Long lost painting found
A painting that local artist and former Plumas County Supervisor Nansi Bohne painted in 1975 is “home.” The painting had hung in the county supervisor’s boardroom for about 10 years and then disappeared. Bohne recently located it at the Nifty Thrifty in Portola and presented it to Scott Lawson, curator of the Plumas County Museum. Photo submitted
Nansi Bohne completed an oil painting in 1975 at the request of Larry Dean, who was then the Plumas County supervisor for the Chester area.
The other supervisors were Bohne, representing Greenville and Indian Valley; Leonard Ross, Portola; and Robin Jeskey and Joe Crivello, representing Quincy, East Quincy and Graeagle.
The supervisors were traveling to a Northern California supervisors’ association meeting in Redding, when Dean pointed an area out to Bohne as being an “old growth forest.”
Dean suggested that Bohne paint it, and she did. She presented it as a gift to the county, and the painting hung in the boardroom for a decade or more.
“Then, one day, I noticed it was gone,” Bohne said. “I asked around and no one seemed to know anything about it. We did a fast search of the offices in the courthouse, and we did not find it; but I’ve continued to search for it for well over 20 years, because it’s been there, in the back of my mind.”
She said it belonged to the county — was presented and accepted as such — but it lacked a paper trail.
Then recently she stopped at the “Thrifty Nifty” in Portola, and “low and behold, after all these years, there it was on their wall. I don’t need to tell you how I felt, but I was elated.”
She said that no one had any idea who donated it; it had just appeared.
“And it’s in great condition, so someone obviously took very good care of it,” she said.
Bohne said that while thrift stores normally search out artists’ names, hers did not appear, mainly because the “B” had blurred and looked like a “P.”
“Had they searched for Bohne, they would have found that I’ve been a local artist in Plumas County for over 50 years,” she said. “No harm done. They gave me the painting and I took it to Scott Lawson at the Plumas County Museum who checked it in, and so it’s finally home.”
