Artful Dodging

The painting itself had previously been purchased by two other New York City art collectors, the first of whom had bought it from Christie’s auction house in New York in 1954. The seller was Leonard Gerald Gwynne Ramsey, editor of Connoisseur, a reputed art magazine of the time. 

Ramsey visited Boughton House in 1951 with a photographer for an article about the family’s collection. Interestingly, the story didn’t mention the paintings. As investigations ensued, Sir Alec Martin, Christie’s managing director, wrote to Ramsey, asking how he acquired the painting. Ramsey claimed he’d bought it at an open country market in Hertfordshire for 10 shillings — following the suggestion of a then-deceased art collector to look for quality paintings there.

But the evidence caught up to Ramsey’s lies quickly. In a 1953 letter to art dealer and historian Ludwig Goldscheider, Ramsey detailed his intentions to sell two van Dyck paintings to buy curtains for his house. Goldscheider gave Ramsey a certificate for selling the painting at Christie’s, calling it “a fine original and in perfect state.”

When questioned, Ramsey and Goldscheider insisted that the painting sold at Christie’s was not “the same quality as those in the Buccleuch Collection.” However, the Fogg had insured the piece for $9,000 — testifying to its quality and origin. Plus, Ramsey couldn’t prove he got his painting before the Buccleuchs lost theirs.

The piece was returned to Malcove after the dispute arose. Following her death in 1981, it stayed at the University of Toronto until a decade long investigation by art historian Meredith H. Gale, ending in 2021, proved how it was stolen. The grisaille was finally returned to the Duke of Buccleuch in 2024. 

Ramsey’s theft hid well, perhaps, as Gale has suggested, because of “the audacity of a thief cloaked in the respectability of expertise.”