Who painted the nature mural in a 1960 St. Paul home? A decades-old mystery is solved.

Snowcapped mountains, towering pine trees and a winding dirt road cover the dining room walls. Fluffy white clouds float above the kitchen cabinets. A waterfall painted onto a slender slice of wall separating the dining room and the living room is so vivid, you can almost hear the water flowing, gurgling.

But it’s the winding dirt road that Steve Jensen, 27, remembers most from his early childhood home in St. Paul’s St. Anthony Park neighborhood, near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

“I remember I had Hot Wheels cars that I would drive on that road,” Jensen said. “I would set the scene and use that as a backdrop.”

Steve and his parents, Earl Jensen and Consuelo Estévez de Jensen, lived in the single-family home for four years. They moved to Puerto Rico in 2004, when Consuelo got a job at the University of Puerto Rico, but they held on to the house.

When Steve decided to move back to Minnesota in 2015 to attend the U, he returned to the house.

“We’ve rented it for 10 or 15 years,” Earl Jensen said. “The renters damaged everything else here, but not the mural.”

Steve — who holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the U and is interested in the history of houses — became fascinated with the mural. Now that he is all grown up, he’s been trying to solve the mystery.

The only clue he had was the signature “H. Hayek,” written in jagged letters in the lower left-hand corner of the mural on the kitchen wall. He started googling that name every few months.

“I could never figure out the artist,” he said.

But every few months he would google H. Hayek. He glanced down at his phone and quickly pulled up the artist he’d been thinking of: Hans von Hayek, an Austrian-born German Impressionist painter who died in 1940.

That couldn’t be him: The Jensens’ house was built in 1960.

Before the Jensens bought the house, the Galush family lived there for 40 years. Steve recalled that his mother Consuelo, 67, loved the mural. His father, also 67, thought the realtor might have had trouble selling the house because of the mural.

The home’s first owner, Robert J. Galush, died in 1992, and when the family sold the house they didn’t offer any information on the artist.

Galush’s daughter Susan Reinart remembered the mural.

“All I know is that [the mural artist’s] name was Henry Hayek,” Reinart said. “My dad must have asked him to come in and do it.”

Galush was a house appraiser. She hypothesized that he might have seen it at a house he had appraised, but there was no way to know. None of her other siblings knew about the mural artist either, she said.

But at least there was a name now: Henry Hayek.

Minnesota death records retrieved two Henry Hayeks. One Hayek was born in St. Paul in August 1897 and died in July 1975 in Anoka. The other Hayek was born in January 1903 in St. Paul and died in February 1986 in St. Paul.

At the Minnesota Historical Society, another clue surfaced: A 1942 painting titled “Harvest Season Atmosphere,” which was created as part of the Minnesota WPA Art Project, a government-funded New Deal art program. The painting depicts a rural landscape with ominous skies, rolling hills, two red farmhouses and no people. It was painted during the tail end of the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), which ran from 1935-1942.

Just like the mural at the Jensens’ home in St. Paul, the 1942 painting at MNHS is devoid of people and animals.

The distinct signature in the lower left-hand corner of the painting at MNHS matched the one on the mural at the Jensens’ home.

That 1942 painting came to MNHS in 2008 from its previous home at the Ah-Gwah-Ching Center, a tuberculosis treatment center-turned-community art center-turned-nursing home.

“[The painting] just feels really representative of the type of work that was being created in spaces like these, like as a real kind of celebration of place and rural identity,” said Spencer Wigmore, curator of Fine Art Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Tom Blanck, a Prescott, Wis.-based artist and collector of obscure Minnesota artists, recognized Hayek as an artist who lived in Minneapolis in the 1920s. He has seen about 12 of Hayek’s paintings and owns one of an elk snorting at the moon at night.

“I noted years ago that he traveled around presumably to tourist locations, county fairs and gas stations selling his pieces,” Blanck said.

Hayek also submitted a painting titled “Decomposition” to the 1941 Minnesota State Fair Arts Exhibition.

“He did get into the fine arts exhibition [juried show], but he did not win an award,” Minnesota State Fair archivist Keri Huber said.

Walker Art Center archivist Jill Vuchetich suspects that Henry Hayek was a WPA artist who worked there as a teaching artist between 1940-1942, but there aren’t any records of people on the WPA payroll, so she could not confirm. Similarly, a search at the Hennepin History Museum came up empty.

However, mentions of Henry Hayek popped up in the archives of the Minnesota Star Tribune and various government sources.

A marriage license for Henry Hayek, 29, and Mary Brollard, 23, was listed in the June 14, 1927, issue of the Minneapolis Journal. Given the date, this was the Henry Hayek born in 1897.

An advertisement in the Minneapolis Journal on Dec. 23, 1928, listed “Oil paintings to order” at H. Hayek Art Studio. The 1930 U.S. Census listed Henry’s occupation as an artist and his wife as Mary.

Hayek got remarried in 1935 to Elenore Olson, who went by Clenore and took Hayek’s last name. The couple had two children: Charles Henry Hayek, 89, and Ruth Zeka Brown (née Hayek), now 87.

The 1937 Minneapolis Directory listed Henry as a painter. In 1940, the U.S. Census listed him as an interior decorator. His 1942 draft card listed him as working at the Walker Art Center. The 1942 Minneapolis city directory listed him as a defense worker.

The 1950 U.S. Census listed him as a furniture refinisher working at a warehouse/shop.

In March 1962, Hayek was mentioned in an advertisement as a “well-known landscape painter,” who was teaching an adult art class at the Apache Color Center. In October 1962, he painted a mural titled “The Mountain of the Glacial Cross” at the Crystal Evangelical Free Church, at 6421 45th Av. N. in Crystal — now New Hope Church in New Hope.

In November 1964, the Minneapolis Star ran a curious story about a north woods lake scene painted onto the garage door of Herbert Johnson’s Brooklyn Park home, which was so lifelike, a mallard duck flew right into it. It was painted by Johnson’s friend, Henry Hayek of Anoka.

Hayek’s painting career continued into the mid-‘60s, including a waterfall painting in a St. Louis Park home that looks similar to the one at the Jensens’ home.

Steve Jensen thinks “it’s cool” that the mystery has been solved.

In his kitchen, there is a green rectangle where a landline phone used to be. Above the kitchen cabinets, the blue-painted skies with white clouds are starting to get a little soiled at the top, where the wall meets the ceiling. And near the doorway to the basement, a crack in the wall has emerged.

The mural has started to show its age, but its timelessness lives on.

“A carpet guy came in, and he was looking at it a couple of months ago,” Earl Jensen said. “And he saw that crack and was like, ‘That’s lightning.’ Just use your imagination.”

John Wareham of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.