But in 2005, Michael Quick, former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, came to town in search of Inness paintings for a complete compilation of the painter's works (known as a catalog raisonné). As it happened, the museum was poking around its own vaults at the same time.
The result is that Twilight was rescued from beyond utter obscurity and is now the resplendent centerpiece of a new exhibition of Inness' work, "George Inness in Italy," on view through May 15.
It's a small show - 10 major works, including several from the museum's own collection of 10 Innesses, plus a bevy of borrowed canvases. Curated by Mark Mitchell, associate curator and manager of the museum's Center for American Art, the show will travel to the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati.
Quite an unexpected turn of events for the painting.
When Mark S. Tucker, the museum's vice chair of conservation, Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American art, and the visiting Quick first saw Twilight in the basement, it was jammed into an ill-fitting frame and veiled by a splotchy varnish.
Not promising, but they decided to get the canvas out into the open and take a closer look.
The first surprise was that the frame was so small it obscured broad sections of the canvas on either side. Instead of a tunnellike view of a tree, Inness actually had created a sweeping landscape.
"They took it out of the frame and looked at it together and actually got a sense of its scope, and that was, I think, the moment of epiphany," said Mitchell, who joined the museum staff not long after.
