Four paintings that have hung in the Howard City Library for decades have become the focus of a mystery search.
“They’ve been back there for years, and finally the librarian took them down,” library board member Mark Hall said, gesturing to the west side of the libary.
“Nobody knew much about them,” he said. “Our board decided to see what we could find out about the paintings.”
When Hall took the pictures out of their frames, he saw they were signed and numbered by their painter, Norma Bassett Hall.
“I did a Google search on the computer and it immediately came up with a story from the Antiques Road Show television program,” he said. “It was about a woman who had a Norma Bassett Hall picture that was worth $2,000 — and she only paid $1.49 for it.”
That whetted Mark Hall’s curiosity (no kin to the painter) and he started researching the painter and her ties to Howard.
There are many biographical accounts of Norma Bassett Hall who, with her husband, Arthur Hall, lived in Howard during the early 1930s for a brief time.
They were world travelers, having spent considerable time in Europe and the American west and southwest where she gained most of her inspiration for painting.
But she also was inspired by Elk County where she painted scenes from the virgin Flint Hills. And, before they moved away, she apparently left four “wood cut” paintings to the Howard City Library, and her husband left three of his own paintings, as well as one painted by a friend, Birger Sandzen.
The pictures painted by Arthur Hall now have been cleaned and reframed. Visitors may view them hanging along the south wall of the library as well as the one painted by Sandzen. Hall’s pictures depict striking landscapes in a black and white painting technique, and the one by Sandzen looks to be a pen and ink painting of a farm house.
An art restorer from El Dorado prepared Arthur Hall’s prints and the one by Sandzen. The four prints by Norma Bassett Hall will require a more tedious process of washing and restoration, according to Mark Hall. “It will cost $400 each for these prints so we’ll probably need to find those funds,” he said.
Longtime Howard resident Pauline Miller said she remembers the famed painter but did not know her well.
“We had small children at the time so I wasn’t too involved,” she said.
Miller said she does remember when the local PEO invited a group from Wichita State University to come to Howard and visit with Norma Bassett Hall.
“It was exciting to think we had such a famous painter in our town,” she said.
She recalls that the Halls lived at 220 Pennsylvania Street in Howard.
“I think she just appreciated the Howard community and donated those pictures,” she said.
The artist stayed in contact for many years after leaving Howard with her close friend, the late Gertrude Mullendore.
An on-line biography states that Norma Bassett Hall and her husband, Arthur Hall, traveled extensively in Europe and across the American west and southwest where they painted landscapes.
The trips to Europe between 1925 and 1927 resulted in some of her most famous works. In Edinburgh, she met and studied with Mable Royds, wife of the English etcher E.S. Lumsden, and she was introduced to the Japanese method of printing woodcuts on rice paper with transparent watercolors, rather than the opaque oilbase colors she had employed at the time.
Two of her works, “La Gaude - France,” and “Portree Day,” are among a permanent art collection at Barton County Community College in Great Bend.
Records show that Norma Bassett Hall was a native of Oregon, born May 21, 1889. During her career, she participated in many group shows and touring exhibitions and her work was displayed at the U.S. National Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
She studied at the Chicago Art Institute where she met her husband-to-be in 1915. Their courtship was interrupted by World War I and she continued her studies and graduated from the Institute in 1918.
In later years, they lived in New Mexico where they both did extensive painting, and they moved to Howard sometime during that era where she painted scenes from the Flint Hills. Three of those prints, “Jontra Farm,” “The Golden Maple” and “Persimmons and Sumac,” are among the pictures found in the Howard City Library. They have hung at the back of the library for many years, along with one titled “Laguna Pueblo” which has a southwest theme.
Norma Bassett Hall died in 1957.
Howard Library board members have been unable to find a local connection to today’s generation. They would welcome any information that anyone might have about the famed artist’s years in Howard.
Anyone wishing to donate funds to help make possible the restoration of these prints, all of which are valued at around $2,000 each, may make checks payable to the Howard City Library.
