Two Stolen Paintings Are Found in Italy.

In 1975, a factory worker at Fiat, the Italian carmaker, bought two colorful paintings for about $70 at an auction in Turin of objects left unclaimed by train passengers. For years, they hung on his kitchen wall. One was a still life with fruit and a small dog, the other showed a woman in white seated in a verdant garden.

Then, last summer, the man’s son, an architecture student, was looking through a book of paintings by Paul Gauguin and saw a familiar image: a still life with a dog. The family called in experts, who contacted the Italian police. On Wednesday, the police said that the paintings were, in fact, a still life by Gauguin from 1889 and “Woman With Two Chairs” by Pierre Bonnard, both of which had been reported stolen from a London home in 1970.

“I’d say it’s quite satisfying,” Gen. Mariano Mossa, the chief of the cultural heritage division of Italy’s paramilitary Carabinieri police said in a telephone interview after presenting the findings at the Culture Ministry in Rome, following a monthslong investigation.

General Mossa said the Gauguin could be worth up to 35 million euros (around $48 million) and the Bonnard at least €500,000 (around $690,000). Auction house experts in New York put the Gauguin’s worth at approximately $15 million and the Bonnard’s at around $2 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/arts/design/two-stolen-paintings-are-found-in-italy.html?hp