The $7 Flea-Market Renoir That Was Stolen 61 Years Earlier

The painting was tiny — just 5½ by 9 inches, about the size of a napkin. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "Paysage Bords de Seine" ("On the Shore of the Seine") in 1879, a delicate riverside landscape in pink and blue; legend holds he made it for his mistress at a riverside restaurant. The Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune sold it to American collectors Herbert and Saidie May, and in 1937 Saidie May — a major benefactor of the Baltimore Museum of Art — loaned it to the museum. When she died in May 1951, she bequeathed it to the BMA outright.

Just months later, the little Renoir disappeared. Sometime between the evening of 16 November 1951 and just after noon on 17 November — while it hung in a show called "From Ingres to Gauguin" — someone simply walked off with it. There was no sign of forced entry. The museum reported the theft to Baltimore police, valued it at $2,500, and collected that sum from its insurer, Fireman's Fund. Then the painting slipped from memory for the next 61 years.

Its reappearance was pure Americana. In late 2009, a Virginia woman named Marcia "Martha" Fuqua said she bought a box of odds and ends — including a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll — for $7 at a flea market in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, drawn mostly to the painting's frame. She let it sit for a couple of years before taking it, in July 2012, to the Potomack Company auction house in Alexandria, Virginia. Specialists there — with help from the National Gallery of Art and a Renoir scholar — confirmed it was a genuine Renoir, valued between $75,000 and $100,000. It was slated to go under the hammer on 29 September 2012.

Then a Washington Post reporter, Ian Shapira, started digging. He found records in the BMA's own library showing the museum had once possessed the painting — and that its staff had reported it stolen in 1951. The revelation stopped the auction cold. Days later, Baltimore police unearthed the original 1951 theft report, matching the little "river scene in pink and blue". The auction house alerted the FBI, which seized the painting and placed it in climate-controlled storage while it investigated.

What followed was a genuine ownership drama. Fuqua insisted the painting was hers — she had, after all, bought it fair and square. But her story frayed. Her own brother, Matt, told reporters he had seen the painting in their mother's home and that it had been in the family for "50 or 60 years." Their mother, Marcia Fouquet, had been a painter who studied art in Baltimore around the time of the theft and reportedly wrote a thesis on Renoir. Before the FBI could question her, she died of cancer in September 2013, taking whatever she knew with her.

The case landed in federal court, pitting Fuqua against the museum, with the insurer's interest also in play. In November 2013, Fireman's Fund transferred whatever title it held from the 1951 insurance payout back to the BMA. Then, on 10 January 2014, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled decisively for the museum, citing "overwhelming evidence" that the work had been stolen. She pointedly did not rule on whether Fuqua's flea-market tale was true — it didn't matter, the judge held, because no one can hold legal title to stolen property, however innocently acquired.

The FBI returned the Renoir to the Baltimore Museum of Art on 31 January 2014. On 30 March 2014 — 63 years after it disappeared, and timed to the museum's centennial — it went on view in an exhibition fittingly titled "The Renoir Returns," reunited with other works from Saidie May's collection. Who actually stole the tiny masterpiece in 1951 has never been established — a mystery that, like the painting's decades in the wilderness, may never be solved.