350-year-old stolen Rembrandt found at CA church

ROBERT JABLON

Asso­ci­ated Press

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. — A stolen Rem­brandt sketch was too hot to han­dle for thieves, and even the detec­tive who held the 17th cen­tury art­work in white-gloved hands Tues­day admit­ted he was nervous.

After all, it was only days ear­lier that the 350-year-old art­work worth $250,000 was swiped from the lobby of a sea­side hotel.

The 11-by-6-inch pen-and-ink draw­ing was found in an unlocked pub­lic area of an Encino church Mon­day evening after a caller rec­og­nized it from news accounts of its week­end theft, said Los Ange­les County sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore.

It was ver­i­fied as being the stolen piece shortly after mid­night, he said.

How­ever, experts will be asked to authen­ti­cate the work as a Rem­brandt, and until then it will remain in an evi­dence locker, Whit­more said.

“It’s going to stay under lock and key until the detec­tives deter­mine where to send it next,” he said.

The frame hold­ing it will be fin­ger­printed and inves­ti­ga­tors will try to deter­mine whether the church has any sur­veil­lance video, detec­tive Clarence Williams said Tues­day as he held up the recov­ered art­work in a dark-wood frame at a Marina del Rey news conference.

The Rem­brandt was snatched from an easel on Sat­ur­day dur­ing a pri­vate art dis­play in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. A cura­tor was momen­tar­ily dis­tracted by some­one who seemed inter­ested in buy­ing another piece.

The thieves appar­ently tore open brown paper cov­er­ing the back of the frame, intend­ing to remove the mounted sketch, but then got cold feet.

“They real­ized that … it’s going to be very hard to sell” because of the pub­lic­ity and might not have had the knowhow and con­nec­tions to sell the sketch, Williams said.

“It doesn’t appear to be dam­aged or touched.”

It was aban­doned, “we believe, because there was so much pub­lic­ity,” Whit­more said. “How do you sell it? What do you do with it?”

It was not imme­di­ately clear whether the thieves were pro­fes­sion­als or ama­teur opportunists.

“I hon­estly can’t tell you if it was well thought-out, at this time,” Williams said.

Inves­ti­ga­tors had sev­eral leads, were review­ing hotel sur­veil­lance video and were work­ing on a sketch of the sus­pects, Whit­more said.

The art­work, in its orig­i­nal mount­ing, was found in an unlocked church build­ing about 20 miles from where it van­ished, Williams said. The detec­tive declined to name the church or to say whether the sketch was found in the sanctuary.

“Right now it looks like it was dumped off,” Williams said.

At St. Nicholas’ Epis­co­pal Church, an Angli­can parish in Encino, the Rev. Michael Cooper con­firmed the sketch was found there but he declined to release any details.

The man who tipped off author­i­ties is not a sus­pect and is coop­er­at­ing with investigators.

The sketch, called “The Judg­ment,” was com­pleted around 1655 and is signed on the back by Rem­brandt von Rijn. It was drawn with a quill pen and depicts what appears to be a court scene with a man pros­trat­ing him­self before a judge.

The draw­ing was part of an exhibit at the hotel spon­sored by the Lin­earis Insti­tute based in the San Fran­cisco Bay area com­mu­nity of Hercules.

Calls to the insti­tute for com­ment were not imme­di­ately returned Tuesday.

Posted by AP News on Aug 16 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.