2/9/02

August high season for old master recoveries

Former head of Scotland Yard’s fine art unit Charles Hill is bagging them again. The recovery of Titian’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt, stolen from the Marquis of Bath’s drawing room at Longleat (notwithstanding the ever vigilantly present ‘wifelets’) in l995 has been recovered by Hill via a go-between and a plastic laundry bag by arrangement. But now Hill is on the track of other goodies: he has been hired by the Marquess of Cholmondeley to track down Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s The White Duck, valued at £5 million, and stolen in l992 from Houghton Hall, Norfolk.