THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

ART It was like being reunited with a child lost for almost half a century. Recently, Irving artist DAN ENGLAND, a drafting instructor at Mountain View College, received a letter telling him that a mural he had painted in the early Forties had turned up in an exhibition in Eugene, Oregon.

America was still reeling from the Depression when England graduated from the University of Oregon in 1941. Times were tough for art majors, so when England heard about a Works Project Administration (WPA) contest, he decided to enter. The winner of the contest would get to paint a large mural in the Eugene Post Office. England had Just completed one such mural over the entrance of the campus student center that had brought him a good deal of attention, so he thought he had a good chance of winning.

Despite his confidence, England’s entry, part of which depicts students busily studying, did not win, and he stored the panels in the family farmhouse with some other works. Sometime later-he doesn’t know just when-the piece disappeared. Then World War II intervened, and England entered the Navy.

After the war England decided to enter the ministry, a dream that led him to the Dallas Theological Seminary. By this time he had turned to sign-painting to support his family, and later took a drafting job at Chance-Vought.

The current owner of the work, an art teacher at the University of Oregon, told England, now 69, that he had bought the piece at a church charity sale a few years back and had been using it in his classes as an example of the “social realism” of the Thirties, which glorified the working classes and was often denounced as Communist-inspired. England may have lost the contest, but his long-lost work has outlasted the Depression, a world war, and, it appears, the Soviet threat that made the social realists such scandalous young rebels.