FBI offers $20000 reward for stolen NC Wyeth paintings

PanARMENIAN.Net - The FBI is offering a $20,000 reward for help in finding two famous NC Wyeth paintings which were stolen in 2013, Sky News reports.

The two works were among six by the US artist taken from the home of a businessman in Portland, Maine.

Three men were prosecuted for theft after four of the missing works were found in a Beverly Hills pawn shop after the owner alerted police.

The art was estimated to be worth around $2m.

One of those charged in their theft was aspiring rapper Oscar Roberts, who used the paintings to get a $100,000 loan from the shop and was jailed in April for two years. Lawrence Estrella was jailed for seven years and Dean Coroniti is to be sentenced in October.

But the remaining two paintings - the 1920 work The Encounter On Freshwater Cliff, and Go Dutton, And That Right Speedily of 1916 - are still lost.

It is believed the two paintings are in New England but David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, also said they could be anywhere in the world and could take decades to find.

NC (Newell Convers) Wyeth was born in 1882 and was perhaps best known for his illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island around 1910.

He died in 1945, in Chadds Ford, when the car he was driving was hit by a train. His grandson, also in the car, died too.

He was the first of three generations of American painters: his son Andrew best known for his 1948 work Christina's World and grandson Jamie who, at the age of 20, was asked by Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy to paint a posthumous portrait of former president John F Kennedy in 1967.