A Francisco de Goya y Lucientes oil painting worth more than $1 million was stolen last week on its way to New York from Ohio for a Spanish painting exhibition scheduled to open Friday, museum and FBI officials said last night.

The painting, “Children With a Cart” (1778), disappeared as it was being transported through Scranton, Pa., from the Toledo Museum of Art by a professional art transport company, museum officials said.

It was scheduled to hang in the “Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum starting November 17.

The painting was insured for $1 million, and the insurance company has put up a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the painting.

A joint statement from the Guggenheim and Toledo Museum of Art said the painting “would be virtually impossible to sell and therefore has no value on the open market.”

A spokeswoman for the Philadelphia FBI office, Gerri Williams, said the details of how the painting was stolen, and when, wouldn’t be released until later this week. FBI agents want to determine how reliable tips are by the level of detail they include about the theft, she said. If the tips aren’t successful, the FBI will release more details, she said.

The FBI has a special art crime team comprised of 12 special agents.

Famous paintings stolen in the past, such as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which was stolen twice, have typically gone underground for several years before resurfacing. Because a stolen painting is immediately entered into international lists of stolen art and sent out by Interpol to police agencies across the world in an alert, thieves face great risk in selling the painting immediately.

“Children with a Cart” has been in the Toledo Museum of Art’s collection since 1959, when it was acquired from the Wildenstein & Co. gallery in New York, according to the painting’s museum provenance.

The painting, which depicts four children playing with a flute, drum, and cart under a tree, was one of Goya’s earlier works. It was created as a tapestry cartoon for the Royal Tapestry Factory at Santa Bárbara, Spain. After being held for nearly 70 years at the factory, the painting was transferred to Royal Palace of Madrid, the provenance says. It was then thought to have transferred to a London dealer, C. Marshall Spink, and Philip Hofer in Boston.

Goya’s work for the Royal Tapestry Factory typically depicted “leisure activities of the rich, poor, young, and old” in a “playful, Rococo” style, according to an article on Goya and the Spanish Enlightenment on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site.

The Guggenheim exhibit that planned to include “Children with a Cart” is “a large-scale exhibition focusing on key Spanish artists of the last five centuries,” according to a press release. Along with the Goya painting, 134 paintings from El Greco, Diego Velázquez , Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí will be included in the show, which “will explore distinctive Spanish treatments of subject matter from history, religion, mythology and everyday life,” according to the release.

Anyone with information leading to the whereabouts of the painting should call the Philadelphia Division of the FBI at 215-418-4000.