Two stolen paintings by American artist Eastman Johnson (1824–1906) have been recovered in Connecticut. Milford auction house Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers, which helped recover the works, announced the news on its website.
The paintings, Mary and Her Lamb (1877) and The Young Mother (ca. 1872–73), were stolen from New York galleries Kenneth Lux Gallery and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, respectively, in 1978. Their whereabouts remained unknown for almost 50 years, until they were spotted in an estate collection by antiques dealer Brandon Levine earlier this year.
Levine, suspecting they were works by Johnson, sent photos of them to Sandra Germain, Shannon’s owner. Following her advice, he consulted the Eastman Johnson online catalog raisonné compiled by Patricia Hills and Abigael MacGibeny. Both paintings were listed as stolen.
After confirming the information with the Art Loss Register, Levine and Germain contacted the family that had inherited the works. After getting their agreement to return the paintings, Germain set about contacting their rightful owners.
At Hirschl & Adler, Germain says, “The owner, Stuart Feld, described the painting as if it had been stolen the day before.” Finding Kenneth Lux’s descendants was more complicated, but Germain was eventually able to connect with Lux’s son, Daniel.
“They were thrilled to get [the paintings] back,” said Germain. “The family was super cooperative with us. It was one of those situations where everybody did the right thing, and that doesn’t always happen.”
A leading portrait and genre painter, Johnson was known in his day as the American Rembrandt. His work is notable for its realism, as in one of his most famous pieces, A Ride for Liberty–The Fugitive Slaves, (ca. 1862), which he claimed to have based on an actual event he witnessed near the Civil War battlefield of Manassas.
According to Germain, the total worth of the recovered works may be over $200,000. Johnson’s Child and Lamb (1875), an oil painting of a similar size and subject as Mary and Her Lamb, sold at Bonham’s in 2024 for $108,000.
