The Hunt for Stolen Artwork
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thousands of paintings and antiques stolen by the Nazis and others remain in circulation on the art market, but just occasionally one gets returned to its rightful owner.
Manuela Saragosa speaks to two grateful beneficiaries. Penny Ritchie Calder is a warden at St Olave's church in London, which recently regained the 17th century statue of noted botanist and congregant Dr Peter Turner, while Sylvie Sulitzer got back a Renoir painting that belonged to her art dealer grandfather, in both cases some 70 years after they were stolen.
Professional art detective Chris Marinello of Art Recovery International guides us through the murky world of stolen artwork, while Lucian Simmons of the global auction house Sotheby's explains what the restitution department he heads is doing to identify and recover these items.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Sylvie Sulitzer poses with the recovered Renoir painting "Two Women in a Garden" in New York; Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa, and this business daily comes to you from one of London's few remaining medieval churches, St Olaf's, near the Tower of London. |
| 0:16.7 | Why here? Well, it's all about this sculpture, which several years ago was at the heart of an art theft scandal. |
| 0:24.0 | He's a rather serious-looking fellow with a beard and an Elizabethan rough and a rather gorgeous red tunic with his hands held in prayer before him. |
| 0:34.0 | The theft of Dr Peter Turner's statue from St. Olavs highlighted the murky world of stolen and looted art and antiques. |
| 0:42.9 | They say, now that I know I have a looted work of art in my possession, how much are you going to pay me? |
| 0:48.0 | What's the reward? What do I get? |
| 0:49.8 | That's coming up here on Business Daily. |
| 0:54.2 | First, the statue of Dr. Peter Turner was in St. Olas for 326 years. |
| 1:01.0 | It survived the Great Fire of London, even the Blitz of London in World War II. |
| 1:05.9 | Then, for 70 years, it went missing. |
| 1:09.1 | For many decades, there was simply a space here. The memorial had been |
| 1:13.7 | lost, and now we have it here in all its magnificence, and we can't be more thrilled. I'm Penny Ritchie |
| 1:20.2 | Calder. I'm one of the church wardens at this historic church of St. Olaf's. He was buried here |
| 1:25.9 | and worshipped in this church. He was a doctor, a physician, |
| 1:30.3 | he was an MP in several of Elizabeth I, First Parliaments, and a renowned botanist. So he was a man |
| 1:36.6 | of many parts and the memorial was installed here in 1615, the year after his death. And how long have you had him back here? He was reinstated in |
| 1:48.7 | 2012 after an absence of over 70 years. The church was badly bombed in the Second World War in 1941. |
| 1:59.1 | And in the chaos of that bombing, the memorial disappeared. We assume that somebody |
| 2:05.9 | made off with it. So what did it feel like when you heard that it had been located? There was a |
| 2:12.2 | possibility that it might be coming back to its home. Well, it was all completely out of the blue. We suddenly had a call |
| 2:19.2 | from a curator at the Museum of London who had been looking through auction catalogs and had |
| 2:26.0 | spotted a photograph and a description of this memorial and thought, well, why is this up for sale? It clearly has a relationship to the Church of St Olaf. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.