The Beligian diamond dealer’s organization had been infiltrated by Scotland Yard, so the details of the agreement he and Cahill struck were known to investigators. They even drew up an elaborate chart showing the flow of stolen art and money to and from various locales—Dublin, Antigua, the Isle of Man, Istanbul—that would result if the deal went as planned. But it didn’t. In August 1993, the paintings were recovered in the trunk of a car at the Antwerp airport, the culmination of an undercover operation. Several arrests were made. Cahill was in Ireland when the bust occurred, and the police were unable to connect him to the paintings, so he got to thumb his nose at them one last time. He was assassinated in 1994. The Provisional IRA took credit, citing his involvement with the Ulster Volunteer Force, which began when he sold that organization the Metsu.
Cahill’s reputation as a legendary Irish criminal had been established long before he robbed Russborough House, but investigators are likely to remember him as the man who made stolen art a commodity of exchange on the illicit market. It changed the paradigm, and may have led directly to the theft of many masterpieces, including the Van Goghs stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and the paintings by Dali, Picasso, Matisse, and Monet taken from the Chácara do Céu Museum in Rio de Janeiro in 2006. Investigators assume that the art stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 was ultimately used to purchase drugs or firearms.
Pity the poor thief who was trying to use Rockwell paintings stolen from Elayne Galleries as collateral for a major drug purchase in the 1980s. They were immediately recognizable to anyone who was knowledgeable about art, but their value was not on par with a masterpiece. That was especially true in Europe.
In 1975, one of Rockwell’s most famous paintings, an oil original for a 1963 Saturday Evening Post cover that depicted an African American girl being escorted by U.S. marshals to her first day at an all-white school, sold for $35,000. The Rockwells stolen from Elayne Galleries were worth less than that because they didn’t have the same historical significance. According to the seven-percent black market formula, they were collectively worth about $15,000 in the United States, maybe half that in Europe.
Twenty years later it would have been a different story. The recollections of the aforementioned Robert Rosenblum exemplify the critical reappraisal of Rockwell’s status that led to a steady increase in the value of his paintings.
“I had been taught to look down my nose at Rockwell, but then, I had to ask myself why,” Rosenblum wrote in 1998. “If it had already become respectable to scrutinize and admire the infinite detail, dramatic staging, narrative intrigues, and disguised symbols of Victorian-genre paintings, why couldn’t the same standards apply here? I for one am happy now to love Rockwell for his own sake. We have a newborn Rockwell who can no longer be looked at with sneering condescension and might well become an indispensable part of art history.”
The details Rosenblum references—he calls them “a mind-boggling abundance of tiny observations”—were key elements in Rockwell’s art. He used them to tell stories in his paintings, and those stories, his admirers and detractors agree, are quintessentially American. A foreigner might recognize them as part of a nostalgic re-creation of a time and a place, but the images would hardly evoke the emotional response that they have for Americans.
“Norman told me how he used details when he worked,” says Ron Ringling, a Minneapolis-area Rockwell collector. “He said, ‘When I see something I like, I paint it on canvas. When you see something you like, you paint it in your memory, but the best way to do either thing is to remember some details. That’s how I start on these paintings. I have a couple of details that I’ve committed to memory, and I take it from there.’”
Ringling looks back on that conversation with Rockwell as one of the best experiences of his life. The artist was in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap when it took place, and obviously not well. He died a few months later. The fact that Ringling was at the artist’s home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when they spoke is indicative of something else that made the stolen Rockwells more valuable in the United States than they were in Europe. People who collect his work are a little bit clubby. They tend to feel a personal involvement with the world Rockwell created in his art.
Ringling has made several pilgrimages to Arlington, Vermont, and across the Battenkill River to Stockbridge, where Rockwell spent his final years. In the summer of 1978, Ringling was driving down a country road near Arlington when he saw a sign: Rockwell Memorabilia Museum.
“It was just an old house, no security really, and there were about twenty of Norm’s pieces on display there. Some were painted and some were pencil drawings. I asked the lady who was running the place where she got them.”
She explained that they were studies for Saturday Evening Post covers. They belonged to the local people who appeared in them and ultimately appeared in the painting Rockwell used them to execute. The artist often made gifts of the sketches to his models, who treasured them mostly for the near-photographic likeness of their visage. When Ringling came across those pieces, they were considered mere curiosities with personal meaning for the owners but of little value otherwise. Ringling told the proprietor of the museum that if the owners wanted to sell them, he might be interested in buying.
Later that year, he purchased five of the pieces for $40,000. He’s since sold them all, several through Elayne Galleries. In the last decade or so, their value has increased considerably because they function as illustrations of how the artist worked.
“I’d say they’re worth three times what I sold them for at minimum,” he says.
Two of the pieces he sold depict scenes from a carnival that the original owner’s family operated around New England for years. In the corner of one of those sketches there appears the unmistakable likeness of someone whose name is familiar to all Rockwell aficionados: Gene Pelham.
Pelham was a fellow cover artist for the Post who eventually became Rockwell’s photographer and assistant. The two were friends for years, then their friendship ended, apparently because Pelham believed he should have gotten more recognition for his assistance. His face appears in many Rockwell paintings.
Ringling met Pelham when he went to Arlington to pick up the sketches he’d purchased from the Memorabilia Museum. “I was told he might have some Rockwells he’d be willing to sell,” says Ringling. “The librarian at the town library said to look him up. In fact, he introduced me to Gene’s wife right there in the library, and she told me Gene was down in their car waiting for her. So I went out and talked to him.”
Pelham was standoffish at first but eventually invited Ringling to his house for a drink. They had several drinks and a long, rambling conversation during which Pelham revealed more than a little animosity toward his old friend.
“There were clearly some hard feelings on Gene’s part,” says Ringling. “He said, ‘Norm, he just pulled out and left me, went to Stockbridge and I never heard from him again.’ I suppose Norm went over there to retire and just lost contact, but Gene took it personally. He told me he didn’t really have any of Norman’s paintings to sell. ‘I have a few sketches,’ he said, ‘but my kids want those.’”
Ringling spent the night in Pelham’s spare bedroom. The next morning over breakfast Pelham admitted that he hadn’t been totally honest about possessing Rockwell paintings.
“We finished eating, went outside, and he reached into a crawl space under his house and pulled out a tube,” says Ringling. “I don’t know if it was cardboard or what, but he had two paintings in there, and then he said he had three more stored down at the bank. He never did tell me why some of them were in storage, and some were just shoved under the house. But they were all in good condition. I bought all five of them for $60,000.”
Ringling has bought and sold many Rockwell paintings over the years. He chuckles when he thinks about what some of them are worth now, but it’s clear that he isn’t in it for the money. Queried about why he is so fond of Rockwell’s work, he replies, “Norman painted the way we remember it. Not necessarily the way it was, but the way we like to remember it. The experience of looking at one of his paintings is—well, it’s incredible. Just incredible.”
But Ringling does wince a bit when he thinks about one painting that got away. He bought it in 1980, from a dealer in Chicago who was representing the widow of a former president of Montgomery Ward & Company. It depicted an elderly woman sitting in an attic. “She has a trunk open and she’s reading a letter she’s taken out of it,” says Ringling. “There’s kind of a distant look on her face, like she’s reliving the past. It was done as a cover for a Ward’s catalogue, in the 1940s I believe, but it had been hanging in their living room all that time, and it was in absolutely mint condition.”
Ringling bought it for $50,000 and sold it a few years later for $80,000.
“You couldn’t buy it for a million dollars today,” he says.
In 2006, Sotheby’s sold a Rockwell titled “Breaking Home Ties” for more than $15 million.