Pαʂʂιɳɠ Dσɯɳ
A ƚɾυҽ ʂƚσɾყ αზσυƚ ʂƚυϝϝ
A relative of mine by marriage was given a piece of art worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not worth in the sense of possibly being worth a lot in a possible sale, but truly worth a large amount of real money. I won’t go into details about the artwork, or about the brewing squabble it’s already the cause of in that branch of my family. That’s not my story to tell, but the provenance of this artwork is an interesting tidbit in itself.
In the 1970s, a public school teacher who was from a wealthy, art-collecting family, who had been very well and every expensively privately educated in the Liberal Arts, accepted a job at a very remote rural public school. His choice of profession had angered his family to the point that he’d been cut off financially altogether and even disinherited. In this remote region, through a shared interest in a game I won’t name, this teacher became close friends with an Indigenous artist who was famous among his own people. After several years of friendship, the artist asked the teacher what he could give to him as a gift, in honor of their years of regular gaming together.
The teacher asked for a set of their game to be made by the artist himself. The artist agreed, and for a year he crafted by hand all the various parts of the game, eventually presenting it to the teacher in complete form. The art was of exquisite, uniquely exquisite, craftsmanship and material. The teacher’s background and education made that instantly clear to him.
The teacher became engaged to a woman from his own hometown and was set to return there, to get married and start a family. He had no capital however, nor did his fiancée. Through his artist friend, the teacher discovered that the area was actually teeming with Indigenous artists of extremely refined talents. He also discovered, as is always the case, that the poorer among these artists were prepared to sell their productions to the teacher at low prices, for there was no market for their work, and wouldn’t be for decades into the future. Cash in hand is preferable to professional dignity when you’re hungry.
With an eye to curating an entirely unique collection and gaining enough in the sale of it for a house deposit in his hometown, the teacher carefully selected his purchases from the artists with his well educated eye. Although it took him 3 years to find a buyer who was willing to buy the collection in total for the sum he asked, he did find a buyer, and that buyer was the boss of my relative’s father. The teacher hadn’t included the game made by his friend in the collection he offered for sale, but he made the mistake of leaving it in the same room where he displayed his wares. The buyer, a very rich man, became determined to have the game too.
Though very reluctant to sell it, his now wife was also by now pregnant with twins, and the amount offered to them would set the young family up in a home and garden of their own. After many months of bartering, the buyer finally offered a sum for the entire collection including the game, which the teacher couldn’t refuse. My relative’s father, also a keen collector of art but nowhere near as rich as his boss, was invited to buy in to the spread a little too, and he selected a couple of pieces for himself. My relative’s father was absolutely smitten with the game, but certainly could never afford to pay its worth.
The buyer was more than a boss to my relative’s father. He was his first and only boss, and his lifelong friend. The buyer was twenty years older than his employee, and when he died in due course, he left the game in his will to my relative’s father, never having ever hinted that he had any intention of doing so.
Now in his 90s, my relative’s father is enjoying himself enormously by giving his most precious things to his most beloved people, and in seeing that they’re safely put when he wants them to be. My relative never expected to be given this artwork, as her more avaricious and pushing siblings had already been vying for it for years. She suspects her father gave it to her just to annoy her greediest sister. I know what she doesn’t know however, in that way in which people can be so blind about their own immediate family - that she herself is the favorite of his five children, and always has been, just as this artwork was his favorite possession.
