QUICK TAKES - April 2, 2009

An important 19th century painting has been brought back to public view after languishing for decades, forgotten beneath a pile of reproductions in a church closet.

The Rev. Steven Olson of Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Dassel, Minn., approached the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2007, looking for advice on how to preserve a painting he had found in a janitor’s closet.

The museum’s experts now have determined that the painting was the long-forgotten “Christus Consolator,” which was painted by the Dutch-born, French-trained artist Ary Scheffer, one of the pre-eminent Romantic painters in Paris of the first half of the 19th century.

Scheffer’s 1851 work was iconic in its day, and copies enjoyed wide circulation in Europe and America. But the original went unrecognized for 70 years in Dassel, a town of 1,300 people 50 miles west of Minneapolis, until Olson came across it in the closet, underneath a pile of art reproductions.