Art thieves have broken into the Auckland Art Museum and stolen
the famous doggy artwork “THE HOWL”. It is hidden
somewhere in Auckland. Can you find it?
Estimated to be worth well in excess of $10 million dollars
there will be a handsome reward for whoever recovers this lost work
of art.
To locate the missing artwork you will need to visit the site of
10 famous artworks featuring dogs. Inside the lid of each artwork
you will find a number. Match the number to the corresponding
letter below to get the coordinates for “The Howl” and
to locate the missing artwork.
This artwork is called “Setting up with a new
friend” by the artist Cassius Coolidge.
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (September 18, 1844–January 13,
1934) was a United States painter best known for a series of nine
paintings of anthropomorphized Dogs Playing Poker. Born in upstate
New York to abolitionist Quaker farmers, Coolidge was known to
friends and family as "Cash." While he had no formal training as an
artist his natural aptitude for drawing led him to create cartoons
for his local newspaper when in his twenties. He is credited with
creating Comic Foregrounds, life-size cutouts into which one's head
was placed so as to be photographed as an amusing character.
In 1903, Coolidge contracted with the advertising firm of Brown
& Bigelow of St. Paul, Minnesota, to create sixteen oil
paintings of dogs in various human poses.
Nine of them depict dogs playing poker. On February 15, 2005,
two of these much imitated paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo,
went on the auction block expecting to fetch between $30,000 and
$50,000 but surprisingly sold for $590,400. The auction set an
auction record for Coolidge, whose previous top sale was
$74,000.
When you find this artwork cache there will be a letter and a
number on a sticker under the lid. You will need this to be able to
find The Howl Heist final cache. Please record the number for your
own purposes, but do not remove it! The container is heavily
alarmed and guarded and the art police will be onto you if you do!
At the time of theft the artwork was then hidden in a small plastic
box equipped with a few trinkets and with a book suitable for the
practising of forging signatures on the bottom of the artwork,
BYOP.
Remember to return the cache to the exact location you found it
and enjoy some of the other great caches in the local vacinity.