So how COULD town hall chiefs lose a Botticelli from a collection worth millions?
...and unbelievably they say the 1,577 lost treasures may not even have been stolen – it’s just nobody knows where they are
ON a day of acute embarrassment for Scotland’s third city, some 100 of its art treasures were stolen in a heist in June 1962. It was not the most exhaustively planned of art thefts; it did not need to be.
Many of the works were pilfered from open display cases in Aberdeen Art Gallery while no one was looking. Almost all of them remain missing to this day.
Happily, two pieces by Walter Sickert, a seminal figure in the Post-Impressionist movement, were returned to their rightful owner in 1999, though not through any proactive measures on the city’s part.
As luck would have it, art historian Dr Wendy Baron was studying in Aberdeen in the early 1960s and remembered the two sketches – worth many thousands – on display. In 1999 she spotted them in a London auction house catalogue and knew instantly they were stolen.
In Aberdeen, council bosses were tickled pink to have even a tiny proportion of the haul returned. ‘One of the stolen sketches had been gifted to the gallery by the Sickert Trust,’ they pointed out.
Of course, they hastened to add, security measures at the gallery were far tighter now.
Yes, the infamous heist of June 1962 was a grim episode in the history of this priceless collection and its council guardians – but rest assured, the PR message went, the city’s treasures were, in the modern era, lovingly protected.
Sixty years on, it is possible there has been another one – only this time much more audacious and lucrative. Equally, it is possible there have been multiple heists – or perhaps none at all. Aberdeen City Council cannot rightly say.
All that can be said for certain is some 1,577 items in the collection it guards for the people of the city are ‘missing’. The range of artworks, collectors’ items, antiques and curios which the local authority cannot find is breathtaking.
It cannot find its Edward VIII Coronation Medal from May 1937 – although the fact that it is listed in its database as an Edward VII medal probably does not help.
It cannot find several dozen pieces by 18th century artist William Williams, including The Last Supper, Fauns and Nymphs and Cupid with Train.
Nor can it help you with the present whereabouts of a slew of 19th century images by pioneering Scottish photographer George Washington Wilson. The great man’s 1890s view of Union Terrace Gardens in the heart of Aberdeen? Missing. Ditto his 1880s image of Fingal’s Cave.
Works by modern masters such as John Bellany from East Lothian also reside in the ‘we haven’t a clue’ file. Two of his pieces from the 1980s are listed as ‘not found’. A substantial haul of sketchbooks from James McBey, a self-taught 20th century artist from Aberdeenshire whose work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London and in several US cities, are also unaccounted for in the city closest to where he lived.
There is missing silverware, missing glassware, missing oriental china, missing jewellery, missing clothing from several centuries, missing antique furniture, two missing Rococo-style mirrors from 1750, missing hair lockets, missing pocket watches, a missing Victorian sewing machine, a missing 19th century naval sword, missing Victorian curling tongs, missing candlesticks, missing commemorative coins, missing 14th century footwear, a missing deep sea diver’s telephone from 1900, a missing 1973 Sony portable video recorder, multiple missing dolls... and that is but a small sample of the missing.
In many cases, explanations are missing too.
Some of the absent items may seem trifling – ‘Box of Matches’; ‘Clear Plastic Cigarette Lighter Containing Blob of North Sea Oil, 1980s’; ‘Black Leather Ski Gloves 1970-1980’ – while many others are clearly historical treasures.
Among the pieces the city council cannot account for are ‘illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy’ by Sandro Botticelli. The fact the early Renaissance painter is listed in the gallery database as ‘Boticelli’, again, may not be helping.
So what can have happened to such an extensive collection of historical artefacts entrusted to the council to keep on behalf of a city’s people? Could they be in a storeroom no one has thought to check? Languishing in the damp basement
‘Some of the missing items have not been seen in decades’
of a public building, perhaps? Have coronation medals fallen down the backs of council settees, sketchbooks found their way into cavities behind bookcases? Or is there a more sinister explanation for the disappearance of this monster tranche of collectables?
The answer may well lie in all of the above. It almost certainly lies in part in database errors and a lamentably leaky system of cataloguing these treasures, many of which were removed from Aberdeen Art Gallery when it closed for refurbishment in 2015.
But let us not be too quick to panic. In an early press statement from the council – issued before it refused to answer more questions on its missing valuables – it said: ‘Previous experience tells us that “missing” items are likely to be elsewhere in our premises, and audits and communication between members of staff generally resolve location queries.’
Previous experience. So the
council has form in mislaying its museum pieces?
An examination of the list of the city’s artefacts which may or may not be in its possession reveals that is certainly case. Some of the missing items have not been seen in decades; a few may have been lost more than a century ago.
