Ammi Philips Paintings Returned
A bit of a spoiler in the title but I’m excited to be able to deliver a happy ending for once. It’s also interesting to look at the work that goes into recovering a missing artwork and how much had to be done for the police, in this case, by passionate historians.
The Original Crime
On February 16, 1972, there was a fire at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building in New Paltz, New York. Thieves seized the opportunity and commotion (or some speculate that they started the fire themselves) to break into the historical society’s 1799 house and make off with a cache of items estimated to be worth $30,000 at the time.
Among the items stolen was silver, ceramics, a prayer book, a powder horn, swords, and two paintings by Ammi Philips created in the 1820s. This pair of paintings depicted elderly New Paltz resident and local wheat farmer Dirck D. Wynkoop and his wife Annatje Wynkoop. Not a lot is known about these paintings specifically except the identity of the subjects and the fact that they were painted by Philips who was a prominent, self-taught folk artist active in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut between 1810 and 1860.
Portraits of Dirck D. Wynkoop and his wife Annatje Wynkoop by Ammi Philips
After the initial robbery was committed many of the stolen items turned up weeks later at a Manhattan thrift shop and were recovered from there. The notable exception was the portraits of the Wynkoops. The historical society had distributed a black and white postcard with images of the paintings hoping that someone would see them and report it but nothing ended up coming of this and the paintings were assumed to be lost.
Fast Forward
I won’t say that it was a particularly good investigation since it seems to kind of go cold after the other items were recovered from the Manhattan thrift store. However, in 2020 Carol Johnson, a historical society member, and Josephine Bloodgood, the historical society’s director, were working on an exhibition about Civil War veteran Jacob Wynkoop, whose father was enslaved by Dirck D. Wynkoop, the man in one of the missing portraits. This reminded them of the missing paintings and inspired them to try and track them down.
Bloodgood and Johnson used the black and white postcard from the time of the robbery to compare to an online catalogue of Philips’ work. They ended up finding the canvasses in a listing that said the sitters were unidentified and that they were sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2005 for $13,200 (way less than other works by Philips had in the past). Why the police hadn’t done this is a mystery to me.
The historical society went to the FBI’s New York art crimes unit with the information that they had uncovered. The FBI subpoenaed Southeby’s for the name of the buyer and they traced the paintings to a collector in another state who had no idea that they were stolen and agreed to return them to New Paltz.
The question of how two stolen paintings managed to go up for sale at a prominent auction house remains open. No one really knows the answer to this. If specialists had looked at the back of the works they would have seen the names of the sitters which would have made it easy to identify them as the stolen paintings. A representative of Sotheby's said that the Sotheby's catalogue for the sale was checked against the Art Loss Register and if the paintings had been registered there they would have been immediately identified as stolen.
Luckily these paintings are now back on display at the New Paltz historical society without sustaining any lasting damage which is a relief. But I will say that investigations around stolen art are usually super lame and lack rigour on the part of the police. These two untrained members of the historical society were able to do more to recover these paintings in a year than the police were in 50. Pathetic.
Works Cited
Cascone, Sarah. “Two Sleuths from a Small-Town Historical Society Tracked Down Two Paintings Stolen 50 Years Ago. Now, They’re Going Back on View”. 2022. Artnet. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/stolen-new-paltz-paintings-returned-after-50-years-2133806#:~:text=Sotheby's%20sold%20the%20stolen%20works%20at%20auction%20in%202005.&text=The%20FBI%20has%20returned%20these,50%20years%20after%20their%20theft