A FAMOUSLY STOLEN PAINTING WAS FOUND THANKS TO A $18 THROW PILLOW
One night in June 1978, while Robert Stoddard was peacefully sleeping, thieves were sneaking through his 36-acre Worcester estate. By the time they fled, they had collected 12 artworks from the house, many of which are still missing and are valued at almost $10 million today. Stoddard soon discovered he had been the victim of one of the most notorious heists in the history of the art industry when he woke up the following morning. Numerous old masters, including Hendrick Avercamp, J.M.W. Turner, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, have lost their paintings.
The tide ultimately turned nearly fifty years later when Warren Fletcher, Stoddard's nephew, turned to Cliff Schorer for assistance. Schorer, a well-known art dealer, former Worcester Art Museum board president, and amateur art detective, had always been interested in finding lost masterpieces, or "sleepers," and he immediately set to work, concentrating on the Turner and the Avercamp, a painting by the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind from the 19th century.
“They were quite distinctive,” Schorer recently told the Boston Globe. “I figured, even in silhouette from an old image, I could find them.”
After some research, he finally found a $18 throw pillow with a piece of the long-lost Avercamp painting that showed a winter scene with ice skaters, a characteristic stone arch, and a cloudy sky. The cushion was identifiable enough for Schorer to follow up, even though it was listed online as being created by Barent Avercamp, the artist's nephew and student. He found a colour duplicate of Avercamp's Winter Landscape with Skater and Other Figures on Pixels.com by using a reverse image search engine. The metadata indicated that the photo was taken years after the theft of the artwork.
Shortly after, Schorer linked Winter Landscape to a fine arts fair held in the Netherlands in 1995 by Newhouse Galleries. The Dutch couple who purchased the picture there are already deceased, but Schorer was able to locate their heir by August 2021. After years of negotiating, the art dealer finally acquired the Avercamp in early May 2025. Since then, the artwork has made its way back to England, where it will shortly be on display at the Worcester Art Museum.
"The recovery of this magnificent painting is extremely significant—not just because it represents the lasting relationship between the Stoddard family and the Worcester Art Museum, but also because a long-lost piece of art has been returned to its original owner."Matthias Waschek, the museum’s Jean and Myles McDonough director, said in a statement. “We are grateful to have the work on loan to the museum to soon share with the Worcester community.”
“It was nirvana,” Fletcher said of the moment he saw Avercamp’s Winter Landscape again. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell this painting will show up, but through a combination of serendipitous circumstances, it did.”
Now, Schorer is already eager to locate Stoddard’s other lost paintings: “That’s the exciting part. There’s a whole number of threads that I can unravel.”
