A treasure in plain sight

For generations, the giant painting of white-robed Afghan tribesmen and their horses resting on a mountaintop made children stop and wonder how such a colorful canvas ended up hanging on an auditorium wall of their public school in North Attleborough.

"We'd always look at the painting and say that is a huge painting, but what is it doing here?" said John C. Rhyno, the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, who graduated in 1966 when the building housed the high school.

Then in December, a parishioner attending a church service in the auditorium of what is now the Community School for kindergarten through fifth grade wondered the same thing and decided to find the answer.

What Richard Paynton discovered shocked the town of 28,000 near the Rhode Island border and sparked a debate about money, a community's values, and culture.

Searching on the Internet, Paynton learned that the artist, Alexandre Iacovleff, was an academy-trained Russian who served as director of the Painting Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1934 to 1937. He painted the work in 1932, six years before his death in Paris in 1938. While not among the best known of Russian artists, he traveled the world and was known for vivid, realist paintings of people foreign to European high society: Nigerian sultans, Congolese women, Japanese Kabuki dancers, and Afghan horsemen.

Intrigued by Paynton's discovery, school officials invited Sotheby's to examine the work, which was donated to the school in 1951 by William Charles Thompson. Thompson, a North Attleborough resident and prominent art dealer, said his gift should be "appreciated by the students," according to recently unearthed minutes from a 1951 School Committee meeting.

The auction house's appraisal left school officials almost speechless. They were told last month that the 7-by-10-foot vertical work titled " Afghans" was valued at $600,000 to $800,000 and could fetch twice that at auction.

Indeed, one of Iacovleff's works, "Three Women in a Box at the Theater," recently fetched $1.9 million at Sotheby's in London.

"I was stunned," Rhyno said yesterday. "I don't think anybody had any idea what its worth was."

Town leaders decided to auction the painting, but fearing theft, kept news of the painting's value quiet until they could arrange for it to be shipped to Sotheby's in New York City. Last Thursday, under the watchful eye of the town police chief, workers removed the painting from the wall where Thompson had it displayed 56 years ago, and sent it to market. "This has been like a covert mission for the School Committee chairman and myself," said the superintendent of schools, Richard A. Smith.

Now, town officials are dreaming of ways to spend the windfall.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the auction block. Greg Smith, Thompson's grandson, read about the planned sale in the Sun Chronicle on Saturday and managed to persuade town officials to postpone the auction -- for the time being.

"We thought that we should have been notified before they took it off the wall where my grandfather hung it," said Smith, 52, a North Attleborough manufacturer. "We're now moving past what happened and we're tying to arrange a way to honor the gift's intent."

School officials said yesterday they would appoint a special committee to decide the fate of the painting -- which was valued at $3,500 when it was donated to the school. They say they want to honor Smith's wishes, but insist the painting is their property, and can help whittle down the town's municipal wish list, which includes a new library, school building, and state-of-the-art fire station.

"It's not every day someone tells you something in your building could be worth a significant amount of money and is a significant work of art, as well," said David Manoogian, chairman of the School Committee. "It's a nice problem to have, just thinking about what to do with the money if you sell it."

Officials also say they cannot afford to safely and properly maintain an expensive work of art.

They are amazed " Afghans" survived decades of unruly schoolchildren passing by every day.

"I'm really surprised they didn't throw a book at it, or banana peel," Manoogian said.

If the painting is placed on the market, it could prompt a feeding frenzy among eager buyers, especially Russians, said Maureen O'Brien, curator of painting and sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art.

But if the painting's new resting place becomes a St. Petersburg salon, or a gallery in Kiev, part of North Attleborough will feel a loss that money cannot soothe.

"I always admired it," said William Kelly, the former superintendent of schools. "It's a handsome painting with great color. It's irreplaceable. And coming from the humanities side of academia, I'd like to think the town could appreciate it."

Kelly, a former English teacher, noted the appraised value is but a fraction of the schools' annual budget of about $35 million.

Rhyno agrees. Selling the painting would require the approval of the Board of Selectmen and School Committee, he said. And he, for one, hopes the town will not sell " Afghans" without the consent of Thompson's heirs.

"Once it's gone, it's gone," Rhyno said. "A part of our history is gone."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.