Andrew’s artful dodgers
MY son and I enjoy playing Monopoly but I wonder if it’s passing on the right messages. I have to keep reminding him that, in life, you don’t get a regular stipend of £200 for going around the corner. Nor is there such a thing as a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
Mind you, there are things like it. STEALING VAN GOGH (BBC2) saw the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon venturing onto unfamiliar turf.
He was often in art galleries but in between he was interviewing Dutch detectives, medalled officers of the Carabinieri and wandering cautiously around the housing blocks of Naples’ badlands. He was retracing the trail of two, early Van Gogh paintings, boosted from an Amsterdam Museum in 2002, thereafter vanishing for 14 years.
I’m told that haemorrhoid ointment is the item most frequently stolen from chemists. If that’s true then Van Gogh paintings are the pile cream of the art market, constantly being nicked from galleries around the world.
They can’t exactly be flogged on eBay, of course, which makes the criminal interest in hot Van Goghs and other paintings a mystery. In the course of his investigations, Graham-Dixon uncovered one, partial explanation. Villains use them as credit notes, a wee postcard-sized Vincent number being much easier to exchange than a million quid.
A painting priced at ten million in the straight world will move for a tenth of that between crooks. You can’t turn it directly into a million, of course, but if you can buy a million pounds of heroin with it then it’s as good as money.
I wasn’t sure I bought this explanation, although I enjoyed the ride, populated by Dutch cat burglars with names like Ockie D, and a mysterious Mafioso known as Pinocchio. Pinocchio, it emerged, was a member of Italy’s notorious Camorra crime syndicate, who had the stolen paintings. Far from being nabbed by patient detective work, Pinocchio, really called Raffaele Imperiale, simply confessed to having them at a point when Interpol had mostly given up.
Imperiale came clean in a letter he sent to the Carabinieri in 2016, not so much having a change of heart as exploiting a loophole in Italian law. If you hand over valuable assets, you can get a reduced sentence. Not quite Get Out Of Jail Free, but Maybe Get Out In Ten Rather Than Twenty.
The addictive fashion-history show A STITCH IN TIME (BBC4) was up the road from me this week, at historic Kenwood House. In the 18th century, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield lived there, as did his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Murray, and his greatniece, Dido Elizabeth. There’s a painting of the two cousins in fine frocks, a great rarity because one of the girls is black.
The artist was clearly taken by Dido, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Mansfield’s seafaring nephew and a slave on a captured Spanish ship, and she’s depicted with lively eyes and a mischievous grin.
It would be easy to think, especially with Lord Mansfield’s opposition to slavery, that the 18th century gentry were pioneers in tolerance, but a deeper look suggested otherwise.
Dido had a comfortable life, but the accounts of visitors show that her lesser status was continually made clear. Her life at Kenwood was one of limbo, not family, not servant. The painting just suggests she could look cheerful about it.