Lost Masterpiece Discovered in School Library

Christie's plans to auction a long-lost pre-Raphaelite painting discovered two years ago in the library of the Old Lyme Center School in Connecticut. The masterpiece, uncovered by elementary school student Bingham Bryant, is expected to bring up to £600,000, or $854,307.

Bryant, now 12, was transfixed by an old, grimy painting hanging above the school librarian's desk. "There was something about it," he told London's Evening Standard . "I suspected it might be very valuable."

Bingham persuaded his father—a dealer of 18th- and 19th-century military materials—to look at the painting. Christopher Bryant discovered that the work, entitled The Fate of Persephone (1878), was a rare oil painting by British artist Walter Crane, a noted member of the Arts and Crafts movement. Experts have confirmed the finding.

How did this treasure end up in a Connecticut school library? Christopher Bryant retraced the work's unlikely journey. In 1923, a Berlin dealer sold it to Brian Hooker, an author and professor of rhetoric at Yale University. Hooker had hoped to hang the painting in a house he planned to build. But the house was never built, and Hooker loaned the work to the elementary school around 1935. When he died in 1946, at 66, the only painting Hooker ever purchased was valued at $200.

Bryant located Hooker's two surviving daughters, now octogenarians, who are the painting's legal heirs. They agreed to sell, and Christie's London will hold the auction on June 12.