First it was Montreal; now, Toronto. Either way, Canada is looking like a popular place to fence stolen art:
On Thursday, Miriam Shiell Fine Art in Toronto reported that a small bronze by the English sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1996) it had agreed to inspect for possible sale had been stolen in 2001 from an unnamed New York gallery. The 1975 sculpture, Three Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No. 4, was given to proprietor Miriam Shiell last week by an unidentified young man from Toronto who’d first approached her two or three weeks earlier.
“He had no documentation,” Ms. Shiell said in a brief interview. “He supposedly inherited [the sculpture],” which is valued at about $80,000 (U.S.).
Subsequent checks with the Art Loss Register and the Henry Moore Foundation, both based in Britain, revealed that the Moore, which Ms. Shiell characterized as “a relatively minor work,” had gone missing in New York nine years earlier.
Second Stolen Artwork Recovered in Canada within Weeks (Globe&Mail)