College scholar solves 70-year portrait theft thriller

An Exeter College artwork historian has solved the 70-year thriller over the theft of an authentic oil sketch, by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, from a stately house in Northamptonshire.

The Portrait of Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg was stolen in 1951 from Boughton Home, the house of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry.

It was a part of a set – described as “a puzzle lacking a central piece” – of seventeenth Century oil sketches that had been housed on the property since 1682.

However the art work’s disappearance was solely famous in 1957, when Mary Montagu Douglas Scott, Duchess of Buccleuch and Queensberry, visited one among Harvard College’s galleries – and noticed it on show.

Now, due to an investigation by Dr Meredith Hale, senior lecturer in Artwork Historical past and Visible Tradition on the College of Exeter, the riddle of how the sketch made its solution to the US through distinguished members of the artwork world – together with Christie’s public sale home in London – has been solved.

Dr Hale famous how by means of “new archival analysis within the UK, US and Canada” she was capable of “reconstruct the portray’s actions over three generations”.

She mentioned it “handed by means of the palms of specialists, conservators, auctioneers, sellers, and collectors from London to Toronto”.

“Not solely do these sources reveal a dynamic image of occasions as they unfold,” she added, “however they spotlight the components that contributed to the success of the theft, foremost amongst them the conceptual and materials complexity of Van Dyck’s iconography undertaking – and the audacity of a thief cloaked within the respectability of experience.”

The art work has now been returned and the story of its journey has been chronicled in a brand new paper within the British Artwork Journal.

The thief, Dr Hale mentioned, was Leonard Gerald Gwynne Ramsey, the editor of the journal The Connoisseur, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Ramsey visited Boughton in July 1951 with a photographer to be able to collect materials for a bit for the journal’s yr ebook.

Among the many objects housed on the property for safekeeping through the conflict had been the 37 picket panels from Van Dyck’s unfinished iconography undertaking.

Every panel featured an oil-painted sketch of a distinguished prince, scholar, army chief or artist, and would have been used to create prints on the market.

Correspondence between Ramsey and artwork historian Ludwig Goldscheider revealed that the previous meant to promote two work as a result of he wanted the cash to purchase new curtains.

Based on the analysis, Goldscheider provided a certificates of authentication and the image was offered anonymously at Christie’s for £189 in April 1954.

Dr Hale traced the sale of the image, lower than a yr later, to an artwork supplier in New York, earlier than it moved on to a second supplier who offered it for $2,700 to Dr Lillian Malcove; who in flip donated it to the Fogg Artwork Museum of Harvard College.

In her paper, Dr Hale chronicles terse correspondences between the museum’s artwork director, Professor John Coolidge, and Ramsey as soon as considerations had been raised by the duchess.

Ramsey, it reveals, claimed he’d purchased the image from a market in Hemel Hempstead, and he additionally tried to solid doubt on the authenticity of the image.

With doubts rising, the museum returned the image to Dr Malcove in 1960, and after she died in 1981, it was donated to the Artwork Museum of the College of Toronto.

Dr Hale mentioned the findings have helped to “resolve the query of whether or not this was the image stolen from Boughton”.

It resulted within the govt committee of the College of Toronto voting to return it to the Duke of Buccleuch, 73 years after it was stolen.

“With out this portray, the Boughton oil sketches had been like a puzzle that is lacking a central piece,” mentioned Dr Hale.

“Its return has now restored the integrity of the group.”