Photo: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff.
Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp’s winter scene, stolen in 1978, arrived in May at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
As an inveterate reader of mystery novels, I do love a yarn about art thieves, especially if there’s a clever sleuth who figures out what happened. It’s best if the perps end up in jail, but you can’t have it all. These things take time.
At the Boston Globe, Malcolm Gay has a good story about Clifford Schorer, a former president of the Worcester Art Museum’s board as well as “an international art dealer and sleuth who spends his days (and many nights) hunting ‘sleepers’ — lost masterpieces whose true identities have been obscured through the ages.
“Schorer had flown from Brussels [on a day last May] with the painting he now carried in his hands, a winter scene by the acclaimed Dutch Golden Age artist Hendrick Avercamp.
“The artwork was stolen nearly half a century earlier in a sensational 1978 heist from the baronial estate of Helen and Robert Stoddard, a Worcester industrialist. The Avercamp picture, along with numerous other paintings and other valuables taken from the home that night, had not been seen since. Local officials were stumped. So was the FBI. …
“[Schorer] and a conservator carefully unwrapped the package, revealing the aged but unscathed picture of Dutch figures skating in winter.
“ ‘It was nirvana,’ Warner Fletcher, a nephew of the Stoddards, said of the moment. …
“The Avercamp originally disappeared the night of June 22, 1978, when thieves broke into the 36-acre Stoddard estate, hacking open sofa cushions to cart away valuable works by Camille Pissarro, J.M.W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. …
“That night, with Helen undergoing cancer treatment at a Boston hospital, Robert turned in just before midnight. [He] was sound asleep when thieves broke in through the sun porch.
“The burglars ransacked the home, rifling through drawers and closets. They drank the couple’s liquor and ate food from the fridge, according to later news reports. They made their way through each room, snatching paintings from the walls and pocketing collectibles including miniature carvings, silver tea sets, watches, and valuable music boxes.
“When Stoddard awoke the next morning, he realized the house had been robbed when he found his glasses on the floor. …
” ‘We never had a suspect,’ Ralph E. Doyle, a retired detective sergeant with the Worcester Police Department, told the Telegram & Gazette in 2000.
That‘s not to say there haven‘t been breakthroughs.
“The most valuable work in the Stoddard’s collection, Pissarro’s 1902 oil on canvas, ‘Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny à Dieppe, temps gris,’ surfaced at a Cleveland auction house in 1998. …
“The discovery of the Pissarro prompted authorities to look closely at a Springfield-area art dealer named Robert Cornell and his ex-wife, Jennifer Abella-Cornell, who had brought the painting to Ohio. But the estranged couple gave wildly conflicting accounts. [An FBI] spokesperson later told the Telegram & Gazette that reconciling their stories was ‘like beating a dead horse.’ …
“The trail of the Avercamp and other missing works then went cold. Frustrated by the lack of progress and still hoping they might be retrieved, Fletcher, the Stoddards’ nephew, finally turned to Schorer in 2021. He put information about the missing artworks in a manila envelope and sent it to the sleuth.
“Fletcher was by then familiar with Schorer. … He’s renowned in the trade, and he’d recently discovered a previously unknown drawing by Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer that was purchased at a Concord estate sale for $30.
“Schorer was only vaguely aware of the Stoddard theft at the time, but as he looked through the envelope’s contents, he began to concentrate on the works he found most interesting: the Avercamp, the Turner, and an oil painting by 19th-century Dutch painter Johan Jongkind. …
“His search came up empty. But from his years of experience tracking down stolen art, Schorer knew that disreputable dealers will sometimes misrepresent works to evade detection.
“ ‘Finally, I said, “All right, if I had that painting, who would I fence it as?” ‘ Schorer recalled thinking.
“He knew that Avercamp, a mute painter who specialized in outdoor winter scenes, had a nephew, Barent Avercamp, who mimicked the style of his more gifted relative. Schorer turned again to his computer, this time searching for winter scenes by the famed painter’s nephew.
Bingo: Fifteen minutes later, he came across a throw pillow that was selling for $18.40 with a portion of the missing Avercamp scene — including a distinctive arch — printed on its case. …
“Schorer had made a breakthrough. The only known images of the Avercamp were grainy black and white photos from the ’70s. But this image was in color. It could mean only one thing: The photo was taken after the theft.
“ ‘I clicked on that, and it took me to a page trying to sell me a pillow,’ Schorer recalled. There, just above the asking price, he also found the logo of the image licensing company that held the source file.
“Schorer navigated to the site and paid $39 to download the photo. As he parsed its metadata, he discovered the copyright on the image: L.S.F.A.L., an acronym for Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts Ltd., a dealer he’d known for years.
“Steigrad told Schorer he’d taken a photo of the painting for Newhouse Galleries, which had offered the artwork at a fine arts fair in the Netherlands in the mid-90s.
“Working another angle, Schorer discovered the name of the person who’d originally sold the work to Newhouse: Sheldon Fish. Fish told Schorer he’d purchased the painting at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market, a short drive from Worcester.”
Brimfield, Holy Cow! It’s a really famous flea market in our area, where Suzanne found most of the antique lockets she sold. I followed her around as she shopped one rainy weekend before Covid.
I love reading this stuff. The rest of the story is at the Globe, here.
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