Sotheby’s returns stolen sculpture to French church

SOTHEBY’S has returned a 1450s sculpture to France after realising that it should never have sold it because it was stolen from a church 50 years ago.

The depiction of St Michael slaying the dragon, carved in alabaster by medieval English craftsmen, will be reunited with its original altarpiece in Notre-Dame-du-Tertre, in Châtelaudren, Côtes d’Armor, in Brittany.

After its 1969 theft, it fetched up in London, where Sotheby’s sold it in 1998 for almost £6,000 to a private British collector.

Its return to France has been made possible by Dr Lloyd de Beer, a curator of Late Medieval European Collections at the British Museum.

He told The Sunday Telegraph that while doing some research in Normandy, in the archives of the Museum of Antiquities in Rouen, he opened a Châtelaudren file and found documents headed “Altarpiece for the Life of Christ and the Virgin” and an image of the St Michael sculpture marked “stolen in 1969”.

He immediately thought: “Gosh, that’s interesting, I’ve seen that before.” He had seen it in an anonymous private collection in England.

Dr de Beer contacted the owner, telling them: “I think that something you own was stolen many years ago from a French church.”

He added: “The owner wanted to do the right thing and return it. They’d bought it at auction from Sotheby’s, so they returned it to them, saying, ‘It’s up to you to organise its return because you had ultimately sold something that had come up nefariously in the past’.”

Sotheby’s reimbursed the buyer and a spokesman said: “We are pleased to have been able to assist in facilitating a resolution satisfactory to those involved.”