After 65 years, an acclaimed marble sculpture by Peter Stephenson is headed back to a Boston organization founded by Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere. The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association (MCMA) secured the return of 1850 neoclassical masterpiece The Wounded Indian from the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, ending a nearly 25-year dispute over the work’s rightful ownership.
The MCMA, which Revere founded in 1795 to provide vocational training in the mechanical arts, acquired the sculpture via a donation in 1893, and put it on display in its Boston headquarters. There it remained until 1958, when financial difficulties prompted the organization to sell its 300,000-square-foot building, which was demolished the following year. (The site is now home to the Prudential Center.)
“During the chaos of moving, MCMA officials were told that the Indian had been destroyed,” Greg Werkheiser, a lawyer for the association, told the New York Times.
But the work unexpectedly turned up in 1986, when museum founder Walter P. Chrysler Jr. (Walter Sr. was founder of the Chrysler Corporation) bought it from an art collector named James H. Ricau. The MCMA discovered the sculpture’s whereabouts in 1999—after a visitor to their offices saw a photo of the lost work and recognized it from a trip to the Virginia museum—and has sought its return ever since.