Looking at pictures of the MCMA’s treasures in a binder, the customer mentioned he acknowledged a white marble statue depicting a wounded Native American warrior. He’d simply seen it on the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk.

Not attainable, the affiliation’s govt director responded. That one was destroyed throughout a transfer within the Nineteen Fifties. But the customer was adamant.

So the director traveled to the Chrysler to see for himself. And there it was: “The Wounded Indian,” an impressive sculpture by Peter Stephenson, created in 1850 and displayed for many years at Mechanics Hall in Boston till its reputed destruction.

How did it wind up in Norfolk? Answering that query took years of detective work and left a thriller at its core. Each establishment interprets that thriller in another way, and so the 2 are at loggerheads — each claiming possession of one of many Chrysler’s signature artworks.

The dispute comes at a time when museums are more and more wrestling with questions on legitimacy of possession and trying to right the wrongs of the previous. Last October, the Smithsonian Institution joined different organizations all over the world in returning Benin bronzes to Nigeria, the place that they had been looted by the British military greater than a century in the past. The Chrysler itself is within the means of returning two Nigerian items.

The case of “The Wounded Indian,” which hinges on occasions greater than 60 years in the past that no dwelling individual is thought to have witnessed, has not been so readily resolved. It includes two freewheeling characters from the artwork world of the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies and pits one nonprofit group group in opposition to one other.

The dispute “sounds like a question on a law school final exam, given the complicated and different issues which are coming into play here,” mentioned Thomas Danziger, a New York lawyer with a specialty in artwork provenance who just isn’t concerned on this case.

Each facet, although, sees it very clearly.

“I feel strongly that we have the ethical and legal right to this piece,” Chrysler museum director Erik Neil mentioned in an interview with The Washington Post.

“We just reached the point where we said, this is crazy. We want the damn thing back,” mentioned Chuck Sulkala, president of the MCMA board. “It’s that simple.”

“The Wounded Indian” wasn’t all the time one thing folks would combat over.

Its sculptor, Stephenson, was a little-known Boston artist when he debuted his formidable masterpiece in England in 1851. The sculpture drew fast consideration as the primary main work carved completely from American marble — quarried in Vermont — and for its beautiful magnificence.

The portrait of a dying warrior who has simply pulled an arrow out of his chest was primarily based on a well-known sculpture from antiquity referred to as “The Dying Gaul.” Stephenson received reward for his consideration to element — the wonderful veins within the warrior’s legs and arms, the folds of his abdomen, the general look that led one reviewer to say he may inform the topic was a woodlands Indian, not from the plains.

And the topic was well timed, talking to a brand new consciousness that the nation’s Indigenous cultures had been disappearing as Europeans pushed westward.

But Stephenson struggled to discover a marketplace for his creation after it returned to Boston. He developed a fame for carving portrait busts of town’s elite, however by no means surpassed “The Wounded Indian” and died in 1861, on the age of 37, in a psychological facility.

After that, the destiny of the sculpture grows murky. The Chrysler obtained it in 1986 when the museum’s benefactor — Walter P. Chrysler Jr., son of the automaker — acquired a batch of marble statues from a collector named James H. Ricau.

The museum had little concept the place the statue had been for greater than a century. In “A Marble Quarry,” a ebook about Ricau’s assortment of sculptures revealed by the Chrysler in 1997, the possession historical past of “The Wounded Indian” has solely two entries: A Boston charitable establishment referred to as the Mercantile Library Association had acquired it “by 1856.” And Ricau owned it “by 1967.”

When the MCMA confirmed up in 1999 elevating questions, the museum steered that the affiliation’s statue had been a duplicate. Its members weren’t well-equipped to determine if that was true.

For one factor, lots of the MCMA’s paperwork had been destroyed in a warehouse hearth in 1973. And the group now not had any expertise in wonderful arts.

The affiliation was based at a time when artwork was thought-about a talented commerce, with members that included architects, publishers and shipbuilders. During the 1800s, the group amassed a group of works that included work by the artist Jane Stuart and scientific gear that belonged to Benjamin Franklin.

Today’s members, with headquarters in a small constructing in Quincy, Mass., are usually concerned in companies corresponding to metallic fabrication and auto restore.

