Nine (and counting) oil painted portraits by well known artist Wayman Adams have mysteriously turned up in Gee Library! How they got here is a puzzle--they were relegated to a storage room where things are sorted out before being gotten rid of. I'm in charge of arranging displays in the library, and I was looking at the frames to salvage for student created art.
Then it occurred to me to research the artist--perhaps these were something worth keeping rather than turning over to the theatre department to be used as props. The signature is very unusual, but with help I was able to decipher the last name, and a few letters of the first name.
A little time with Google trying various versions of the name along with portrait and the name of the auction house that was on the back of a few works brought me to the name Wayman Adams. 
He is a well known artist from Indiana who was born in 1883. He was already an established artist when in his mid thirties he married a woman from Austin and moved to Texas, where he lived for the rest of his life.
He was known as "Painter of Presidents" because he did portraits of several US presidents as well as several governors of Indiana. Most of his artwork is held in Indiana museums, but Texas has a fair number. To my knowledge with nine pieces we have the largest collection in the state. 
Now we need to find out how they came to be in the library. I was able to trace all nine pieces to an auction in Waco held in 1993. I wonder if they will tell me who bought them, and perhaps that person is the one who donated them to us.
It is an exciting mystery, among several. The piece below was listed in the auction catalogue as reserved for the Carnegie Institute. How did it end up in Commerce, Texas? 
The piece below won the Walter Lippincott Award in 1933, given by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Smithsonian online archive lists the piece below, Portrait of Everett Victor Meeks, as being owned by Yale University Art Galley.
So now we have a mystery on our hands--how did we come to get these works of art?
