Portrait of Rubens and Van Dyck Returned After Being Stolen 40 Years Ago

A 17th-century double portrait of Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck was returned after being stolen 40 years ago.

The work, an oil on wood painting by another Flemish artist, Erasmus Quellinus II, was reportedly stolen in 1979 while on loan at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, in southeast England.

The work had been in the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire since 1838.

Peter Day, a retired librarian at Chatsworth, said in a video that he organized an exhibition in 1978 at a gallery in Sheffield that included the painting. The show was staged again at Towner in 1979, where it was stolen on May 26, 1979 in what Andrew Cavendish, the late 11th Duke of Devonshire, described to Day at the time as a “smash and grab.”

In 2020, Belgian art historian Bert Schepers saw the work in Toulon, France, at an art auction, BBC reported Wednesday, and told Chatsworth about the suddenly located painting.

The Art Loss Register, an independent, for-profit database of stolen art, then worked for three years with the seller on an agreement to return the painting, Chatsworth House said in a statement in May.

“Despite that long period of time since the loss, we are delighted to have been able to secure its return to Chatsworth where it belongs, and this should give hope to others who are still seeking the return of pictures stolen decades ago,” Art Loss Register’s Lucy O’Meara told the BBC.

The painting was returned to Chatsworth in May after restoration work by UK’s Critchlow & Kukkonen, and will now go on display at National Galleries of Scotland’s Royal Scottish Academy building in November.

“It was over 40 years ago, and after that sort of time, you don’t expect a painting to reappear again,” Chatsworth curator of fine art, Charles Noble, told the BBC.