The Norman Rockwell Painting That Hid Inside a Wall for 35 Years

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In March 2006, a family in Arlington, Vermont, found an original Norman Rockwell painting hidden behind a bookcase in their father’s art studio. It had been there, unseen, for over 30 years.

A Friendship Built on Canvases

Norman Rockwell came to Arlington, Vermont, in 1939 and became a local legend. One of his nearest neighbors was Don Trachte, a cartoonist who drew the “Henry” comic strip for 60 years. In addition to being a friend, Rockwell would occasionally use Trachte as a model for his illustrations.

Trachte, in turn, while frequently in Rockwell’s studio, studied the exact paints and varnishes Rockwell used. Trachte had many talents, including laying a concrete foundation for his own house, constructing his own player-piano mechanism, and playing Chopin and Beethoven on it.

His talent with the paintbrush was also evident: he painted illustrations for magazines and books and was an accomplished portrait artist.

In 1954, Rockwell painted “Breaking Home Ties” for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. He painted this during a time when his oldest son had gone off to the Air Force while the other two had gone away for school.

Rockwell captured the emotions of a father and his teenage son sitting on the running board of a truck, waiting for the train that would take the boy to college, while the dog lies on the boy’s knee. A year after the painting was published, Post readers voted it the second-best cover in the magazine’s history.

In 1962, Rockwell sold Trachte the painting for $900, and it became the centerpiece of his personal collection. Two years later, when a buyer offered him $35,000 for it, he refused. Rockwell wrote back, saying, “You must be crazy not to sell it, but I adore your loyalty.”

A Divorce and Its Consequences

During the 1970s, Trachte and his wife divorced. One condition of the divorce was that they had to split up the eight paintings they owned together, including “Breaking Home Ties.” Trachte ended up keeping most of the paintings, including “Breaking Home Ties,” and hung it in his new studio.

At some point after his divorce, Trachte painted his own copies of the works he owned, including “Breaking Home Ties.” He then hid the originals behind a false wall built into a bookcase in a room of his studio. What he did instead was hang the forgeries in the same spot as the originals. No one in his family seemed to notice the switch at all.

Trachte passed away without giving away any clues to the switch. However, his son, Don Trachte Jr., thought he had a possible motive. “I think he just wanted to tuck these in the wall for his kids,” Don said.

Cracks Beginning to Show

In 2001, Trachte’s children decided to lend the painting to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for safekeeping. Within a few months, the painting was on display at the museum, and a well-known portrait artist, John Sanden, who had known Rockwell, noticed that something wasn’t quite right about it.

He wrote to the museum expressing his concerns that the colors looked washed out and that some of the painting’s details were wrong, such as the way the boy’s clothing was folded. Sanden kept writing to the museum over the course of three years until the painting was finally taken down. Still, no one was aware of the switch.

The Trachte family had also grown suspicious of the painting, so they hired outside experts to examine it in Williamstown, Massachusetts. They also contacted New York City auction houses, including Sotheby’s, to research the painting. Neither of these investigations revealed any evidence that the painting was fake.

However, after their father died, they decided to have the painting scientifically analyzed before selling it. “We were adamant. We had to understand what is wrong with this painting,” Don said. The investigation confirmed what Sanden had suspected all along: the painting that had hung in the museum was not the real “Breaking Home Ties.”

After this discovery, Don Jr. and his brother Dave took a trip to their father’s studio in Arlington to investigate further. They soon noticed a space behind one of the bookcases their father had built into the wall.

Once they noticed this, they managed to slide the bookcase open, revealing a sliding panel that led to a hidden crawl space. There they discovered eight paintings, still wrapped up, including the original “Breaking Home Ties.” One of the brothers even said, “Oh, my God, there’s the painting!”

Soon after the museum confirmed that the newly found paintings were authentic, the real “Breaking Home Ties” was unveiled to the public. The version that had been displayed in the museum turned out to be a forgery by Trachte, and it was shown alongside the original in the same room from April to November 2006.

It was at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, on November 29, 2006, that the original “Breaking Home Ties” was sold.

Sotheby’s had estimated the painting would sell for between $4 million and $6 million, but it went to an anonymous bidder for $15.4 million, shattering the previous record for a Rockwell painting set just months ago when Homecoming Marine sold for $9.2 million.

Trachte’s four children ended up splitting the proceeds from the sale, which amounted to approximately $13.75 million after auction fees were subtracted from the $15.4 million sale price.

Joyce Trachte, who had married Trachte’s son Dave, went to the New York auction to attend the event. She said, “It was very exciting to watch and to hear the bidding and everything.”

The mystery of why Trachte hid the paintings was never solved. Although they tried for years to figure out his motive, his children could only speculate. Don said he was “completely astounded” to discover that his father had devised a plot to keep people from seeing the forgeries he had created. “It’s amazing that it went on for so long,” he added.

“Breaking Home Ties” held the honor of being the most expensive Rockwell painting sold until 2013, when another Rockwell painting, “Saying Grace,” sold for $46 million at a later Sotheby’s auction. “Breaking Home Ties” had hung for decades in the quiet village of Arlington, Vermont, where Norman Rockwell and Don Trachte had been friends.

This story had quite an impact not only on the Trachte family but also on the town itself.

Nearly two decades later, in late 2023, a museum in nearby Bennington opened an exhibit retracing every step of the famous painting’s story, displaying some of the replicas Trachte made alongside the original paintings, as well as the drawing desk where he worked and the check he used to buy the painting from Rockwell.

For the family, it was a chance to share a strange part of their history with others and bring a local curiosity to a new audience.

It is now open to the public.