Art Dealer Finds Lost Hendrick Avercamp Painting Using $18 Pillow

The stolen Avercamp painting that Cliff Schorer helped recover

Hendrick Avercamp, “Winter Landscape with Skater and Other Figures.” (Photo: via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

One night in June 1978, while Robert Stoddard was peacefully sleeping, thieves were sneaking through his 36-acre Worcester estate. By the time they escaped, they’d gathered 12 paintings—worth about $10 million today—across the residence, many of which still haven’t been recovered. Once he woke up the next morning, Stoddard quickly realized he had been the victim of what would become one of the art world’s most infamous heists. Gone were artworks by countless old masters, including Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, J.M.W. Turner, and Hendrick Avercamp.

Nearly five decades later, the tide finally shifted when Stoddard’s nephew, Warren Fletcher, reached out to Cliff Schorer for help. Schorer, a prominent art dealer, former board president of the Worcester Art Museum, and amateur art sleuth, had long been interested in rediscovering lost masterpieces, or “sleepers,” and instantly got to work, focusing specifically on a painting by the 19th-century Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, the Turner, and the Avercamp.

“They were quite distinctive,” Schorer recently told the Boston Globe. “I figured, even in silhouette from an old image, I could find them.”

During his investigation, he eventually stumbled upon an $18 throw pillow featuring a fragment from the long-lost Avercamp painting, depicting a winter landscape complete with ice skaters, a distinctive stone arch, and an overcast sky. The pillow was listed online as being made by the artist’s student and nephew, Barent Avercamp, but was recognizable enough for Schorer to pursue the lead. Using a reverse image search engine, he discovered a color reproduction of Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skater and Other Figures on Pixels.com, where metadata revealed the photograph was taken years after the painting was stolen.

Soon after, Schorer traced Winter Landscape back to a 1995 fine arts fair hosted by Newhouse Galleries in the Netherlands. There, the painting was sold to a Dutch couple, now dead, yet Schorer managed to track down their heir by August 2021. In early May 2025, following years of negotiation, the art dealer collected the Avercamp at last. The painting has since returned to its home in England, where it will soon be exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum.

“The recovery of this wonderful painting is profoundly meaningful—not only because a long-lost work of art has been returned to the family that once owned it, but because it reflects the enduring bond between the Stoddard family and the Worcester Art Museum,” Matthias Waschek, the museum’s Jean and Myles McDonough director, said in a statement. “We are grateful to have the work on loan to the museum to soon share with the Worcester community.”

“It was nirvana,” Fletcher said of the moment he saw the Avercamp’s Winter Landscape again. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell this painting will show up, but through a combination of serendipitous circumstances, it did.”

Now, Schorer is already eager to locate Stoddard’s other lost paintings: “That’s the exciting part. There’s a whole number of threads that I can unravel.”