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Rare Rodin sculpture stolen during $1 million Beverly Hills heist recovered in London

Young Girl With Serpent has been missing for 24 years

Matilda Battersby

Thursday 09 July 2015 08:26 BST

A passerby is silhouetted next to Adam and Eve sculptures by Rodin (Getty Images)

A rare Auguste Rodin sculpture stolen nearly 25 years ago as part of a $1 million Beverly Hills art heist has been recovered after it turned up in London.

The 1991 theft was facilitated by the “trusted” housekeeper of a Los Angeles art collector who, after bragging about his employer's wealth a local bar, was paid $5,000 by art thieves to give them copies of his house keys.

The bronze statue, titled Young Girl With Serpent, by French sculptor Rodin, is believed to be worth around $100,000.

A number of other valuable artworks, including an important early sketch of Rodin’s most famous work, The Kiss, and another sculpture, The Eternal Spring, were also taken and remain missing and total assets taken were valued at more than a million dollars at the time.

Rodin's Young Girl With Serpent

The thieves had considerable access to the Beverly Hills property while its owner was away at another residence for several weeks and used the copied key to rob it over several visits.

The unnamed Beverly Hills art collector, who is now in her Eighties, described returning to her house after the burglary to find it looking “as though it had been hit by an earthquake”.

The housekeeper had skipped town and a warrant was issued for his arrest by the Beverly Hills Police Department.

A six month manhunt followed after which the housekeeper was located and arrested in Miami, Florida while sunbathing next to a hotel pool.

The collector is said to be “delighted” at the recovery of the statue which turned up at Christie’s auction house in New York and was transferred to London for sale in 2011 having being missing for more than two decades.

20th century's biggest art heists

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1/1020th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Leonard Da Vinci's iconic Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by employee Vincenzo Peruggia on 21 August 1911. The thief hid overnight in the Parisian art gallery before emerging to lift the famous muse off the wall, strip the painting of its frame and shove it up his smock. Peruggia's crime has been described as the greatest art theft of the 20th Century, but he and the painting were discovered in Italy two years later.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Works by renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch have been stolen three times in separate heists. In 1994 his most famous work The Scream was lifted from the National Gallery in Oslo, but was recovered later that year. In August 2004 another version of The Scream was stolen along with Munch's Madonna from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo, by a gang of gunmen. The paintings were recovered two years later and three men convicted, but the gunmen remain at large. Another three Munch paintings including the recognisable Blue Dress were stolen from a hotel in Norway but recovered the next day in March 2005.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Russborough House, a large estate belonging to Sir Alfred Beit, has been robbed four times since 1974 and works worth millions are yet to be recovered. Robbers and members of the IRA bound and gagged the Beit family in 1974 in order to steel nineteen paintings worth an estimated £8 million, all of which were subsequently recovered when the criminals were apprehended. Twelve years later another gang of thieves stole paintings thought to be worth £30 million in total. Sixteen were recovered but two remain missing. Gainsborough's Madame Baccelli, which had been stolen in the previous raid, was stolen again in 2001, along with a Bellotto. The two paintings were recovered and returned to the Beits, but just days later the house was robbed for a fourth time and another five paintings were taken. The latest hoard were returned just months later. Let's hope they've installed burglar alarm since then...

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Armed thieves broke into the National Museum of Fine Art in Stockholm, Sweden in 2005, robbing it of one Rembrandt and two Renoirs. The robbers fled by boat and it took five years for all three paintings to be recovered.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Canada's Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was cleaned out by thieves in September 1972 when 18 paintings, jewellery and sculptures worth a staggering (for the time) $2 million were stolen. The works, which included a rare Rembrandt landscape and paintings by Delacroix and Gainsborough, have never been recovered.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Panels from the Ghent Altarpiece, painted by masterly brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, were stolen in 1934. The left panel has never been recovered as the presumed thief, who had sent a demand for a ransom, died before it could be issued, taking the secret of the painting's whereabouts with him to the grave.

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Three armed men used a crowbar to break into the Pinacoteca do Estado Museum in São Paulo in June 2008, making off with five extremely valuable paintings including Pablo Picasso's The Painter and the Model and Minotaur, Drinker and Women.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Monet's Poppy Field at Vetheuil was among a host of impressionist paintings pinched from the Emile Bührle Foundation in Zurich in February 2008 by thieves in ski masks. The total hoard, which also included Edgar Degas' Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter, Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches and Cezanne's Boy in the Red Vest, had a combined value of $163 million at the time of theft. The Monet and Van Gogh were recovered from a nearby parked car shortly after.

Getty Images

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Rembrandt's Jacob de Gheyn III has been stolen four times, earning it the nickname of the "takeaway Rembrandt". It was initially stolen from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1981 by four men who made off with it in a taxi. The painting was returned to the gallery soon after, only to be nicked again two years later when a burglar broke in via a skylight. The painting went missing for three years before it was discovered in a luggage rack of a train station in Münster, Germany. The painting has been nabbed twice more from the Dulwich Picture House since then, but no thief has ever been apprehended. Each time the picture has just turned up: once under a bench in graveyard and another time in the basket of an abandoned bicycle. Mysterious!

Getty Images

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

On 18 March 1990 thieves disguised as policemen handcuffed security guards and stole 13 paintings worth a collective $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA. It has been described as the biggest art heist in the world and remains as yet unsolved. Vermeer's The Concert, three Rembrandts and a series of drawings by Edgar Degas were among the valuable artworks seized.

Christie’s were alerted to the fact that the sculpture was stolen and “assisted all involved parties during the investigation” according to Chris Marinello, CEO of Art Recovery International.

There was a four year deadlock in negotiations between lawyers for the possessor of the artwork who offered it to Christie’s and the Beverly Hills victim, but following intervention by Marinello the work has now been released unconditionally back to her.

The housekeeper claimed to know nothing of the artwork’s whereabouts after his arrest and later attempted to contact the family where he’d worked as “a trusted member of staff” to apologise.

He served time for his role in the theft in the US and was later extradited to prison in Switzerland over an unrelated crime.

Marinello credits the resolution of this case to one particular officer from Beverly Hills Police Department, Detective Michael Corren, who kept the case open for 24 years - even after he had retired.

(AFP/GABRIEL BOUYS)

“Detective Corren was very impressive in the way he pursued the case. He was kind of like Moby Dick and the White Whale,” Marinello told The Independent.

“The police department tracked down the caretaker in Florida by the swimming pool and got an arrest and Corren pursued it to solve it. It’s rare that you get an officer today who is so single-minded.”

The victim has asked Art Recovery International to continue pursuing the other lost artworks.

However, it seems there is quite a market for stolen Rodins on the black market and also fears that thieves might melt the statues down. “Sadly, many of these bronze items are sold for scrap, as horrific as that may sound,” Marinello said previously.

Rodin’s The Thinker was stolen and damaged along with six other bronze statues from the garden of the Singer Laren Museum, Netherlands in 2007. It was recovered two days later “pretty worse for wear” and had to undergo considerable and expensive restoration.

A nude bronze of French novelist Honore de Balzac was stolen from the Israel Museum while it was undergoing renovation in 2011 – one of a series of four studies that Rodin cast for a monument to Balzac on display in Paris – and has yet to be recovered.

In 2012 portrait in bronze of Rodin by his artist lover Camille Claudel worth a reported £800,000 was recovered in the truck of an antique dealer 13 years after it was taken from the Guéret art and archaeology museum in France.

Young Girl With Serpent will be consigned for sale later this year as part of a deal between the victim and her insurance company.

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