The affiliation initially had no plans to reclaim the statue, mentioned Paul Revere III, a Boston-area legal professional and fourth-great grandson of the group’s founder. It has nowhere to completely show it, no approach to shield it.

“We originally came to the Chrysler and said, ‘Look, you can have it, we’d just like to try to get it back here for six months … to share it with the people of Boston,’” Revere mentioned.

But aside from a number of letters between the museum and the MCMA, the problem went dormant for a few years, the foremost questions unanswered. In 2016, when somebody talked about “The Wounded Indian” at an affiliation board assembly, member Peter Lemonias determined to attempt fixing what had grow to be institutional folklore.

“I’m not an art historian,” mentioned Lemonias, who’s retiring from his metallic ending enterprise. “But I’ve kind of immersed myself in this world.”

He employed a graduate scholar one summer time for assist with analysis and leaned on a buddy who labored within the library on the Boston Globe. After a number of years, the board retained a legislation agency, Cultural Heritage Partners, which focuses on artwork possession circumstances. Slowly the story started to emerge.

A path of letters, modern information stories and images confirmed that the statue had handed from Boston’s Mercantile Library, which was not affiliated with the MCMA, to a rich collector named William Emerson Baker in 1877. Baker displayed it in a sculpture backyard till his demise; his widow offered the statue and different items to a James W. Bartlett in 1889.

Bartlett put the statue in storage within the basement of the MCMA. In 1893, Bartlett donated the statue to the affiliation on the situation that the members clear it and show it for the general public. The MCMA put in it in a particular nook within the huge exhibit corridor, and there it sat till the corridor was offered 65 years later, in 1958.

There’s no official report for what occurred subsequent. The affiliation had employed staff to haul generations of artifacts out of the corridor. Lemonias mentioned that within the hubbub of the transfer — some gadgets going into storage, others to numerous establishments — “The Wounded Indian” disappeared.

“Word went back to the board that ‘The Wounded Indian’ was damaged beyond repair and was disposed of in this chaos,” Lemonias mentioned. All that remained was a photograph, the story of the misplaced treasure handed down from member to member. And that, he mentioned, was all anybody on the MCMA knew till the customer who had seen it stopped by 40 years later.

Meanwhile, in Norfolk, the statue arrived in 1986 within the final main batch of acquisitions by the museum’s benefactor, Walter Chrysler. Its curators established solely that Ricau will need to have owned it by 1967 as a result of that yr the Baltimore Museum of Art had written him to request it for an exhibit.

Ricau, who died in 1993, was an eccentric character who stuffed an outdated home on the Hudson River with American marble statues that, for a time within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, had little worth within the market. He socialized with high-end artwork professionals in addition to characters on the perimeter; notorious artwork forger Ken Perenyi has claimed in his memoir and in published interviews that Ricau was an early supporter of his efforts to rip-off collectors.

Ricau snapped up gadgets primarily based on what he favored and will afford, and “he had little concern for documentation, for either posterity or profit,” former Chrysler curator H. Nichols B. Clark wrote within the museum’s ebook concerning the statues.

Chrysler himself was an idiosyncratic collector who didn’t usually trouble with substantiating his finds.

“We don’t have full provenance on everything from Walter’s collection,” Neil, the museum director, mentioned. “They just — they were buying and trading, and some things we do [have documentation for] and some things we don’t. Believe me, I wish we had more documentation.”

In the artwork world, provenance — or possession historical past — is essential in establishing the worth and significance of a chunk. But there’s additionally a authorized purpose for it: “Museums need to know that they truly own an artwork,” the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles — which has confronted high-profile ownership questions — says in an article on its web site.

Clark, the previous Chrysler curator of American artwork, wrote to a number of Boston establishments in 1991 attempting to shut the gaps within the “The Wounded Indian’s” historical past, in accordance with paperwork obtained by the MCMA’s legislation agency.

To the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Clark wrote that Ricau “is somewhat vague about where he got it.” While the collector mentioned he bought the statue from a Boston gallery, Clark wrote, “they have no record of such a transaction which is very unusual for them.”

In latest years, because the back-and-forth with the MCMA has performed out, the museum has up to date its provenance for the piece. It now not questions whether or not there might need been a duplicate and lists the mechanics affiliation because the proprietor earlier than Ricau.

