Rockwell's Lazybones, gone for 40 years

On 30 June 1976, burglars broke into the Grant family home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. They took several items. One was a small oil painting that hung in the foyer: Lazybones, by Norman Rockwell, also known as Boy Asleep with Hoe. Heritage Auctions, the Dallas auction house that later sold it, calls the burglary well planned.

Rockwell painted it in 1919, when he was 25, for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post of 6 September that year. Heritage gives its size as 26 by 24 inches. Robert Grant bought it in 1954 from a friend in Haddonfield, New Jersey, after Grant put a pool cue through the canvas at the friend’s house. The family says the rule was “you break it, you buy it.” The price is not settled. Grant’s son John says $50, The New York Times reports that it was $50 or $100, depending on who tells it, and Heritage says less than $100. The hole in the canvas later helped to identify the painting.

The work was insured for $15,000. The insurer, Chubb, paid the claim in the 1970s and so took title to the missing painting. Nothing more is reported for decades. John Grant was 15 at the time of the burglary. In 2006 he began to search again, after finding a folder about the painting. In 2011 a friend led him to Bob Bazin, a retired FBI agent who had worked on art cases, and Bazin took the case to the FBI. On 30 June 2016, the 40th anniversary, the FBI Art Crime Team and Cherry Hill police appealed for help. The painting went into the FBI National Stolen Art File and Interpol’s database.

After the appeal, the painting came to light. Louis D. Lappen, acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said a Philadelphia-area antiques dealer had paid a few hundred dollars for it not long after the theft. He thought it was a damaged copy, could not sell it and hung it in his kitchen for about 40 years. Investigators said he did not know it was stolen, but no one has tested that. The dealer was never charged, and no outlet names him. Press accounts differ on when he gave it up. The Inquirer says it was recovered in 2016, after the appeal. The Associated Press and Heritage say it was returned in March 2017. The date is not certain.

The thief was never identified or arrested. In March 2017 the FBI said it had a description of a potential suspect, and Lappen called the case an ongoing investigation. The sources consulted report nothing later.

What is certain is the ceremony. On 31 March 2017, at an FBI event in Philadelphia, the painting was handed to the six Grant children, whose parents had died. Chubb gave back its title in exchange for the $15,000 it had paid, and said it would give that sum to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The family chose to sell. John Grant told the Associated Press that no one felt safe keeping the painting at home. Heritage had a conservator mend the hole, after consulting the Norman Rockwell Museum. On 3 November 2017, at Heritage’s American Art Signature Auction in Dallas, Lazybones sold as lot 69166 for $912,500, below an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. Heritage reports its prices with the buyer’s premium, but the sources on this lot do not state the basis. Two telephone bidders competed, and the buyer was not named. The painting is presumably in a private collection. No later report was found.