The London-based Art Loss Register said Tuesday that it had recovered a 17th-century Flemish painting that had been stolen in September 2020 from a private residence in Canada.
The missing painting was reported to police and logged with the Art Loss Register shortly after its theft. The stolen painting, Interior of a Collector’s Cabinet: An Allegory of Sight (ca. 1660) by Jan van Kessel the Elder and Abraham Willemsens, was identified in October 2023 ahead of a planned sale at Sotheby’s. The auction house cross-checked the painting with the Art Loss Register’s database of stolen works as part of its due diligence, which ultimately matched it with the work taken in 2020.
The consignor of the work had told Sotheby’s that they had purchased it in 2015 from a sale in Switzerland. That part of the provenance is correct, as the 2015 sale is where the work’s owner at the time of the theft had purchased it.
According to the Art Loss Register, the consignor went silent for a year before the organization “was able to secure a response from him and the recovery of the painting.” The Art Loss Register recovered Interior of a Collector’s Cabinet on behalf of its insurer AXA XL, which had paid out an insurance claim to the owner at the time of its theft and “thus secured the right to claim the stolen painting if it ever reappeared,” according to a release.
The painting was shipped to Sotheby’s last August and then offered this past February as part of a sale in New York titled “Master Paintings & Sculpture from Four Millennia Part II.” The work carried a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $40,000, selling for $88,900 or more than double the high estimate.
“This recovery demonstrates not only the benefit of registering stolen works with our database, but also the great value of due diligence checks carried out by the art market,” James Ratcliffe, the Art Loss Register’s director of recoveries, said in a statement. “We are grateful to Sotheby’s for their diligence and assistance in this case, which enabled the recovery of this picture and a very successful subsequent sale for the benefit of the insurer.”
ARTnews has reached out to Sotheby’s for comment.
In its catalog essay, Sotheby’s described the painting as a “richly orchestrated kunstkamer [that] epitomizes the Flemish fascination with collecting, connoisseurship, and visual knowledge in mid-seventeenth-century Antwerp. Conceived as an Allegory of Sight, the composition unfolds as a dazzling inventory of paintings, sculptures, scientific instruments, precious objects, and naturalia.”
Per Sotheby’s, Willemsens “contributed the sculptures and the figures of Juno and the putto” to the composition, with van Kessel, “celebrated for his refined cabinet pictures and still-life passages,” painting everything else. “Together,” the essay continues, “the artists created a learned and visually sumptuous meditation on the pleasures of looking—an image that simultaneously celebrates Antwerp’s artistic culture and invites the viewer to participate in the discerning eye of the collector.”
