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Charley Hill obituary Oliver Basciano
One bright morning in May 1994, in a summerhouse in the Norwegian fjord town of Åsgårdstrand, Charley Hill, a Scotland Yard detective, stared down a trapdoor leading to the basement. Below, in the dark, was Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, stolen three months earlier from the National Gallery in Oslo. With Hill was an art dealer, who had brought him to this secret location, and two men, hoodwinked by Hill’s pseudonym of Chris Roberts, who were handling the sale of the missing masterpiece. “I posed as a representative of the Getty Museum, wanting to buy the painting. The Getty was wonderful in creating an identity for me. There was a lot of tough talk and near misses, but the thieves fell for it.”
Charles Hill, art sleuth who tracked down works by Titian, Vermeer, Goya, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream – obituary
He recovered The Scream during an elaborate ‘sting’ operation in which he posed as a representative from the Getty Museum in California
Charley Hill: a natural for covert work in the art world
Credit: Richard Anset
Charles Hill, the art detective, aided the recovery of many priceless objects in an adventurous career both with the Metropolitan Police and as a freelance investigator, most sensationally Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Titian’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt.
A former soldier and aspirant priest, Hill gave up sword and cassock in favour of dagger and cloak. With a passion for art and a flair for theatrics, he was a plain-clothes man who could talk to academics and the criminal fraternity on equal terms.
She began life as a rich young debutant who was presented to the Queen but she became the inspiration for Martin ‘The General’ Cahill to conduct one of the most daring raids of his career.
Republican renegade Rose Dugdale was an aristocrat born into extreme wealth in Devon but she turned her back on her life of privilege to join the ‘Irish cause’ and is to date the only woman to pull of a major art heist.
A new book, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer, by art detective Anthony Amore details how Dugdale planned and carried out the first major raid on Russborough House in County Wicklow stealing a number of paintings including the famed ‘Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid by the Dutch master Vermeer.