Goya Is Found After the FBI Is Tipped Off
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A $1 million Francisco de Goya y Lucientes painting has been recovered in central New Jersey less than two weeks after it was purloined from a parked truck, FBI officials said yesterday.
A spokesman for the Newark FBI office, Steven Siegel, said investigators now believe the theft was a “target of opportunity,” not an inside job.
The work of art, “Children With a Cart,” painted in 1778, was taken from an unmarked, locked truck in a hotel parking lot in Stroudsburg, Pa., on November 8. It was on its way from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, where it was supposed to make its debut in a large Spanish art exhibit last Friday.
It didn’t make it, and officials yesterday said it would now be whisked back to Toledo’s permanent collection without making an appearance at the Guggenheim.
The two truck drivers were staying the night at the hotel, and when they saw the truck’s locks had been broken and the painting was missing, they immediately called police, who contacted the FBI.
The FBI said the painting was found through tips that came about after extensive press coverage of the theft beginning early last week. Because the investigation is ongoing, FBI officials refused to provide specific information about where and how the painting was recovered.
A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Philadelphia office, Jerri Williams, said no arrests had been made and no one is in custody for the theft.
“A tip came in that allowed us to recover the painting,” she said.
The company that insured the painting for $1 million offered a reward of up to $50,000 when the theft was first announced. Ms. Williams said the decision to hand the money over to the tipster was up to the insurance company. A spokeswoman for the Toledo Museum of Art, Jordan Rundgren, refused to answer questions about the reward.
The FBI said the painting appeared to be in good condition, a fact that the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, Sharon Flescher, said was the biggest news.
“The most important thing today is that the painting was found, and found in good condition,” she said. “Now we can start asking questions.”
A spokeswoman for the Guggenheim, Betsy Ennis, said the directors of both museums decided the painting should be returned to the Toledo Museum of Art “for the benefit of the community.”
“We are ecstatic that the painting has been recovered, and we look forward to bringing the Goya home and sharing it again with our community,” the director of the Toledo Museum of Art, Don Bacigalupi, said in a statement.
The painting has been part of the museum’s permanent collection since 1959, when it was purchased from Wildenstein & Co. gallery in New York.
“I’m so happy for the museum,” a senior vice president at Wildenstein & Co., Joseph Baillio, said. “It’s wonderful news. It’s a lovely thing. It just shimmers. I think it was dramatically underinsured.”
Goya created “Children with a Cart” early in his career when he was painting cartoons for tapestries at the Royal Tapestry Factory. The painting, one of about 60 cartoons, wouldn’t have been displayed by itself when it first created, but as Goya’s work began to attract more attention, it likely became an attraction on its own. Almost all of the other early Goya cartoons have remained in Madrid.
The painting depicts four children playing with a drum and a flute on a cart beneath a large tree, and a cloud rising from the horizon. The final tapestry was woven for the private quarters of the prince and princess of Asturias at the Pardo Palace, a professor of Spanish art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Jonathan Brown, said.
The painting is 145.4 by 94 centimeters, according to the Guggenheim catalog.
The Guggenheim’s exhibit, “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History,” opened Friday with work from a broad selection of Spanish artists including Diego Velázquez, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí.