The Art Loss Register (ALR) is the world’s largest, private database of lost and stolen art, antiques and collectibles. Its main services include helping museums, auction houses, collectors, insurers and law enforcement agencies seek and recover missing objects.
Founded in London in 1990, the ALR is a private organisation that employs digital technology and an international team of specially trained art historians. Its database currently lists 500,000 items. According to the New York Times, the ALR has become an “integral part of art investigation around the world”.
One of the ALR’s highest-profile recoveries was that of Paul Cézanne's £18.1 million painting ‘Bouilloire et Fruits’. Stolen from a private residence near Boston, Massachusetts, in 1978, it was retrieved with the help of the FBI two decades later, when a private individual tried to sell the work using a Panamanian shell company.
The ALR has its roots in the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a not-for-profit organisation established in New York in 1969. IFAR was set up to provide “impartial and authoritative” information about the authenticity and ownership of art works. In 1976 it established an art theft archive. By 1990, IFAR had manual records on 20,000 art works.
That same year the ALR was established in London and, in partnership with IFAR, digitised its records, forming the basis of the ALR’s database today.
The ALR was the brainchild of former risk consultant, Julian Radcliffe, who saw the potential to build on IFAR's endeavours, setting up a service for anyone wishing to track down an artwork or check its provenance.
In subsequent years, satellite offices were opened by the ALR in New York, Cologne, Amsterdam and Paris to cater for growing client bases in those locations. In January 2010 the regional offices were consolidated into one central, international office in London. The ALR retains a team fluent in multiple languages and expert in a range of specialities – from antiquities to contemporary art.
As of 2013, Pablo Picasso was the artist who singly accounted for most of these, with more than 1,000 works missing.
As the focus for suspicions of illegitimate art ownership worldwide, the ALR provides a recovery service to return works to their rightful owners. In the process it also aims to act as a deterrent against art theft.
Its services are offered on a one-off or subscription basis. In 2016 the ALR announced that it now had 100 auction houses worldwide as subscribers, including Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips and Bonhams. It also conducts vetting searches for the world’s leading art fairs, including Art Basel, TEFAF, Frieze Masters and Art Cologne.
According to its website, the ALR has been “instrumental in the recovery of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of stolen valuables”.
Since 2014, the ALR has also begun to offer a specialist service to the watch trade, known as The Watch Register.
1999: Cézanne's still-life ‘Bouilloire et Fruits’ was one of seven paintings stolen in 1978 from a private residence near Boston, Massachusetts. Twenty-one years later, Lloyd’s of London contacted the ALR after a Panamanian company had tried to insure the painting with them. Following investigation, the work was identified as the stolen Cézanne and returned to its original owner, Michael Bakwin. A few months afterwards he sold it for £18.1 million ($29.3 million).
2004: A second-century AD marble head of Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, was stolen in 1996 from a museum in Skikda, Algeria. During a catalogue search ahead of an antiquities sale at Christie’s in New York in 2004, the ALR identified an item matching the missing bust of Marcus Aurelius. The piece was seized by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pulled from the auction and repatriated.
2011: On Christmas Eve 1997, more than a hundred religious artefacts were stolen from the Church of San Andres de Machaca, near La Paz, in Bolivia. Over a decade later, a dealer based in Washington, USA, approached the ALR to check its database for a pair of colonial-era paintings he claimed he had received on consignment from a collector. The works were identified conclusively as portraits of 'Saint Rose of Viterbo' and 'Saint Augustin', two of the standout pieces removed from the Church of San Andres de Machaca. They were subsequently repatriated to Bolivia.
2014: A large 18th-Century pastoral tapestry by the French manufacturer, Aubusson – which in 1974 had been declared a national treasure by France's government – was stolen from the salon of a chateau in Normandy in 1982. Thirty-two years later the ALR spotted the item for sale during a routine catalogue search before an auction in London (the consignor saying he had bought it at a flea market in Paris in the 1990s, unaware of its provenance). The tapestry was returned to its original home.
2016: A pair of rare Mamluk mosque lamps were stolen from Egypt’s national collection in 2014 and replaced with replicas. The two medieval items were eventually returned to Cairo after a London-based dealer reported them to the ALR. They are housed today at the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation.
2016: In 1994, two Old Master paintings from the 17th Century – ‘Battle Scene’ by Aniello Falcone and 'Concert with Four People and a Drinker' by Valentin de Boulogne (or his workshop) – were stolen in separate raids in Rome: one from the office of former Italian prime minister, Emilio Colombo, the other from that of an accountant. Twenty years later, a British collector, who’d bought the works in good faith and been storing them in a vault in London’s Hatton Garden, began researching their provenance on the ALR website. A positive match with the two stolen canvases was made and – after further investigation and final confirmation by the ALR, working alongside Italy's Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage – the works were returned to Rome.
2016: A Patek Philippe watch worth $27,500 was ripped from a Swiss holidaymaker’s arm, while he was walking through Naples city centre in 2014. He immediately reported the theft to Italian police, the manufacturer and his insurer, which listed the watch on the ALR’s Watch Register. Two years later, the ALR spotted the item for sale in an auction in New York.
