Price Hill Historical Society Treasures

The Price Hill Historical Society & Museum

Cincinnati, Ohio

This Month's

Price Hill Treasure

Price Hill Historical Society P.O. Box 7020 Cincinnati, OH 45205-7020 513/251-2888 phhs@pricehill.org

Every few months, we feature a new Treasure of Price Hill from our museum collection and archives, from our newsletter and oral histories, or simply from around Price Hill. If you have any ideas for a "Treasure" that needs to be featured or preserved, let us know at phhs@pricehill.org.

Have you ever day-dreamed about finding treasure hidden in a basement or closet, stuck in with a bunch of junk? Well, that dream seems to have come true in Price Hill—an old painting, found in a suitcase that was put out for the trash, was rescued by neighborhood children, donated to the Price Hill Historical Society, and eventually was found to be a small masterpiece painted more than a century ago by a Cincinnati artist with an international reputation.

The story begins on a street in East Price Hill, with kids playing around with an old suitcase they’d found in their neighbor’s trash. The neighbor had recently died and the house was being cleared out. The suitcase was locked, and the kids had some fun trying different combinations before they gave up and took the brute force approach—they hammered the lock until it opened.They brought the painting home, but the scary eyes seemed to follow them around, so they told their parents they wanted to get rid of it. Thinking it might be a portrait of a woman who had lived in Price Hill, the family donated the painting, which was somewhat damaged, as you can see at left, to the Price Hill Historical Society.

At the Society, several members, including Valda Moore and Joyce Meyer, started to do some investigating. The painting was signed with initials and dated: HFF 1904. Armed with an idea about who may have painted the portrait, they made a trip to the Cincinnati Art Museum to speak to someone with knowledge of a famous local artist.

There, an assistant curator concurred that it might indeed be a work by the artist Henry Farny, as they suspected. Farny was a contemporary of Frank Duveneck and was known for his paintings of the American West. A painting called Song of the Talking Wire at the Taft Museum is Farny’s most famous work. The Cincinnati Art Museum actually had a copy of a photograph of the artist in his studio with the portrait of the lady hanging on the wall behind him.

But there was no clue to the identity of the woman in the painting. Henry Farny painted only a few portraits; most of his western paintings were essentially landscapes with small figures. The ladies from the PHHS continued their pursuit of the portrait’s identity and found a newspaper article that described Farny’s second marriage, to a very young woman named Ann Ray who had been his ward. She married Farny in 1906, two years after the portrait was painted, and she had the same dark eyes, the same small mouth, and a very similar hairstyle to the woman in the portrait.

Then the story of the painting was highlighted in a front page article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, and a relative of Farny’s second wife who still lived in the area contacted the Enquirer. The man recognized the woman in the portrait as his aunt—his father’s half-sister, Ann Ray Farny! Another mystery solved—the Price Hill Historical Society is now satisfied that it is a portrait Farny painted of his ward a few years before she became his wife. (The cleaned and restored portrait is shown at right.)

Farny was born in France, and he and his family have no known ties to the Price Hill area. He lived in Clifton and Covington and had a studio in downtown Cincinnati where he painted when he was not traveling in the western United States. So how the painting wound up in the trash in Price Hill is one mystery that still remains. And since the painting is not a part of Price Hill’s history and the Price Hill Historical Society’s museum is in need of many repairs, the society has decided to sell the painting. We are currently accepting bids, and now that the painting’s subject has been determined to be the artist’s wife, it may be even more valuable than they expected.

If you are interested in bidding on the painting of Ann Ray Farny, you can contact the Price Hill Historical Society at 513.251.2888 or phhs@pricehill.org.

“Mystery” Portrait Donated to Historical Society