Stolen

Police have announced two dates for a roadshow of objects recovered from what is thought to be a £30m art theft spree.

A SMALL Renoir portrait painted in 1913, with an estimated value of €170,000-200,000 (£120,000-140,000), was stolen from the Tajan premises in Paris shortly before it was to be offered at a sale on March 31.

SCOTLAND Yard is to put a £500,000 Aladdin’s Cave of stolen antiques on show after a two-year investigation into a £30m burglary ring.

Police have issued this CCTV image of a man wanted for questioning in connection with a theft at a Greenwich antiques shop.

A remarkable array of art and antiques seized by the High Court from an Austrian businessman convicted of fraud were sold by a small-scale Buckinghamshire auctioneer last week.

Almost a quarter of a century after it was stolen from its walls, the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery is again appealing for the return of a Japanese woodblock print that once belonged to Vincent van Gogh.

The Elizabethan communion cup of St Peter-with-Bastwick, Repps, pictured right, was stolen from a safe on the weekend of January 1-2.

Four antique clocks and two barometers were stolen in a raid on Chislehurst Antiques in Kent in late December.

THE V&A has appealed for help from the art and antiques world in tracing the eight bronze plaques thought to be worth a total of £450,000 stolen in the third raid on the museum in three months.

A 90-year-old member of the Wine Label Circle has lost 70 items from his collection during a break-in at his East Sussex home. The wine labels were the only items taken in the theft.

The Victoria and Albert Museum have updated security following a second theft from their Ceramic Galleries in as many months. While the new systems were installed, the galleries were closed for a week.

VALUABLE Native American artefacts were stolen in a smash-and-grab raid on an auctioneer’s car in Surrey last week. A substantial reward is being offered for the safe return of the stolen items.

POLICE investigating the theft of Tang and Yuan dynasty jewellery and body ornaments from the British Museum on October 29-30 believe the raid could be linked to the theft of Chinese jades from the Victoria and Albert Museum earlier last month.

GLASSWORKS by Emile Gallé thought to be worth over £1.5m have been stolen from a Swiss museum. Thieves seized 15 items by the French master craftsman in the raid on the Neumann Foundation, housed in the castle of Gingins overlooking Lake Geneva, on October 27.

POLICE have alerted dealers across Ireland to a cache of antiques stolen in a weekend raid at the home of Lord Henry Mountcharles on his Slane Castle estate in County Meath.

TWO diamonds with a reported value of nearly £8m were were stolen from the Chopard stand at the Paris Biennale.

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No 1276, February 22, 1997, I reviewed a fascinating but somewhat disconcerting exhibition at Archeus Fine Art in London of drawings by Eric Hebborn (1934-1996), who has been described as the maker of the finest art fakes of the 20th century. The show offered rather convincing ‘Old Master’ drawings after the likes of Raphael, Rembrandt and Watteau, which were selling at prices up to £2500.

THE owners of a mid-18th century cello by Tomasso and Lorenzo Carcassi of Florence have appealed for its safe return following a theft in North Finchley.

SIX masked raiders broke into the South Cotswolds Antiques Fair at Westonbirt School, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire around 3am on the morning of Sunday August 15 and escaped with an estimated £400,000 worth of jewellery.

NEWS has come in of the theft of a New Zealand ‘Waitangi’ crown. This one should prove to be particularly easy to identify because it is the rare proof – not the ‘ordinary’ issue.