How an $18 pillow led to the recovery of a $2 million stolen Dutch painting

Boston Globe

28-05-2025

Schorer had flown from Brussels the day before with the painting he now carried in his hands, a winter scene by the acclaimed Dutch Golden Age artist Hendrick Avercamp.
The artwork was stolen nearly half a century earlier in a sensational 1978 heist from the baronial estate of Helen and Robert Stoddard, a Worcester industrialist. The Avercamp picture, along with numerous other paintings and other valuables
taken from the home that night, had not been seen since. Local officials were stumped. So was the FBI.
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But Schorer had thought to look where others did not.
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Inside the museum, members of the Stoddard family and museum staff greeted Schorer, who apologized for being late. As they gathered around, he and a conservator carefully unwrapped the package, revealing the aged but unscathed picture of Dutch figures skating in winter.
'It was nirvana,' Warren Fletcher, a nephew of the Stoddards, said of the moment. 'There's not a snowball's chance in hell this painting will show up, but through a combination of serendipitous circumstances, it did.'
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Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp's winter scene, stolen in 1978, arrived earlier this month at the Worcester Art Museum.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
The Avercamp originally disappeared the night of June 22, 1978, when thieves broke into the 36-acre Stoddard estate, hacking open sofa cushions to cart away valuable works by Camille Pissarro, J.M.W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others.
The theft has been largely forgotten since, overshadowed by notorious art heists such as the 1990
But the Stoddard theft — the largest art heist in the city's history — was equally chilling.
That night, with Helen undergoing cancer treatment at a Boston hospital, Robert turned in just before midnight. The industrialist, he'd run a metal forging enterprise, was chairman of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette Inc., and a founder the anti-Communist John Birch Society, was sound asleep when thieves broke in through the sunporch.
The burglars ransacked the home, rifling through drawers and closets. They drank the couple's liquor and ate food from the fridge, according to later news reports. They made their way through each room, snatching paintings from the walls and pocketing collectibles including miniature carvings, silver tea sets, watches, and valuable music boxes.
When Stoddard awoke the next morning, he realized the house had been robbed when he found his glasses on the floor. The couple's bedroom dressers had been raided, their closets opened, and, ominously, a thief had left a poker from the downstairs fireplace by his bedside.
All told, the thieves stole nine paintings, which today would be worth millions. (Schorer estimated the Avercamp, valued at $65,000 at the time of the theft, could today bring upward of $2 million.)
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Investigators conducted a wide-ranging investigation, but no one was ever arrested, and the crime remains unsolved.
'We never had a suspect,' Ralph E. Doyle, a retired Detective Sgt. with the Worcester Police Department, told the Telegram & Gazette in 2000.
That's not to say there haven't been breakthroughs.
The most valuable work in the Stoddard's collection, Pissarro's 1902 oil on canvas, 'Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny à Dieppe, temps gris,' surfaced at a Cleveland auction house in 1998. The painting, which reportedly wasn't listed in a stolen art database the auction house consulted, was set to be the sale's premier lot. But the auction stalled when the Impressionist's great grandson, art historian Joachim Pissarro, informed a potential buyer the painting was stolen.
'The auction was coming up in a week,' recalled Fletcher, who
worked to get the Federal Bureau of Investigation involved once he learned of the painting's whereabouts. 'At the last moment, the FBI did go in and basically seized the painting, withheld it from the auction.'
Helen Stoddard, then 94, was ecstatic.
'I don't believe it,' she told the Globe
back then. 'I'm so thrilled.'
Helen Stoddard after she'd learned the Pissarro had surfaced in Ohio.
Barry Chin/Globe Staff
The discovery of the Pissarro prompted authorities to look closely at a Springfield-area art dealer named Robert Cornell, and his ex-wife, Jennifer Abella-Cornell, who had brought the painting to Ohio.
But the estranged couple gave wildly conflicting accounts:
She said she'd took it from his closet; he denied any knowledge of the painting. The FBI never charged either of them, and an agency spokesperson later told the Telegram & Gazette that reconciling their stories was 'like beating a dead horse.'
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Cornell died in 2013; Abella-Cornell did not respond to a request for comment.
Helen Stoddard, in poor health when the Pissarro was discovered, did not live to see its return to Worcester. In a codicil to her will, however, she said she wanted the Pissarro and the Avercamp — if ever found — to go to the museum.
A stolen painting by Camille Pissarro, Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny à Dieppe, temps gris (The Duquesne and Berrigny Basins at Dieppe, Overcast Weather), 1902, now at the Worcester Art Museum, surfaced in 1998. Stoddard Acquisition Fund in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Stoddard.
Camille Pissarro
Another of the stolen works, a small painting by Boston-born Impressionist Childe Hassam, turned up at auction around 2006. But the work never entered the museum's collection, and it was eventually sold at auction.
