The Great Hoskins Art Heist

By Brooks Clark

In the darkest hours of a sticky night in August 1973, no one on White Avenue noticed a stealthy figure crawling through a basement window of Hoskins Library. Inside, the intruder pried the lock off the door to the circulation department and went directly to two boxes, where they found a total of $102 and the master keys to the building. The burglar and accomplices then made their way to the top floor of the tower, which had been built in 1932 to house the collection of oriental and Turkish rugs, jewelry, sculptures, paintings, and Renaissance furniture—some 400 pieces in all—and several thousand volumes of art and travel literature that Louis and Eleanor Audigier had accumulated during 20 years living in Rome and donated to UT.

Louis Bailely Audigier had been born in 1858 in Switzerland and emigrated to Searcy, Arkansas, where he became a newspaper editor and publisher. In 1887, he married Eleanor Deane Swan of Knoxville. They first lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Audigier wrote for the Arkansas Gazette, then moved to Knoxville, where Audigier was a book printer and worked in various capacities on a monthly, The Industrious Hen, serving the poultry industry. 

Eleanor was an artist, active in the Ossoli Circle, who helped organize the Knoxville Art League. The Audigiers lived in an elegant house called Crescent Bluff at 3100 Kingston Pike. In 1911, they traveled for two years in Greece, Egypt, and Palestine, then settled in Rome, where Louis took photos for the New York Times, including portraits of Mussolini and a Pope Pius XI, published several books of his pictures of Rome, traveled and lectured. Eleanor, meanwhile, collected all manners of art, originals and copies, old and new. She died in 1931, and was buried in Knoxville. After Louis remarried in 1933, he gave Eleanor’s art collection to UT in her memory. In 1936, Louis and his new bride returned to Knoxville and settled into a large Victorian home on East Magnolia Avenue. He died in 1943 and was buried in Little Rock.   

In the relatively innocent era of 1973, there were no guards on duty or electronic surveillance cameras to watch over the Eleanor Deane Audigier Art Collection. The intruders came prepared: they had brought packing crates and straw packing material. They packed up some 80 objects on exhibit throughout the gallery and slipped them out the basement window. The list of the stolen goods ranged from five antique rugs and 23 sculptures to a mahogany model of a Venetian sedan chair, a brass French coffee pot from 1809, a 19th century nutmeg grater, and an Arabian dagger and scabbard. 

Since the thieves knew exactly where to find the master keys, the police assumed it was an inside job, although lie-detector tests on 50 employees revealed nothing. The larcenists may not have been art experts: they took neither the five Raphael paintings nor some of the other most valuable artwork. Nor may they have planned what to do with the goods once they had them. The pieces have never shown up in local pawn shops or on the international markets. The Knoxville Police never found any clues to lead them to the identities of the thieves. 

In 1978, the entire collection was moved to the McClung Museum, where it resides today in vault and storage rooms secured by several systems of locks, video surveillance cameras, and motion detectors. 

To this day, the Hoskins Heist remains the largest theft of art in Knoxville history and UT’s most perplexing unsolved mystery. If your great uncle has ever wondered about a remote barn or warehouse full of packing boxes, please call me at 865-310-1277.

 

The Scandalous Miss Evelyn Hazen

By Brooks Clark

Over the years, UT has been home to any number of “characters.” Not many of them, however, have been featured in the pages of Life magazine.

In 1914, green-eyed, raven-haired fourteen-year-old Evelyn Hazen graduated from her private girls’ school and enrolled in the University of Tennessee. The last of Alice Evelyn Mabry Hazen and Rush Strong Hazen’s three daughters, she grew up in the antebellum Victorian home at 1711 Dandridge Avenue, at the crest of Mabry’s Hill in Knoxville, with a majestic view of downtown to the west and the Tennessee River to the south. 

As a UT student, Hazen took the stage in Staub’s Theatre alongside a smooth-talking fraternity boy named Ralph Sharringhaus, the only son of a prosperous Knoxville businessman. They were engaged in 1917, but when the United States joined the war in Europe, Sharringhaus signed up for the Army and began basic training. On one of his weekend visits, Hazen fell for an old line—basically, “What does being married in the eyes of God matter when we love each other so much?” She regretted going to bed with Sharringhaus, she later claimed, finding the experience unpleasant. It also seemed to cool his ardor to marry her.

      

Hazen graduated in 1918 and took a job as a teacher in the Knoxville school system, eventually landing at Knoxville High School. For the next fifteen years Hazen tried to maneuver Sharringhaus to the altar. She joined him for weekends and vacations in places like New York and Asheville, alternately fending off his advances and acceding. Finally, in 1932, Sharringhaus dumped her. “There is no solution but to stop,” he wrote to her. 

     

After briefly contemplating killing him, Hazen decided to sue him for breach of promise. The trial, in Covington, Kentucky, made national news, especially as she testified about her humiliation as a woman betrayed and what she called Sharringhaus’s “perverted and lascivious” demands, as recounted by Jane Van Ryan in the book The Seduction of Evelyn Hazen.  

Hazen won the case, and the jury awarded her $80,000. Life magazine ran her picture and called Sharringhaus “an ardent wooer but a laggard groom.” Even though an appeals court upheld the verdict in 1937, she never received the money, lost her job as a teacher, and never recovered her ruined reputation.

      

Hazen lived out her life in the house on Mabry’s Hill. In 1951, John C. Hodges, the straitlaced head of the UT English department, hired her as his administrative assistant. Wagging tongues imagined some dalliance between the tweedy Hodges and Hazen; in fact, there was never a hint of hanky-panky, and the gossip is more telling about attitudes about female sexuality at the time. After Hodges died in 1967, Hazen continued to work in the English Department, patrolling the corridors like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play, carrying a loaded pistol on campus, and doling out office supplies like Scrooge, at least according to some. She died in 1987 at eighty-eight years old after falling in her home and suffering a stroke. Her will stipulated that her home be preserved and operated as a museum, which it is today under the direction of the Hazen Museum Foundation.

Source: The Seduction of Evelyn Hazen, available from UT Press, tiny.utk.edu/hazen