Mystery shrouds paintings of Brooklyn Bridge, George Washington Bridge at Roebling Museum

FLORENCE - One mystery surrounding historic paintings of the Brooklyn and George Washington bridges has been solved, but another remains.

Who painted them?

The Roebling Museum recently unveiled a newly restored 1939 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge that hangs on a wall near a George Washington Bridge painting done in the same style, but museum officials still have no idea who the artist was.

The bridges were built with steel wire and cable produced here and in Trenton by the John A. Roebling's Sons Co.  Son Washington Roebling and his wife Emily supervised construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883 and still stands today linking Brooklyn and Manhattan with a heavily traveled pedestrian walkway in the center of the vehicular traffic lanes.

"A lot of research has been done by us, other museums and historians in New Jersey and New York City, but we still don't know. It's a great mystery we would like to solve," said Roebling Museum executive director Varissa McMickens Blair.

The two bridges were among a series of at least seven unsigned paintings commissioned by the John A. Roebling's Sons Co. to showcase its suspension bridge accomplishments at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City.

Steel wire rope and cable manufactured at mills in the Roebling village section of Florence Township and in Trenton were used to build the nation’s two most famous suspension bridges in New York City and later the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Even the conservation painter who restored the George Washington Bridge painting in 2014 and who just finished restoring the Brooklyn Bridge art was unable to find a clue as to the artist.

She said she found the two circular paintings, both 3 feet in diameter and more stylistically realistic than impressionistic in style, in good condition despite being unaccounted for decades after they had hung at the fair and then at the Roebling corporate headquarters in Trenton.

That first mystery was solved in 1980 when the seven paintings were discovered in a vault when Mercer County took over the closed Roebling corporate building, now the Mercer County Administration Building. 

"There was nothing written on the back side of the canvases," conservator Christyl Cufworth of Landisville told visitors at a recent unveiling.

Both paintings were restored with private donations. The Roebling Museum does not own them, however, but has a long-term loan for four of the seven from the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie.

“It’s like the painting went to a spa. The colors pop and you can see the details more clearly,” McMickens Blair said of the restorations.

The other two paintings in that series on display at the Roebling Museum are of mill workers in a wire rope shop. Those works have yet to be restored.

Two couples, Ken and Chloe Ibachand David and Mary Ellen Eckman, and Ken's late sister, Phyllis Hawkins, financed the restoration.

“It’s beautiful, I just want to stand there and keep looking at it,” Mary Ellen Eckman remarked.

“Awesome. The detail adds to the flavor of the time in 1939,” Ken Ibach said at the unveiling.

Chloe Ibach called the refreshed painting “gorgeous” while Mary Ellen Eckman declared, “It’s beautiful! I just want to stand there and keep looking at it."

Ken Ibach's parents both worked at the Roebling mill. His dad was a mason who repaired the brick furnaces where metal was melted to a molten stage to make the wire rope and his mother was a secretary.

“Our family history at the mill goes all the way to my grandfather and I am proud to be a person from Roebling,” Ibach said.

For more information, visit www.roeblingmuseum.org

Carol Comegno: @carolcomegno; 856-486-2473; ccomegno@gannettnj.com