The painting turned out to be "El Albañil" ("The Bricklayer"), an early work of renowned Latin-American artist Diego Rivera, who had been just 18 when he painted the piece shown on "Antiques Roadshow." Appraiser Colleene Fesko said that there were only three or four of Rivera's paintings from that early time period in Rivera's career, and that one of the things that made the piece so interesting is that it foreshadowed his technique of what would become the subject of so many of his portraits and murals: "workers of Mexico," as Fesko says in the show. Fesko said that "El Albañil" was listed in the Mexican City records as "missing" after 1930, presumably when the man's great-grandparents purchased it.
In 1996, "El Albañil" would briefly resurface to the public over 60 years after it went missing, when it was authenticated and exhibited. The San Antonio Museum of Art said that one Rugeley Ferguson, Sr. brought the painting to Marion Oettinger, the museum's curator. Ferguson told Oettinger that his family had acquired it in the 1940s, and at the time an expert had told them it was a fake, due to Rivera's signature; as Fesko had noted in the "Antiques Roadshow" clip, it was different because Rivera had been so young, and hadn't yet formalized his signature. Also, when the "expert" had seen the painting, it was badly damaged with a big gash in the canvas.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunCEmGpscGlfqbWmecyoqq1lla29prrSoq2eZaCWtq%2FAyKeeZpmgpb%2BitdKem2annmKur8DIqqyeq12nvKKw0qGmsGc%3D