Displaying items by tag: Stolen

The Field Museum has put some new security measures in place after an employee in the membership department swindled the museum out of more than $900,000 in cash over seven years.

The museum revealed the $903,284 theft — discovered in April 2014 — in its 2014 Form 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

The theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence from an oratory in Palermo in 1969 is still considered one of the worst art crimes in history.

The 17th-century masterpiece – a depiction of the newborn Christ on a bed of straw, painted in the chiaroscuro technique – was thought to have been painted by Caravaggio in Rome and later moved to Sicily, where it hung for centuries before being cut from its frame by two thieves in the night, never to be seen again.

A rare map depicting the New England and Canadian coast has been returned to the Boston Public Library.

The “Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France” was created by French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1612, and stolen from the BPL in 2003, according to a library press release. Boston Public Library’s map curator, Ronald Grim, found the missing map advertised by a New York antiques dealer, and identified it by its distinctive flaws.

A pair of stolen N.C. Wyeth paintings worth up to $500,000 apiece have been recovered and will be displayed in Maine along with four other stolen paintings recouped nearly a year ago in California, officials said Thursday.

The two paintings were recovered last month when a third party surrendered them to a retired FBI agent in the Boston area, Harold Shaw, special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston field office, told reporters at the Portland Museum of Art, where the paintings were on display.

Four rare artworks believed to have been stolen are being returned to India by an Ohio art museum.

Director Brian Kennedy recently announced that the Toledo Museum of Art made arrangements with the Embassy of India to return the objects, including an 11th-century bronze sculpture depicting the deity Ganesh and a carved stone.

A painting and a drawing by Francisco de Goya, with an estimated combined value of €5 million ($5.6 million), have been stolen from a private home in Villanueva de la Cañada, a wealthy suburb of Madrid.

El País reports that the theft took place in the evening of September 1, when there was no one in the house, and the thieves disabled the alarm system.

In what appears at first glance to be a simple, magnanimous act, a Russian billionaire is poised this week to return two Picassos, valued at $30 million, to the artist’s stepdaughter, who says the works, both portraits of her mother — Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife — were stolen from her.

The businessman, Dmitry E. Rybolovlev, owner of one of the world’s most valuable art collections, said in an interview last week that he bought the works in good faith in 2013, without any hint that there was a question about their title.

Nine Warhol prints of Jewish icons including Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein have gone missing from the walls of a movie editing studio in Los Angeles. The works are thought to be valued at $350,000, or £226,854 each, have been surreptitiously replaced by an industrious individual who had reportedly created fakes to replace the originals versions of the works and secretly installed the new works in place of the originals, according to TMZ.

This particular art crime only came to light when a member of the business took the works to a framer who realized that the works were indeed fake, leading to a police investigation.

Danish police today announced that they are on the hunt for two suspects who robbed a Copenhagen museum in broad daylight and made off with a bronze bust by sculptor Auguste Rodin, reportedly worth as much as €270,000 ($300,000).

The theft took place on July 16 at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, and only took the two men, who were posing as tourists, 12 minutes to pull off, reports the Danish newspaper Politiken.

The FBI and Portland police on Tuesday announced a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the recovery of two paintings by N.C. Wyeth stolen from Portland developer and art collector Joseph Soley in May 2013.

Police Chief Michael Sauschuck traveled to the Boston FBI office to join Vincent B. Lisi, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, to make the announcement. It comes a month after a New Hampshire man was convicted of illegally transporting four other N.C. Wyeth paintings stolen from Soley at the same time. Two other men have been convicted of possessing those stolen works.