[MSN] Historic painting swiped from church

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Historic painting swiped from church
150-year-old Yosemite scene by female artist irreplaceable, pastor says
By M.S. Enkoji -- Bee Staff Writer

Published 12:01 am PDT Wednesday, June 7, 2006

It wasn't quite the audacious theft of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream,"
or the boldness of the thieves armed with submachine guns who swiped
Rembrandt's "Self-Portrait," but by God, this painting was in a church --
and someone stole it right off the wall.
"When you see that empty wall, it brings a whole flood of emotions," said
Lucile Whittier, a church member of Pioneer Congregational Church United
Church of Christ in midtown Sacramento. "How could somebody steal something
like that?"

For 107 years, the city's oldest congregation, which began in 1848 in a tent
outside the under-construction Sutter's Fort, has owned a historically
significant oil painting by Mary Park Benton of Yosemite Valley. The
sister-in-law of the church's founding minister, Benton was one of the first
female California landscape artists to emerge from a male-dominated field,
according to several California art curators.

Someone broke into the L Street church sometime Thursday night or early
Friday morning, passed by computers and a television, headed for a wall
facing a church entrance, grabbed the 5-foot-by-4-foot landscape, and then
slipped away into the night.

Church members arriving early for Sunday services gasped with horror when
they heard the treasured art's fate.

"I've been seeing it every Sunday since I moved to Sacramento in 1956,"
Whittier said. "It's a very spectacular picture."

The Rev. Jim Truesdell said he had to preach Sunday to congregation members
weeping in the pews.

"This is not something you can replace," he said, showing the blank wall
Tuesday where the Yosemite Valley once dominated. Two flower arrangements
had been positioned to mask the bareness.

The church is keeping the exact monetary value of the painting low-key, said
Kevin Manz, who is chairman of the church's property committee. He said it
was more than $10,000 but less than $500,000. And he said the church is
looking into "increased security."

The painting was probably done in 1855 by Benton and came to the church in
1899 through her brother-in-law's estate, Manz said.

"The thieves knew what they were doing," said Sacramento Police Sgt. Terrell
Marshall. "They knew the value of it.

"How anybody would stoop that low to come into a house of God to do
something like that," Marshall said.

Investigators were still sifting through evidence on Tuesday, he said.

If the thieves were not particularly savvy, detectives might find the
painting dumped at a pawnshop or a flea market, even popping up on eBay, the
online auction site, Marshall said. But if they were sophisticated, it could
vanish into a sizeable black market, he said.

"It's a shame for beautiful art to be hidden," Whittier said, recalling the
soaring mountains that dwarfed the valley floor in the warm-weather scene.

Manz, the church property chairman, said Benton was significant because she
belonged to a family integral to the valley and was a pupil of Thomas Hill,
one of the most famous 19th-century California landscape artists.

If the painting was done in 1855, chances are good Benton didn't haul easel
and brush into Yosemite Valley, said Gary Kurutz, curator of special
collections for the California State Library.

"It was a real rough trip then," he said.

Benton did show her work at the California State Fair in 1859 and in 1866
and at the Mechanic's Institute Fair in San Francisco between 1857 and 1877,
he said.

Consulting art scholar accounts, Scott Shields, curator at Sacramento's
Crocker Art Museum, said the California Historical Society owns another of
Benton's paintings, which dates from 1857.

Born in Boston, Benton joined her minister husband in San Francisco in 1855.
She taught art in public schools in San Francisco and Oakland until she died
in 1910.

Shields was unaware of the church's painting but said it was a shame it
wasn't on the museum's wall: "We've been trying to add more women to the
collections."

Churches are becoming crime victims more often, Marshall said.

Consider the hapless theft at another Sacramento church. A man came into the
church on May 3 and told someone there he needed money to pay off some angry
drug dealers. The church worker directed the man to social agencies for
help, but that night, police say, he broke in and uprooted a pillar with the
collection box.

The collection box held $4, which didn't appease the drug dealers, who beat
up the church thief. Several weeks later, police arrested a 36-year-old man
and charged him with grand theft: The stolen pillar, found discarded in a
park, was worth $800.



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TOP 10 ART CRIMES
The FBI's Art Crime Team posted 10 criminal cases in November that represent
losses of up to $600 million, in an industry with overall losses of up to $6
billion a year. The works of art are considered priceless in terms of their
cultural value:
. 7,000 to 10,000 looted and stolen Iraqi artifacts, 2003

. 12 paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1990

. Two Renoirs and a Rembrandt stolen from Sweden's National Museum, 2000
(Recovered)

. Munch's "The Scream" and "The Madonna" stolen from the Munch Museum in
Oslo, 2004

. Benevenuto Cellini "Salt Cellar" from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum,
2003

. Caravaggio's "Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco" from Palermo,
1969

. Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius violin from a New York apartment, 1995

. Two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam's Vincent Van Gogh Museum, 2002

. Cezanne's "View of Auvers-sur-Oise" from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, 1999

. Da Vinci's "Madonna of the Yarnwinder" from Scotland's Drumlanrig Castle,
2003

For more information, see www.fbi.gov/page2/nov05/toptenart111505.htm


Mary Park Seavey Benton
. Born in Boston in 1815.
. Began painting as a teenager, had a New York City studio where she also
taught and exhibited.

. Came to California in 1855 to join her minister husband.

. Taught in Bay Area schools and worked for prison reform.

. Died in 1910, buried in a family plot at Mountain View Cemetery where her
mentor, landscape artist Thomas Hill, is also buried.


About the writer:
The Bee's M.S. Enkoji can be reached at (916) 321-1106 or
menkoji at sacbee.com.

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