(NewsNation) — A painting stolen in the 1960s has been recovered and returned to the Herbert Arnot Gallery in New York City after it was listed for sale by a fine art dealer.
Art Recovery International announced the return of “Flower Market Madeleine” by Edouard-Leon Cortés, one of the 3,000 paintings stolen by former gallery manager and salesman Louis Edelman during a 12-year period in the 1950s and 1960s. Edelman was selling Arnot Gallery’s paintings under his own name, stealing more than $1 million worth of art from the gallery.
Edelman was eventually arrested in Chicago and convicted of transporting stolen artworks across state lines. He was sentenced to two years in prison and given a $10,000 fine, but the majority of the paintings weren’t recovered.
Since then, the stolen art has popped up at auction houses and galleries around the globe.
The Cortès painting was being offered for sale by Carnes Fine Art, a dealer in England, after being owned by several galleries previously.
Art Recovery International founder Christopher A. Marinello thanked the dealer and others who previously owned the painting for releasing the stolen work back to the Arnot Gallery.
“While in this instance, we were able to convince many of the parties to reimburse the other, eventually there will be those who are out of luck,” Marinello said. “I cannot stress enough the importance of performing due diligence and authentication checks which would have uncovered this stolen painting decades earlier.”
Marinello added anyone selling paintings by Cortés or Antoine Blanchard should check with the Arnot Gallery for authentication since some of the stolen works still have yet to be recovered.
The Arnot Gallery began in Austria in 1863, holding several retrospectives for artists including Claude Monet and Cortés. The gallery was popular with the Hapsburg emperor but was forced out of Austria by the Nazis. The gallery was then reestablished in New York City.