There’s a lot of stolen art out there. As a buyer, how do you minimize your risk?
Sometimes it is not sufficient simply to look a gift horse in the mouth; one may also have to check for missing teeth. This was certainly the case with an important 19th-century painting of a thoroughbred that a trustee of a museum client of ours recently offered to purchase for the institution. The problem was that the painting’s provenance had suspiciously large gaps, and the dealer selling it said that he could not fill in the missing information. The museum’s director believed that something about the proposed sale seemed fishy, and both she and the trustee asked for our advice. Continue reading “Hot Stuff”