A picture entitled A Scottish Maid, by an unknown artist, was last spied in a ‘museum basement store’ in 1976. A decorated sauce ladle, circa 1865, was stolen from public display in 1980. Several artworks are filed as ‘reported stolen 1962’ – unseen in Aberdeen since the heist of that year.
A good many homeware and personal items, from teapots to snuff boxes, Oriental cups to KuangHsu dynasty crockery, were reported missing to the thenGrampian Police in 1989. Many more missing artefacts, including the Botticelli piece, are catalogued as victims of a ‘suspected admin error due to mass moves during Art Gallery decant’.
Aberdeen City Council states that a large proportion of what it cannot now find was missing before it introduced a computerised database known as The Museum System in 2002. It says their status was confirmed as ‘still missing’ during an audit of the database in 2020.
And yet a bewildering number of items are simply listed as ‘missing’ with no record of when they were last seen, or whether police are aware of their disappearance.
Have light-fingered members of the public made off with them? Was it an inside job?
To date the council is quite unable to say whether it has fallen victim to a crime or to its own incompetence.
The council’s Liberal Democrat group leader Ian Yuill surely speaks for councillors of all political colours in the city when he says: ‘It does not look good and it is important this is cleared up as soon as possible.
‘There is a risk to the council’s reputation if significant pieces of artwork are lost or disappear.’
YET, in a move which some view as evidence things are even worse than they look, the council now refuses to answer questions on the haul of missing treasures. Any further inquiries, it tells journalists, must be made through the Freedom of Information (FOI) process.
Even through that avenue the council will not be drawn on the cumulative value of the items it cannot locate. In FOI responses it claims putting a price on them ‘poses a significant increased risk to objects being stolen on an opportunistic or planned basis. This also results in a significant increased risk to our staff’s health and safety.’
Other details on the missing items, such as whether they were bought or given to the city as gifts, are withheld by the council because preparing the information would be too expensive.
The guardians of the treasures held on the people’s behalf, then, refuse questions asked on their behalf, up to and including the value of what it has lost.
In response to the Scottish Daily Mail’s questions, a council spokesman said: ‘A report relating to the missing items from the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums service will be brought to the next cycle of the council’s audit risk and scrutiny committee. This will be the February 22, 2022 committee.’
One early difficulty in assessing what is missing or lost may stem from the deepening suspicion the city lacked a clear idea of what it possessed in the first place.
The story told by an Aberdeen resident, Clare Rochford, 60, illustrates the point. As a teenager in the mid-1970s, she discovered a Victorian corset in the eaves of her family home’s attic. Her mother donated it to Aberdeen Art Gallery and a report about the gift was published in local newspapers at the time.
Miss Rochford says: ‘I was telling my niece about it about 11 years ago and I thought I would email the art gallery to ask if we could see it. I was told they had no record of it. I suspected their administration and record keeping were at fault.’
She adds: ‘I was upset that I wasn’t able to see it again and show it to my niece. I wish my mum hadn’t given it to them as we would have looked after it better.
‘I expect that she hoped it would be seen by visitors to the art gallery, especially people from Aberdeen. It’s absolutely shocking that so many artworks are “missing” or misplaced because the records of where they were haven’t been kept properly.’
It may be, of course, that many of these lost treasures turn up in their own good time. That was the happy outcome last year with around 50 granite blocks from Union Terrace Gardens which were removed and stacked during its £28million revamp.
The granite, which was to be relaid in the refurbished gardens, disappeared without explanation and the mystified council promptly alerted the police. For a time last summer, the hunt was on for the Aberdeen granite thieves.
Two weeks later the blocks turned up in the garden of a private city residence whose owner knew nothing about them. A contractor had put them there.
Businessman Mike Wilson told local papers: ‘They are not my blocks and I have no use for them.
‘I just came back one Friday night and they were there in the front garden, now 50 per cent of them remain and 50 per cent of them have gone. I’m not to know where they came from.’
If many tons of granite blocks can give city fathers the slip for a
‘The council is quite unable to say whether it has fallen victim to a crime or to its own incompetence’ ‘Could they be languishing in a damp basement?’
fortnight, perhaps priceless art can do so for much longer.
But another tale of council misadventure from last year puts a more worrying slant on the missing collection’s fate. It came in October when it was arranged for a dance troupe to create a temporary chalk artwork on the pavement outside the newly refurbished Aberdeen Art Gallery. They did so in an early-hours performance, leaving their colourful art to be discovered by city centre pedestrians the next morning.
Alas, members of the public were denied that pleasure.
Council cleaners took one look at the street art sanctioned by their own employer and set about it with a high-pressure hose, obliterating it completely.
‘This appears to have been an unfortunate misunderstanding,’ said the council at the time.
Might similar misunderstandings pertain to the council’s more permanent artworks? Did local authority skips play a part in the disappearance of some of them, and landfill become their final resting place?
In this most blunder-strewn of sagas, few would rule it out.