Gauguin, going, gone

It’s an art thief’s ultimate dilemma: you’ve snaffled that million-pound painting, but where do you put it? Do you hide it under a mattress, as was Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at the end of the 19th century, or stuff it in a Swiss vault, like a lost Leonardo sketch found last year? Or do you send it careering through the underworld as trade in drug deals? Those were the kind of leads Interpol and insurance companies would have been following in the search for a Gauguin still life stolen in 1970 from the family of a Marks & Spencer heiress. Where they did not look was a kitchen wall in Sicily.

To the art market, the value of the Fruits on a Table or Still Life with a Small Dog is as much as £20 million, say experts. ‘It is one of those works that finds its place in a museum,’ says Dr Karen Serres, Schroeder Foundation curator of paintings at the Courtauld Institute, which amassed its Gauguin collection in the 1920s. ‘It was from a crucial year in his career.’ To the Italian Fiat factory worker, who had bought it, along with a Bonnard (a French artist painting prolifically around 1900) painting of a woman in a garden, in a railway lost property auction in 1975, it was worth £20. No one could make out the signatures on the paintings.

In the world of high-end crime, the Gauguin is unusual for both the accidental nature of its discovery and for something the art world dares not admit: the arbitrariness of monetary value. That it ended up in such a humble location has a certain justice to it. Rather like the 17th-century Dutch painting that is tended to by the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch, it was in the hands of someone who loved it without caring about its worth.

Gauguin painted the apples and dog in 1889, aged 41, while staying at Le Pouldu, on the Brittany coast, with barely two francs to rub together. It was two years before he headed out to Tahiti, which marked the high point of his career, and he was staying at a guesthouse, paying for his board by painting. Also holidaying there was a woman who signed the register as Comtesse de Nimal, of whom very little is known. Gauguin spotted a chance. The countess claimed to know the finance minister, a possible route to patronage. Gauguin wrote to a friend that there was ‘another countess who is enamoured with me’ and the painting is signed flirtatiously not with Gauguin’s name but with the face of a dog and a dedication to ‘la comtesse de N’.

Her affection for him didn’t last long. She sold it to the dealer Étienne Bignou, and soon the painting began to move through the bloodstream of the regular art market, through the industrialists and old money, accruing value until it ended up in a sale at Sotheby’s in New York in 1962.

Gauguin was not the only man in need of patronage. Terence Kennedy was an American in Paris in 1949, a broke ballet dancer with a dodgy knee and literary aspirations, when he met the heiress Mathilda Marks. A year later they married. ‘Millionairess Mathilda Marks, 16st and 54, has married Terence Kennedy, a 42-year-old writer,’ said the Daily Mail. The implication was as heavy as Mathilda.

Marks was the daughter of Michael Marks, the Belarusian immigrant pedlar — slogan: ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’ — whose business grew rapidly into Marks & Spencer, the most successful retailer of the age. The Mail did not mention the other rumour about Kennedy — that he was homosexual. The late publisher Anthony Blond, whose father had married another of the Marks sisters, was not so reticent. ‘Tilly enjoyed years of married life in a ménage à trois, tended and indulged, petted and cared for by an intelligent, charming and witty husband and his boyfriend,’ he wrote in his book Jew Made in England.

This odd couple flashed their wealth. Stories appeared in the American gossip columns about trips to New York where her luggage included £200,000 worth of jewellery, a Rolls-Royce and a £14,000 mink coat, and Kennedy on her arm. It was on one of these trips, in 1962, that Mathilda bought a Gauguin at auction for £45,000. She liked dogs, and expensive objets d’art.

Two years later, Mathilda died on a trip to Montecatini, a spa town in Italy, and Kennedy inherited her £2m estate, which had included their Lutyens house in Sussex, to the horror of her family. ‘Her possessions were without exception very valuable, and her widower was the principal beneficiary,’ noted Blond. You might call it the heist of an heiress.

In 1970, the widower had moved from Mayfair into the Regency splendours of Chester Terrace, NW1 — the whereabouts of the boyfriend are unrecorded. He was away in June when the housekeeper let in three men, dressed as a policeman and two burglar-alarm installers. While she was in the kitchen making the tea, they got to work. It was a pre-planned heist, by someone who knew what lay behind the façade of Chester Terrace. When she returned with the tea, there were two empty frames where the Bonnard and Gauguin had been. Men and pictures were gone.

When a painting is stolen it typically follows certain routes, says Julian Radcliffe of Art Loss Register. After 25 years, around 20 per cent remain unrecovered. Thirteen paintings, including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 may soon fall into this category. Others are destroyed because they are too hot to handle, or end up being held by relatives of the original thieves. A treasure trove was discovered in the apartment of an art dealer from the Nazi era last year. Another 30 per cent return to the market through backstreet dealers, and around ten per cent, estimates Radcliffe, form part of gangland security, another idea Tartt plays with in The Goldfinch.

The Gauguin and Bonnard, however, escaped all these fates. They were abandoned on a train travelling from Paris to Turin — the police have speculated that the thieves may have been spooked by a border control — and, with uncharacteristic Italian efficiency, sent to the lost property office. Had Interpol or the local police spotted them, they may have investigated whether they were heading to Switzerland to be put in a vault or into Italy where the Mafia had a sideline in art dealing. Or, considering neither painting was a showpiece, they were heading to a specific home.