The Titian taken from Longleat

Just after nine on the evening of 6 January 1995, thieves put a ladder against Longleat House in Wiltshire, climbed to a window of the State Drawing Room and broke in. The Art Newspaper reports that the Marquess of Bath, who owns the house, was dining upstairs. The thieves took three paintings. Two were lesser works. The third was a small Titian, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

The picture had a long history before that night. It is 46.2 by 62.9 centimetres, oil on canvas laid on panel, and Christie’s dates it to about 1508 to 1510, when Titian was a young painter in Venice. Its recorded history begins with a Venetian collector, Bartolomeo della Nave. It later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and hung among the Habsburg collections in Vienna.

Napoleon’s troops then took it. Christie’s dates the removal to 1809, and The Art Newspaper says the painting was back in Vienna in 1815. The sources do not explain how it later came to Britain. The Art Newspaper says it was probably sold in the 1840s to Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, a Scottish collector and patron of Turner, and Christie’s has him as owner by 1851. On 1 June 1878 it sold at Christie’s for 350 guineas to the dealer Colnaghi. The Art Newspaper says the buyer was almost certainly acting for the 4th Marquess of Bath, and the painting went to Longleat.

After the theft, nothing is recorded for some years. The Art Newspaper reports that about seven years later, once a reward of 100,000 pounds had been announced, the painting turned up without its frame in a bag at a bus stop in Richmond, south-west London. It went back to Longleat. The paper gives no exact year for the recovery, and the sources consulted record no claim on the painting by anyone else.

On 2 July 2024 the present Marquess of Bath offered the Titian at Christie’s in London, as lot 8 of the Old Masters Part I sale. The Art Newspaper gave the estimate as 15 million to 25 million pounds. It sold for 17,560,000 pounds, including the buyer’s premium. The sources consulted do not name the buyer or say where the painting hangs now.