They were stolen when three men posing as burglar-alarm technicians came to the Kennedy Marks residence-when only the housekeeper was home-claiming they were there for a planned maintenance call. Marks bought the paintings for an undisclosed sum at a Sotheby’s auction in 1961 and gifted them to his daughter. The paintings had been sensationally stolen in 1970 from a Regents Park house in London belonging to Terence Kennedy and Mathilda Marks, the daughter of Michael Marks, co-founder of Marks & Spencer. READ MORE Cat Café Craze Sweeping the Globe
He bought a book and was surprised to find a picture of the artist Pierre Bonnard sitting on the same chairs in the same garden as the painting that hung on his father’s wall. It was signed “Bonnato” or so he thought, but when he researched it, he only found “Bonnard,” a French painter he had never heard of. His son, age 15, who had taken an art appreciation class, thought there was something peculiar about the one with a young girl sitting on a garden chair. This time, he hung them in his kitchen above the same table he had moved from Turin. When Nicolo retired and moved home to Siracusa, Sicily, he brought the paintings with him. “In the background there were always the two paintings.” “I have a photo album of my most fond memories: the kids’ birthdays, anniversaries, parties, Christmas lunches,” he told La Repubblica newspaper. He took them home and hung them on his wall. He and another bidder battled until Nicolo finally won the paintings for 45,000 lire-around $32. Nicolo loved art, but he only made 200,000 lire or $143 a month and he couldn’t justify spending a quarter of his monthly salary, so he bid 30,000 lire ($20) for the two. The auctioneer told him they were just “garbage” found on a midnight train from Paris to Turin, and started the bidding at 50,000 lire ($35). There, among the watches, radios and lost coats, Nicolo spotted two paintings he thought would look nice above his dining room table. As he often did, he stopped by the “after work auction” run by the Italian state police where items found on the trains were sold to the highest bidder. It was just after sunrise on a June morning in 1975, when “Nicolo,” whose real name cannot be revealed because of Italy’s privacy laws, finished working the night shift on the assembly line at the FIAT auto factory in Turin.
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