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.
