The Bad News:

- Over the holiday season, Edgar Degas’ painting Le Choristes was stolen from the Musée Cantini in Marseille, France. The painting’s value is placed between 1.15 and 42.2 million- quite a wide discrepancy! The 13 × 10 inch painting seemed to be easily unscrewed from the wall, leading police to suspect an inside job- and are currently interviewing a night watchman.

- One day after the Degas painting was stolen, an entire collection was taken from a villa in La Cadiere d’Azur in the south of France, and estimated to be worth over $2 million dollars. The caretaker of the estate discovered the missing pieces, including works by Picasso and Henri Rousseau.

- Art Loss Register has found the UK has the most art thefts in the world- with the US coming in second! Although, Norway takes the prize for the most expensive work of art stolen, with Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

The Good News:

- Claude Monet’s “Beach in Pourville” was found by Polish police, and is now at the National Museum in Poland with experts confirming its authenticity. Ten years ago, “Beach in Pourville” had been sliced from its frame and replaced with a fake done on cardboard! Of course, this didn’t fool anyone for very long.

- A Miami thief, who was inspired by “Antiques Roadshow”, has been caught for the theft of a Chagall lithograph and a Picasso etching. The works were stolen from a gallery in Washington DC in 2007, and the thief attempted to resell the works to a gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. The man was caught through a federal sting, with an agent posing as a gallery employee after the Palm Beach gallery notified police.