Found & Lost

Masterworks of art. once out of the artist's studio, are often launched on mysterious and perilous careers. Altered out of recognition, tucked away in vaults. revered and then forgotten in dark church recesses, they have a way of dropping from sight, unexpectedly turning up in odd places. Last week two rediscoveries and one disappearance made art news in the U.S.:

P:A dramatically lighted Crucifixion by Francisco de Zurbaran, Spain's i;th century master, made its reappearance at Chicago's Art Institute, an event the institute hailed as "one of the most remarkable 'recoveries' in art history." The Crucifixion, originally painted for Seville's white-robed Dominicans, dates from 1627, the period of Zurbaran's arrival as a mature artist. Seized by Napoleon's troops around 1807, it turned up in 1880 in the hands of Spain's Duke of Alba, who donated it to a Jesuit seminary in Canterbury, England. In 1950 the painting turned up again, heavily repainted, and was offered for sale first to the Louvre, which turned it down, then to a Paris art dealer. Last year Chicago Art Institute Director Daniel Catton Rich saw a photograph of the disputed masterpiece. He cabled a colleague to check the original, and the painting was finally authenticated by experts in Barcelona and Madrid. Last week The Crucifixion hung in the Chicago Institute's Spanish Gallery with the institute's other two Zurbarans. Said Director Rich with understandable satisfaction: "In my opinion, it is one of the greatest paintings by Zurbaran."

P:A Rembrandt portrait, probably of his son Titus, so little known that it has been overlooked even by most Rembrandt scholars, was purchased by the Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford, Conn, for a price estimated at $130,000 to $150,000.

The museum considered it well worth the purchase price, cited the opinion of Harvard's Rembrandt Scholar Jakob Rosenberg: "The portrait of a young man with beret and gold chain is one of the finest Rembrandts that ever came to this country." Last exhibited 45 years ago at London's Royal Academy, the painting has been hidden from view since then in a private English collection. Covered with coats of varnish. Hartford's new Rembrandt had to be painstakingly cleaned before the artist's original signature was uncovered. The date. 1655, placed the painting in the period when family misfortunes and declining popularity had led Rembrandt to retire to his house in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter. There he painted what he loved most: his companion and mistress Hendrickje, his ailing son Titus, and his magnificently wrought Biblical scenes. One problem still baffled experts. The three-quarter-length figure, dressed in the heavy folds of a reddish brown cloak, is a young man of 18 or 20. Titus in 1655 was only a lad of 15. The experts' explanation: Rembrandt often used his models only as points of departure, aged and emphasized features at will.

P:A Renoir canvas, showing a young woman with a large rose in her hair, was reported missing from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first major art theft in the Philadelphia museum's history. What made the theft doubly embarrassing: the stolen canvas was one of 19 Renoirs on loan from an anonymous European collection since 1937. The thief had pried the small to-by-i 2-inch canvas from its frame one day last month, probably during the 2 p.m. shifts of the museum guards, then apparently walked out with the canvas under his coat.

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