-profile returns. “We would need more evidence.”

Good story though - unless you're the offspring of Arthayer Sanborn or the William Brittain. (Wonder how my friend would be able to establish the provenance of his lesser Hopper.)