Cold Case Cracked by a Throw Pillow
Decades after a major Worcester art theft, a rare Hendrick Avercamp painting is recovered—with help from an online throw pillow listing.
In 1978, a robbery in Worcester, Massachusetts, rocked the art world. Thieves broke into the home of Helen and Robert Stoddard at night and stole twelve paintings, including work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and J.M.W. Turner. They were the most valuable paintings in the couple’s impressive collection, worth about $10 million total.
There were no leads, and authorities went years without identifying any suspects. The FBI recovered one of the Pissarro paintings in 1998, and it was donated to the Worcester Art Museum, as the Stoddards intended to do with their art collection. Little progress was made toward finding the rest of the stolen paintings.
In 2021, Warner Fletcher, a lawyer, the Stoddard Charitable Trust chairman, and the Stoddards’ nephew, took a different approach. He contacted Clifford Schorer III, an art collector who is all about different approaches. Despite his reputation as an “amateur art detective,” Schorer’s specialties are not stolen artworks but “sleepers,” an art-world term for works by famous artists that get misattributed and undervalued.
Of the stolen paintings, Schorer took particular interest in a winter scene, known as Winter Landscape with Skater and Other Figures, by Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634), a painter of the Dutch Golden Age. An online search took him to a surprising place: print-on-demand website Pixels.com, which offered an Avercamp scene of ice skaters on, among other items, a throw pillow on sale for $18.40.
The website attributed the scene to Barent Avercamp, Hendrick Avercamp’s student and nephew, but the painting was unmistakably stolen from the Stoddards. Schorer traced the image to a digital archive, where metadata led him to a dealer who had photographed the painting at an art fair in 1995. From there, Schorer finally tracked down the painting’s most recent owners: a Dutch family who wished to remain anonymous.
After lengthy negotiations, drawn out by complications in international art laws, the family finally agreed to return the painting. As reported by the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, it will be donated to the Worcester Art Museum.
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