WELLESLEY, Mass.—A 1921 Fernand Léger painting owned by Wellesley College's Davis Museum has gone missing and may have been accidentally thrown out, the Boston Globe reports.

The 25-by-21-inch oil on canvas, Woman and Child, was given to the Davis in 1954 by the museum's then director, John McAndrew. It was a staple of the museum's permanent display until early 2006, when it was taken down in advance of the museum's May renovation and shipped to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art with 31 other works for an exhibition that ran March 2, 2006 – April 8, 2007.

The Oklahoma City museum returned the works a week after the show closed. With the Davis renovation was still underway, the art remained in crates for months, however. A crate believed to contain the Léger sat in the museum's fifth floor galleries through fall 2007 and then was moved to a vault. In November, museum administrators began compiling a digital catalogue, and when they went to search for the painting, they discovered it was gone, according to a statement issued by the museum.

Shortly thereafter Davis registrar Bo Mompho called Matthew C. Leininger, the registrar of the Oklahoma City museum. According to Leininger, "She asked me, 'Do you have our Léger, by chance?' I said, 'No, why are you asking?' That's when she said they couldn't find it. I said, 'Oh, boy.'"

Leininger says he catalogued each work as it was packed to be sent back to the Davis. The Léger was placed in a crate with an Armand Guillaumin oil on canvas and a László Moholy-Nagy oil on linen. He searched the Oklahoma City museum's crate room and vault anyway, but found nothing.

Two trucks left Oklahoma City with two crates of art and an accompanying Davis museum preparator on April 17, 2007. All of the works in the shipment have been accounted for except for the Léger.

Leininger said that when he asked Mompho where the crates were, she answered, "'They were sent off to be destroyed.'"

According to three faculty members who attended a meeting with Davis director David Mickenberg last fall, Mickenberg said that the painting may have been destroyed along with the crates. He also suggested that the work could have been stolen sometime after leaving Oklahoma City.

The disappearance of Woman and Child has been reported to the Art Loss Register, and Wellesley police are working on the case with college police. In the meantime, Travelers Insurance has paid the museum's claim. Though officials at the company would not say how much the Davis was given, they confirmed that it was in the area of $2.8 million, the average sale price of a Léger work in 2007.

Davis staff members contacted by the Boston Globe either did not return phone calls or referred the paper to the museum's official spokeswoman.

"We've all wondered about it," said Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, associate professor of art at the college. "It's a tremendous loss for the college, but, beyond that, we just don't have a lot of information."