LOST ROCKWELL PAINTING RESURFACES AFTER 45 YEARS

Norman Rockwell’s famous 1936 painting, “Tom Sawyer Whitewashing the Fence,” is now the property of a museum here after being out of public view for 45 years, museum officials said.

The William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum announced that it has acquired the work through the will of a private collector. “All these years the painting was sitting in Rockport, Maine, in the home of the late Clifford Smith,” said Marius B. Peladeau, director of the museum.

The painting depicts one of the most famous scenes from Mark Twain’s novel of boyhood in Hannibal, Mo. Tom Sawyer, assigned to whitewash a fence, gets the job done by convincing the other neighborhood kids that they can’t resist doing it for him.

Somewhat more mysterious has been the saga of the painting itself. According to the museum, Rockwell received a commission from the Heritage Press in the mid-1930s for eight illustrations for a new edition of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Rockwell retained ownership of the canvases themselves and lent them to the Mark Twain Memorial in Hannibal. In 1940, the paintings were sent back to Rockwell for inclusion in an exhibition of his art.

When the Rockwell exhibition ended, the artist shipped the paintings back to Hannibal. But when they arrived, the memorial’s staff found the whitewashing painting missing.

They contacted Rockwell, who confessed that the canvas had been “mistakenly sold,” the museum said.

Experts have been searching for the painting ever since. In 1972, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp depicting the Tom Sawyer canvas, raising hope that the owner of the painting would come forth, the museum said.