Stolen Flemish Painting Recovered After Sotheby’s Due Diligence Match
A 17th-century Flemish painting stolen from a private residence in Canada in 2020 has been recovered after Sotheby’s flagged it during routine checks against the Art Loss Register database. The work, Interior of a Collector’s Cabinet: An Allegory of Sight, by Jan van Kessel the Elder and Abraham Willemsens, was identified in October 2023 before a planned sale and later returned on behalf of insurer AXA XL.
The painting’s path back to the market was unusually circuitous. According to the Art Loss Register, the consignor told Sotheby’s that the work had been purchased in 2015 at a sale in Switzerland. That detail was accurate: the 2015 transaction was where the painting’s owner at the time of the theft had acquired it. Once the work was matched to the 2020 theft report, the consignor went silent for a year before the organization secured a response and arranged recovery.
AXA XL had already paid the insurance claim to the owner after the theft, which gave the insurer the right to claim the painting if it resurfaced. The Art Loss Register said it recovered the work on AXA XL’s behalf.
The painting later appeared in New York in Sotheby’s sale “Master Paintings & Sculpture from Four Millennia Part II,” where it carried a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $40,000 and sold for $88,900. In its catalog essay, Sotheby’s described the composition as a densely layered kunstkamer, or collector’s cabinet, filled with paintings, sculpture, scientific instruments, precious objects, and naturalia.
James Ratcliffe, the Art Loss Register’s director of recoveries, said the case shows both the value of registering stolen works and the importance of due diligence in the art market. It is also a reminder that provenance research can do more than clarify ownership history: in some cases, it can return a work to the legal chain of title years after it disappeared.
