The Phillips portraits taken from New Paltz

On the evening of Wednesday, 16 February 1972, police and fire crews in New Paltz, New York, answered a fire at a Veterans of Foreign Wars building. While they were there, thieves broke into the 1799 house of Historic Huguenot Street, a society that looks after the town’s old Huguenot settlement. They took dozens of objects: silver, ceramics, a prayer book, a powder horn, guns, swords and two portraits. The New York Times reports that the society’s president valued the haul at about $30,000. Officials suspected a link between the fire and the theft, but none is proved.

The portraits were by Ammi Phillips, a self-taught travelling painter born in Connecticut in 1788, who died in 1865. He made the pair in the 1820s. They show Dirck D. Wynkoop (1738 to 1827) and his wife, Annatje Eltinge (1748 to 1827). The society states that Dirck ran a wheat plantation south of New Paltz and held enslaved African Americans, who worked his fields and his household. Marie J. Wiersum gave the portraits to the society in December 1971, two months before the theft.

Many stolen items turned up at a Manhattan thrift shop. The Times says several weeks later, the society a few months. The portraits did not. The society sent a black-and-white postcard of them to dealers and the public. Then the trail goes quiet until 2005, when Sotheby’s sold the pair in New York, catalogued as portraits of unidentified sitters. Artnet News, citing the Artnet Price Database, gives the price as $13,200. The Times says roughly $13,000. No source says whether the premium is included, and the sale date and lot numbers are not known.

Sotheby’s told Artnet News that it checked its catalogue against the Art Loss Register, a database of stolen art, and that the paintings would have been flagged if they had been registered there. Carol Johnson, a society trustee, said the sitters’ names were on the backs of the canvases and that Sotheby’s should have found the theft.

In 2020 Johnson and Josephine Bloodgood, the society’s director of curatorial and preservation affairs, were preparing an exhibition on Jacob Wynkoop, a New Paltz carpenter and Civil War veteran. Artnet News reports that his father was enslaved by Dirck Wynkoop. Around June 2020 they found an unidentified pair of Phillips portraits in David R. Allaway’s online catalogue of the painter’s work. The images matched the 1972 postcard. Bloodgood bought the Sotheby’s catalogue on eBay and confirmed the lots. She took the file to the FBI’s New York Art Crime Team, which obtained court orders and subpoenaed Sotheby’s for the buyer’s name.

The investigation took about a year and a half. The buyer, a collector in another state, did not know about the theft and agreed to give the paintings back. The collector is not named and is not accused. The FBI returned the portraits to the society on 17 February 2022, 50 years and one day after the theft, and announced it on 10 June 2022. No one was charged, and the thief has never been identified. Johnson and Bloodgood told the Times that the FBI said the statute of limitations had passed.

The paintings came back scratched and scraped, and the support of Annatje’s portrait was warped. Yost Conservation of Oxford, Connecticut, treated them. They now belong to the collection of Historic Huguenot Street. A Hudson Valley news page from August 2023 says they were on view at the DuBois Fort Visitor Center through 31 August 2023. The sources do not say where they hang now.