[MSN] Insurers pay up for art theft

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Insurers pay up for art theft

IRISH insurers have compensated a family whose 18thcentury painting vanished during the filming of a Jane Austen biopic.

The £50,000 portrait, which depicted the family of Richard Chapell Whaley, disappeared from Newman House on St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin last May.

Gardaí questioned the film crew who were shooting the £8.2million movie about Jane Austen, Becoming Jane, at the time and made inquiries with art dealers in Ireland and in Britain.

But the painting — which was on loan from the Whaley family to University College Dublin — has not been located. UCD, which owns Newman House, said that its insurers had now compensated the family for their loss.

“We are very sad about what happened and we still hope the painting might turn up,” said a UCD spokeswoman.

The university had made the building available to the film crew at the request of the Irish Film Board.

The film — which is currently in post-production — charts the doomed romance between 20-year-old Jane Austen and a young Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy.

The lead roles are played by Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada and James McAvoy, co-star of the current film about Idi Amin, The Last King Of Scotland.

Although gardaí questioned everyone who had access to the building at the time of the theft they are not treating the film crew as suspects. Det Garda Brian Sheeran of Harcourt Terrace garda station said that the investigation into the disappearance of the painting was ongoing.

He said: “Unfortunately when there are a lot of people around, people can enter and leave the building a lot easier. We’re still appealing for information.”

The painting, created in wax, is very fragile and those in art circles have been asked to help with its recovery. Galleries and auction houses have been told to be on alert for it and advertisements have been placed in art magazines in Ireland and in Britain.

Its image and details about it have also been put on Interpol’s database of stolen art.

The subject of the painting, Richard Chapell Whaley, was a Protestant landowner whose anti-Catholicism earned him the nickname “Burn-Chapel” Whaley.

His descendants included the legendary Dublin rake Buck Whaley (after whom a Leeson Street bar is named), who ran up huge gambling debts in his youth, launched an expedition to the Holy Land and, as a member of the Irish Parliament, took bribes to vote for and against the Act of Union in 1800.

http://www.irishpost.co.uk/