Recovery of a stolen Van Dyck

In July 1951 Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg (Pl 1) was stolen from Boughton House, Northamptonshire. It is one of thirty-seven oil sketches at Boughton for Van Dyck’s print series known as the Iconography, a unique group of panels that, until the summer of 1951, had remained together in the same collection since 1682.

This paper tells the remarkable story of the theft, which spans three generations and involves some of the most prominent members of the art establishment in the UK and the US.