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Victoria Reed, senior curator of provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, can spend months chasing down old files about a contested artwork, visiting libraries, translating documents, and poring over databases. It’s an imperfect science, and Reed is often left to fill in the gaps while pondering unanswerable questions.
But every so often, she encounters an object like the Egyptian child’s coffin from the New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty (1295 to 1186 BC), which Reed recently determined was stolen, prompting the MFA to return it to the Gustavianum, Uppsala University Museum in Sweden.
“I just open a file, and I can see what’s wrong,” said Reed, who added that the seller likely gave the museum forged ownership documents to support the sale. “This was one of those instances.”
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When the museum purchased the ceramic coffin in 1985, the seller provided a letter from the Swedish artist Eric Ståhl, in which he described excavating the sarcophagus in Amada, Egypt, in 1937. He also supplied the museum with a letter, purportedly from a Swedish expert, that attested to the coffin’s quality and provenance.
Satisfied with those materials, the MFA exhibited the coffin (which is empty) and published the seller-provided provenance online and in printed catalogs.
Recently, however, Lawrence Berman, head of the museum’s Art of Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East, alerted Reed to a 2008 book that contained a photo of the coffin being excavated.
The problem: The book indicated the coffin had been excavated nearly 20 years earlier at a separate dig led by the British School of Archaeology. Not only was Ståhl not mentioned in the literature, but the book noted that the coffin had been sent to what is now the Gustavianum.
“I kind of had a feeling about which way this is going to go,” said Reed. “It’s very clear that we didn’t necessarily have the documentation that we thought we did.”
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For starters, the seller-supplied provenance describes one “expert” as an Egyptologist at Uppsala University, a credential Reed was unable to confirm.
“He was a photographer,” she said. “That was kind of red flag number one.”
Reed also debunked the seller’s claim that Ståhl had been a professor of paleontology. The artist’s rambling letter contains no real description of the coffin itself, and the archeologist he supposedly accompanied to Egypt did not, in fact, work in Egypt.
Reed eventually contacted a curator at Uppsala University Museum, who confirmed the coffin had been shipped to the museum from Egypt in 1922 but that it had been missing from the collection since at least 1970.
The Swedish curator also reached out to an expert whose name was on one of the documents the seller provided the MFA.
“She denies ever having put her signature on this thing,” said Reed. “At that point, I think it was pretty clear what the facts showed.”
Museum trustees voted to deaccession the coffin last fall, paving the way for the MFA to return the coffin to Sweden in March.
As for the seller, Olof S. Liden, Reed estimates he’s around 83 years old these days with an address in California.
“He appeared to have a profile on LinkedIn,” she said, “but did not accept my request.”
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him @malcolmgay.