Church Had No Clue

Jerome · Mar 4, 2018

Visiting Italian stunned to see rare artwork in rural Virginia church's hallway:

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Federico Colagrande...and his girlfriend, Annette Bronson, filed into the church’s fellowship hall after the service along with the rest of the funeral attendees....he came face to face with an aging framed print...Colagrande recognized that he could be in the presence of what he called a “Müller Madonna.”
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“It’s always been in the hallway,” said church elder Joe Leslie...no one could identify where the print came from or how long it had been there.
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From the [1512] original...Friedrich Müller created the plates from which prints were made, and only a handful of those prints exist today.... they can be found in museums in the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the British Museum in London and this would be sixth print known in existence.
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Baptist Believer · Mar 5, 2018

A lot of art was taken as spoils of war from churches, individuals, and institutions during and immediately after World War II. A lot of it ended up in the United States. When things settled down in the late 1940s, a lot of soldiers realized that they had no use for a lot of those items, or felt guilt for taking them, and quietly donated them to religious institutions.

The Bible Museum at the Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas has a lot of items like that, including icons and altars from European churches.

Jerome · Mar 5, 2018

on the back of the print was the stamp of...19th-century art dealer — Goupil’s — with an address of Fifth Avenue in New York. There was also a mysterious red tag hanging on the back with a name: “Mrs. T.G. Brown.”
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rsr · Mar 5, 2018

That's intriguing. It's possible that "Mrs. G.T. Brown" is Albertine Espey, the widow of Grafton Tyler Brown, a noted African American lithographer and later painter. She was previously married to artist Edward Espey and married Brown after Espey's death. It's possible that the print at the church was once in her collection, since she inherited the collection of both men after their deaths.

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