Doorman Returns Lost $1.35M Painting

Artwork had reportedly been lost by drunken courier
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 16, 2010 2:38 PM CDT
Doorman Returns Lost $1.35M Painting
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's "Portrait of a Girl".   (Wikimedia Commons)

A doorman has turned in to police a missing painting worth $1.35 million that he says he found in the bushes near the Fifth Avenue apartment building where he works, the New York Post reports. The painting turned out to be Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's Portrait of a Girl, which had previously made news when it was apparently lost in a drunken haze by a courier. The doorman says he didn't turn it in immediately because he assumed the owner lived in his building.

But after no one claimed it, he took it home and put it in his bathroom. Later, he looked it up online and found that it was the focus of a legal battle, after which he turned it in to a police station. Police had previously arrested one of the painting's co-owners on fraud charges in the weird case, and the doorman's tale is under investigation. "His story is definitely weird," a law enforcement source tells the Post. "It doesn't make sense."
(More painting stories.)

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