Goya masterpiece stolen en route to New York

Goya painting stolen in country road hijack

Ed Pilkington in New York
Wednesday November 15, 2006
The Guardian

The operation was meticulously planned and had the benefit of pinpoint accurate intelligence. The van was travelling on a circuitous route through the backwater of Scranton in Pennsylvania, well away from the main interstate highway 80 that led to its destination, New York.
The reason for taking the long way round was that inside the vehicle was a 228-year-old painting by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya. It was being carried by a specialist fine art transport firm to Manhattan's Guggenheim museum, where it was to be shown from Friday in the exhibition Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso.


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The painting never made it. The van was intercepted as it travelled from the Goya's home in the Toledo museum of art in Ohio to an exhibition in New York last week by art thieves who presumably knew precisely what they were targeting and why.
The grab is likely to have been a made-to-order job, as any attempt to sell such a well-known painting would be instantly thwarted by Interpol, which sends out global alerts when such thefts occur. The Toledo museum said "the painting would be virtually impossible to sell and therefore has no value on the open market".

The work, Children With a Cart, is an early painting by Goya from 1778 and one of his first royal commissions. It was intended as a template for one of a series of tapestries to be woven by the royal tapestry factory at Santa Barbara in Spain. It remained at the factory until about 1850, when it was transferred to the royal palace in Madrid, later passing through dealers in London and Boston and ending up in Toledo in 1959.

It depicts four children playing with a flute and drum as they sit on a carriage under a tree against a background of low billowing clouds.

It is not known how the snatch happened. The FBI, whose art crime team of 12 officers has been called in to investigate, is withholding details until it has had a chance to test the accuracy of information it is inviting from informants.

An insurance company which had underwritten the work for $1m (£524m) is offering a reward of $50,000 for information leading to its recovery.

Fine art carriers go to extraordinary lengths to secure the safe passage of masterpieces. Most firms carry the paintings in temperature-controlled vans with at least two vetted drivers. The vehicles are usually alarmed and are never left on their own.

"We try to keep the trips at a pretty low level so we don't draw attention, and we always use our own drivers who we have worked with for many years," said Russel Belk of the Minneapolis-based transporter Museum Services.

The Toledo museum will have to hope that the painting has the same fate as other masterpieces recovered by major collections in recent years following the offer of large rewards. In 2004 the Tate recovered two stolen Turners after the gallery offered £2m for information. In August, Norwegian police recovered Munch's Scream and Madonna stolen two years ago.