The trail of the Avercamp and other missing works then went cold. Frustrated by the lack of progress and still hoping they might be retrieved, Fletcher, the Stoddards' nephew, finally turned to Schorer in 2021. He put information about the missing artworks in a manila envelope and sent it to the sleuth.
Fletcher was by then familiar with Schorer. The dealer, whose Provincetown home was designed by Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius, is a shareholder in London's storied Agnews Gallery. He's renowned in the trade, and he'd recently discovered a
Schorer was only vaguely aware of the Stoddard theft at the time, but as he looked through the envelope's contents, he began to concentrate on the works he found most interesting: the Avercamp, the Turner, and an oil painting by 19th-century Dutch painter Johan Jongkind.
'They were quite distinctive,' said Schorer, who began to scour the internet. 'I figured, even in silhouette from an old image, I could find them.'
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Cliff Schorer, the former head of the Worcester Art Museum board of directors, visits the museum's Baroque Gallery in Worcester, MA.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
His search came up empty. But from his years of experience tracking down stolen art, Schorer knew that disreputable dealers will sometimes misrepresent works to evade detection.
'Finally, I said, 'All right, if I had that painting, who would I fence it as,' Schorer recalled thinking.
He knew that Avercamp, a mute painter who specialized in outdoor winter scenes, had a nephew, Barent Avercamp, who mimicked the style of his more gifted relative.
Schorer turned again to his computer, this time searching for winter scenes by the famed painter's nephew.
Bingo: Fifteen minutes later, he came across a throw pillow that was selling for $18.40 with a portion of the missing Avercamp scene —including a distinctive arch — printed on its case.
'Instantly,' Schorer knew, 'I mean, there is no other painting of that composition.'
An image of a throw pillow may not seem particularly revealing, but Schorer had made a breakthrough. The only known images of the Avercamp were grainy black and white photos from the '70s. But this image was in color. It could mean only one thing: The photo was taken after the theft.
'I clicked on that, and it took me to a page trying to sell me a pillow,' Schorer recalled. There, just above the asking price, he also found the logo of the image licensing company that held the source file.
Schorer knew he'd made a breakthrough when he found a color image of the Avercamp painting on a pillow.
Courtesy Cliff Schorer
Schorer navigated to the site and paid $39 to download the photo. As he parsed its metadata, he discovered the copyright on the image: L.S.F.A.L., an acronym for Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts Ltd., a dealer he'd known for years.
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Steigrad told Schorer he'd taken a photo of the painting for Newhouse Galleries, which had offered the artwork
at a fine arts fair in the Netherlands in the mid-90s.
Working another angle, Schorer discovered the name of the person who'd originally sold the work to Newhouse: Sheldon Fish. Fish told Schorer he'd purchased the painting at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market, a short drive from Worcester.
He added that he'd bought the piece 'in the '90s' but hadn't known it was by Avercamp and couldn't remember the seller's name.
'I just thought it was a good painting,' Fish told the Globe via telephone from Peru. 'I took a shot.'
Schorer is now convinced the mysterious Brimfield seller was Cornell, the art dealer who was implicated when the Pissarro surfaced in the late '90s.
'Cornell exhibited there,' he said. 'He sold it to Sheldon Fish.'
Newhouse Galleries, which Schorer said offered the painting as the work of Barent Avercamp, has since closed. But Schorer managed to access the gallery's archives, where he learned the name of the Dutch couple, now deceased, that had purchased the work at the art fair back in the '90s.
By August 2021, Schorer had tracked down an heir to the couple and began firing off a series of increasingly urgent letters. But he received no response. Eventually, Schorer wrote that he planned to go on Dutch television about the case, enlisting a well-known art recovery expert, who also made contact.
'At that point, finally, they came back' to me, he said.
Terms of the Avercamp agreement, including the name of the Dutch family, were not revealed. But after years of searching, Schorer finally collected the picture in early May after having it independently authenticated at a meeting in Antwerp, Belgium. The small group of individuals who supported the recovery of the painting now plan to donate it to the museum.
Schorer returned home the following day, stowing the artwork in the back of his car while he squired it back to Worcester.
James Welu, who led the museum when the Pissarro came home, said the Avercamp's return 'was like déjà vu.'
Cliff Schorer, left, inspects the recovered painting with conservator Matthew Cushman.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Current museum director Matthias Waschek called it 'profoundly meaningful.'
'Not only because a long-lost work of art has been returned to the family that once owned it,' he said in a statement, 'but because it reflects the enduring bond between the Stoddard family and the Worcester Art Museum.'
During a meeting last week, Schorer marveled at the overall condition of the painting with conservator Matthew Cushman. The yellowed varnish will need to be addressed, Cushman said, and there may be some minor retouching before he applies a new coat of varnish. Otherwise, the painting is almost exactly as it was described in a conservator's report from 1977.
But Schorer was already thinking about other
missing
works from the Stoddard collection, saying he plans to
focus on the nexus revealed by the recovered Avercamp and Pissarro.
'That's the exciting part,' he said. 'There's a whole number of threads now that I can unravel.'
Malcolm Gay can be reached at