Tom Lea  (1907 - 2001)

Lost Tom Lea artworks found in Santa Fe
During the 1980s and '90s three lost artworks by Texas-legend Tom Lea were discovered in Santa Fe by art historian and gallerist Fred R. Kline. Lea, who died in El Paso in 2001 at age 93, lived and worked in Santa Fe in the 1930s; today several of his paintings hang in the Oval Office and Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts. Kline got in touch with Lea about the three separate finds: two unique prints of a nun and a fandango dancer that Lea had thought “gone forever” and a painting of unrecognized significance purchased at auction which proved to be important to New Mexico art history. The lost painting, a scene of deer hunters on horseback hunting in the winter mountains, was used on the cover of New Mexico Magazine for several years during the 1930s. Lea told Kline he was paid $50 for it during the Depression; “They certainly got their money’s worth on that one, ” Lea jovially remarked. “But during those years I was very grateful for the $50”. Kline offered to give the artist a commission on its possible future sale of $30,000, which Lea graciously refused, thanking Kline for finding and preserving his “wayward offspring”. When Lea died, Kline donated a painting in his honor to the Tom Lea Wing of the El Paso Museum of Art. Kline says the painting, “Pancho Villa’s House” by Lloyd Goff, “recalls the time when Tom’s father, who was a judge in El Paso, went after Pancho Villa and put a price on his head. Villa in turn put a price on the judge’s head and threatened to kidnap young Tom, who survived the threat.”