Neil, who has been the museum’s govt director for 9 years, mentioned he sympathizes with the affiliation however thinks the central difficulty is clear.

“The institution disposed of it as damaged in the fifties,” he mentioned.

Now, Neil mentioned, the members remorse that call. “I get that. But it doesn’t it mean that it was illegal or unjustified or anything nefarious,” he mentioned. “They’re not a museum. They were moving. It’s a big, hulking piece of marble. You could absolutely understand why.”

He added that Ricau had not stashed the statue in a shed someplace — it had been on mortgage to a museum in Newark, the place it was displayed for some 10 years earlier than Chrysler acquired it.

The Chrysler’s data point out that the piece arrived lacking all of the fingers from the determine’s left hand in addition to a part of the hair and an arrow shaft. Those options have been changed, and the statue totally cleaned.

Thaddeus Stauber, a lawyer in Los Angeles with the agency Nixon Peabody who has lengthy expertise in artwork possession circumstances however no involvement on this one, mentioned he’s not stunned by the shortage of a doc path.

Buying a automobile or home may generate titles and deeds, Stauber mentioned, however “art has never been that way, there’s not a central required registry.”

Based on an outline of the Chrysler case, Stauber mentioned it’s not essentially a matter of who’s proper or flawed. “Nobody is a bad person in this, nobody is ill-intended. They’re trying to get to the merits of it but likely can’t because of the passage of time and loss or lack of documentation,” he mentioned.

The two sides got here near resolving their variations in late 2020. Lawyers for the affiliation needed the MCMA’s possession acknowledged; they needed the statue to make a short lived look in Boston; they usually needed $200,000 to cowl authorized and analysis bills.

A deputy metropolis legal professional for town of Norfolk, which gives a few of the museum’s $10 million annual working finances, replied three months later. Yes on the credit score; possibly on the mortgage of the paintings; no manner on the cost, calling it a “frankly outrageous monetary demand.”

Last yr, when the affiliation lastly obtained entry to all of the documentation held by the museum — such because the 1991 letters outlining the trouble to pin down Ricau’s possession — its legal professionals accused the museum of unhealthy religion. Among different particulars, the paperwork confirmed that the Chrysler continued to query whether or not the MCMA’s statue was a duplicate lengthy after museum officers knew that wasn’t the case, mentioned Greg Werkheiser, a Richmond-based lawyer representing the affiliation.

“We said this dishonesty is unacceptable and we’re no longer negotiating for the statue to stay there,” Werkheiser mentioned.

A spokeswoman for the museum rejected the accusation, including that director Neil “can’t speak to what was done before he arrived.” For a time, there was “legitimate doubt” about whether or not the affiliation had owned a duplicate, spokeswoman Ashley Grove Mars mentioned through e mail.

After extra analysis, the museum “made the determination that we are probably dealing with just one marble sculpture,” Mars mentioned. But the group “has never produced a credible explanation of how they disposed of the sculpture in the 1950s.”

Lemonias mentioned the MCMA just lately reported the case to the FBI, reasoning that no matter occurred to the statue in 1958 amounted to theft. A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Boston area workplace declined to touch upon the scenario. The museum mentioned it has not been contacted by anybody in legislation enforcement.

Sulkala, the affiliation’s president, mentioned he feels annoyed that what began as a easy effort at recognition has reached such an deadlock. But the longtime auto physique restore store proprietor visited the Chrysler a few years in the past and got here away impressed.

“I will say this — they’ve done a remarkable job in showing it,” he mentioned. “The Wounded Indian” sits within the heart of a dark-walled room, surrounded by large work of the early American wilderness. The marble determine, roughly life-size, is seen from no less than 4 galleries away, framed by doorways and highlighted underneath dramatic lighting.

“To see it — I won’t say I was tearful, but it leaves such an impression,” Sulkala mentioned. “It is just magnificent. Honestly, I’m not one who visits art museums, but I tell you what. This was a special piece of sculpture.”

Story enhancing by Jennifer Barrios. Photo enhancing by Mark Miller. Copy enhancing by Angela Mecca. Design by Jennifer Reed.