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The mystery surrounding a painting belonging to Central Lutheran Church deepened recently when a Winona Post reader noticed that the painting pictured with the original story looked familiar. Very familiar.
In fact, Arlene Prosen said, it looks exactly like a painting that hangs in the church of her childhood in Hayfield, Minnesota. Prosen said she directed the photo to a friend who also attended the Trinity Lutheran Church in Hayfield and the pair agree: It's the same.
The original Winona Post story detailed the restoration work of local artist John Durfey on a seven-foot-tall oil painting that had been in storage at Central Lutheran Church.
The painting features a resurrection scene with an angel and several women at Christ's tomb, and though it is signed in pencil on the back by someone named Orvin Olson, not much else is known about the origin of the art.
Church officials say they don't know exactly when the painting was created, but that it hung in the congregation's original building on Center Street until the church moved to a new building on Huff in 1954. After that point the painting hung in a chapel at Central Lutheran until the chapel was remodeled for a different use.
The original church building dates back to the late 1800s and there were Olsons among the founding membership, but Winona archives have turned up no record of an Orvin Olson around that time or into the 1950s.
An address, 753 East Lake Boulevard, and a date, September 17, 1954, scribbled on the back of the painting also yielded no clues to its origins. Durfey originally speculated the date and address might have represented the date and location it was created, but Central Lutheran Pastor Jeff Franko said his understanding is that the painting existed before the new church was built in 1954.
Prosen said the painting in Hayfield is virtually identical except that it is much taller than the Winona painting, perhaps twice as tall.
Prosen said she is 75 and the painting in Hayfield, which is 20 miles west of Rochester, has been standing behind the altar for as long as she can remember. "That painting was there since I was an itty bitty girl," she said. "I'm sure it was there since the church was built."
Trinity Lutheran Church was built in the early 1920s, and at 78, parishioner Arlene Bjornson has been there almost the whole time.
She is, Trinity office staff said, the unofficial expert on historical issues about the church, and it turns out Bjornson has been exploring a little mystery of her own regarding the enormous resurrection painting at Trinity.
A while ago, Bjornson said, she stumbled across an article about a church in New York, a Lutheran church with a lovely sanctuary. But it was a photo of the sanctuary that caught Bjornson's eye, as she spotted the unquestionable twin of her beloved painting in Hayfield hanging inside.
Not an Internet user, Bjornson said she hasn't been able to learn much more about the matching painting in New York, but she speculates, like Prosen, that perhaps a well-known artist concentrating on Lutheran churches around the country brought re-creations of the same scene to a variety of communities.
Like the Central painting, the Hayfield painting is not signed on the front, and it is firmly mounted to a wall so there is no way to know if Orvin Olson is credited with the work on the back like Central's.
Bjornson was mildly surprised to hear of another painting matching the one at Trinity, but not terribly. "I love that picture. Every Sunday when I go to church I look at the beautiful colors. I'm a painter too."
She wonders whether all three and possibly more are reproductions of a more famous piece, but she has been unable to find any reference to such a painting in the countless art books she has perused. "It's such a beautiful painting that I can't believe I wouldn't find it in a book of some kind," she said. "My ancestors were the ones who built that church, you think I'd know."
Durfey, who has nearly completed restoration on the piece for Central, was intrigued by the revelation that the painting had a twin and said he is eager to see the one at Trinity in person. An artist's eye can discern the exact color palette of oil paints used as well as technique, and it should be relatively easy for him to tell whether they were created by the same artist.
Until he makes that trip, whether they were will remain a mystery, not to mention the matter of who Orvin Olson was and when exactly he created these heirloom images parishioners still love today.
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