The Worcester Art Museum is about to recover a painting that was stolen nearly 45 years ago. They were able to find the painting using an $18 throw pillow.
The robbery took place many years ago, at the home of Helen and Robert Stoddard. Mr. Stoddard was a former museum trustee who had promised to donate many of his art pieces to the institution. Under cover of night, burglars stole twelve pieces of art that are currently estimated to be worth $10 million. Among these were a Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting and a J.M.W. Turner watercolor.
Clifford Schorer, a former board president at the Worcester Art Museum, found a painting, i.e, Hendrick Avercamp’s ‘Winter Landscape’, that was created back in the 1600s. Now, the museum is trying to find a way to bring the painting back to Massachusetts.
A search of the 17th-century Dutch master’s winter scene turned up a pillow featuring a much higher-quality print of the painting than any known photographs taken of the work before it was stolen.
At Pixels.com, you can buy products featuring paintings by Hendrick’s nephew, Barent Avercamp. Some products include iPhone cases, canvas totes, puzzles, and face masks.
Schorer is an artist, collector, and investor. He’s been successful in the past identifying rare pieces of art. In 2014, he helped keep a London Old Masters dealer, Agnews, in business. Schorer has proven to have an excellent eye for art, and in January, he helped show off some of Agnews’ newest pieces at Master Drawings New York.
So, when Schorer found a throw pillow with a painting on it, he looked at the metadata and found that the painting was named after an art library and an art dealer in New York. He called the dealer and they were able to remember the painting from a 1995 art fair. They said that the gallery that sold the painting had closed down a few years ago.
Schorer found the niece of the person who had sold the painting to the auction house, and she was able to find the old company records that showed who the painting had been sold to. It only cost Schorer around $200,000 to find this information, which is much cheaper than the auction house’s $8.6 million record.
Somebody changed the signature on the painting to make it look like it was made by another artist named B. Avercamp. This made it easier for people to sell the painting for a higher price on the open market. The top price that Barent Avercamp (the painter’s real name) gets at auction is only £378,000 ($460,919).
The museum’s owners, a Dutch couple, died a few years ago. So, in 2021, he sent a letter to their heirs asking if they would be willing to take care of the painting’s return. But never heard back from them.
Schorer has a Dutch lawyer who has contacted him to tell him that after 40 days, the museum will start a criminal case in the Netherlands. He’s hoping that the painting’s recovery is now close at hand.
Only three of the Stoddards’ paintings have been found so far. The most significant was Camille Pissarro’s Bassin Duquesne et Berrigny a Dieppe, Temps Gris, which was found at Wolfs auction house in Cleveland in 1998. There was a complicated legal dispute, but Helen Stoddard won and the painting entered the museum collection to much fanfare.
