$8000 Goldie, silver recovered

Press, 23 June 1978, Page 4

$8000 Goldie, silver recovered

The $BOOO Goldie painting which was stolen from a Bryndwr house a week ago has been recovered by the Christchurch police. Detectives tave also recovered several thousand dollars worth of sterling silverware which went missing in the san burglary. The painting is believed to be undamaged. The police declined to say where the painting, which depicts an elderly

Maori man, Te Hanairo te Awe, had been rtc It had been stolen, with the silverware, from a house in Bryndwr Road on the night of June 13. No arrest had been made last evening in connection with the burglary, but inquiries were continuing, said a police spokesman. Even if «t had not been recovered, the stolen Goldie would have been almost impossible to sell in New Zealand, according to

the director of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (Mr B. D. Muir). “Any art dealer here would' have recognised it immediately. The only way it could have been sold would have been for a fraction of its true vale to someone who did not know what he was getting,’’ said Mr Muir. He said the work would also have been very difficult to sell in Britain — the other main market for

Goldies apart from New Zealand. Whenever a valuable painting was stolen in New Zealand, details of it were sent to institutions suth as Sothebys and Christies. Mr Muir said that most valuable paintings stolen in New Zealand in recent years had been Goldie originals. “But as far as I know' they have all been traced. It would be a tragedy if

one was destroyed or lost,” he said. C. F. Goldie’s works were consistently popular during the artist’s lifetime (1870 to 1947) and have remained popular since. He said that several hundred paintings by the Auckland-born artist — most of them portraits of Maoris — were still in existence. Several w'ere privately owned in Christchurch.