Works by Pissarro, Renoir, and Avercamp Vanished. Here’s How an Amateur Art Sleuth Cracked the Case

On the evening of April 7, 2021, the amateur art detective Clifford Schorer III was seated on a couch in his glass house. In silence, he opened a manila envelope that had been sent to him by a respected Massachusetts attorney. The packet contained evidence related to an unsolved crime.

Schorer’s midcentury-modern home, designed in 1956 by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, sits atop a majestic dune at the western edge of Provincetown. Its floor-to-ceiling windows offer 270-degree views of the seascape below. After dark, with the lights on, the glass house glows like a television screen. Since Schorer and his spouse, Kris, never close the front blinds, passersby can actually see into the home, as if watching a show about a sleuth who tracks down missing artworks.

Had you peered through the panes on that spring night, you might have spied Schorer, in front of the fireplace, on his Danish modern sofa, leafing through photocopied pages, seeking clues as he often does. “Your interesting package has now found its way to my hand,” he would write the lawyer who had mailed the envelope. In fact, he had told that attorney some weeks earlier: “You know what I do all day long. I look for paintings.”

Schorer located this lost Dürer, circa 1503.Leon Neal/Getty Images.

Schorer already had a reputation for finding lost masterpieces worth millions, but this dossier contained the makings of his biggest case yet. The documents related to a 1978 home invasion in Worcester, Massachusetts, during which nine highly valuable paintings were taken, including works by several Old Masters. The stolen art, Schorer calculated, would now be worth roughly $34 million. Like the 1990 hit at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—in which 13 pieces, estimated at $500 million, had been swiped—the Worcester mystery ranked among America’s most confounding art heists. For decades, there’d been no cracks in the case. But then again, Clifford Schorer III had never looked into it.

Schorer has quite a track record. In 2019 he uncovered an original Albrecht Dürer, today valued at eight figures; remarkably, it had wound up in a yard sale for $30. Vienna’s Der Standard deemed this “no less than a find of the century.” Schorer seemed to concur, telling The New York Times: “I’ll never have an experience like that again.” But when it comes to unearthing overlooked and underpriced art trophies, he keeps repeating that experience; his identifications and retrievals, he says, are the equivalent of being struck by a “kind of electricity” multiple times. “In Cliff’s case, lightning strikes a lot,” explains Jim Welu, director emeritus of the Worcester Art Museum (WAM). “It’s just not a fluke in his life; it’s part of his DNA.”

Over the past decade or so, Schorer has stumbled across two van Dycks and “relocated” five Turners. He’s been restoring an altarpiece fragment attributed to El Greco that, he suspects, was rescued from a burning church during the Spanish Civil War. He regularly identifies or reidentifies works by significant Old Masters listed as “by an unidentified artist.” His specialty is the forgotten Rembrandt or Rubens that has somehow slipped between the cracks and ended up, in his words, “sleeping in plain sight.”

His hunches don’t always prove correct: He’s been suckered by at least a few forgeries or phonies. “Sometimes you follow threads that turn into an unraveling sweater,” he admits. But many filaments he’s followed have led to veritable treasures: the previously unrecorded van Haarlem he spotted in New Jersey that now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago; a Cézanne he snagged from a Campbell’s Soup heiress and helped place in Ireland’s National Gallery; and three possibilities he scooped up on the cheap that were subsequently reattributed to the Milanese maestro Daniele Crespi. He also owns four works from Rembrandt’s studio, he claims, including “two that I believe are by the master himself.”

Schorer, who does not hold a university degree in art history, is largely self-taught and makes many of his finds in his spare time. He also employs runners to scour auctions around the world in search of hidden gems. “All day and night,” he says, “we send pictures back and forth by WhatsApp, going, ‘Do we think this is this?’ ” The Sunday Times Magazine (UK) describes him as being “well known in the art world for his ‘eye.’ ” Schorer formulates it slightly differently: “I’m known in the art world for rediscovering lost things.”

Despite having left high school at age 15, Schorer, 58, is an exceptionally knowledgeable if mercurial and at times elusive man. He is lanky, with piercing dark eyes, short-cropped hair, and a trim white beard. “I’m no one, with no particular education,” he stated in an oral history project for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “I come to it with an open pair of eyeballs.”

The types of paintings Schorer seeks are known as “sleepers.” A sleeper is the name that the picture trade bestows upon a work being sold below its true value because it is mistakenly thought to be fake, specious, a probable copy, or the work of an inconsequential artist. A sleeper hunter is an individual like Schorer, who stalks such errors or misattributions in listings at auctions. Whenever he acquires sleepers, he joins forces with experts to reassess and properly catalog the paintings. Then he and his team often unload them at a profit to blue-chip institutions, using the proceeds to procure more beauties.

Schorer’s success at rousing sleepers enabled him to put together the investment group that purchased the venerable London gallery Agnews in 2014. He then acquired a 290-acre forest in Vermont. Recently he became the owner of a Gatsby-style mansion on an approximately four-acre private island in the Long Island Sound where J.P. Morgan’s great-grandson has resided. Schorer is renovating the place to sell.

I first met him in New York City after a Christie’s auction, where he’d just won a Turner for more than $1 million. His intent was for Agnews to offer it over the coming years at a higher price to the European market. What moves him, however, isn’t lucrative deals. He isn’t an art dealer at all. Instead, he contends that his goals are threefold: to resurrect forsaken or neglected artworks; to repatriate pieces spoliated by the Nazis; and to die in possession of a single perfect painting, ideally an unobtainable Leonardo. This last aspiration could require selling everything else he owns, but, as he once said, “I don’t mind living in a cardboard box.”

When asked where he normally lives, he replies, a tad testily, “I don’t really ‘normally live’ anywhere.” He divides his time between Provincetown and homes in Boston, London, and Mashpee, Massachusetts. He attends art fairs, lectures, and meetings in Europe once or twice a month. A favorite pastime, he says, is going to symposia that end just short of “fisticuffs between scholars about attribution.”

A collector and art lover, Schorer is above all a dedicated investigator. He compares the way his mind works to those wall-mounted corkboards in classic crime shows, the kind with thumbtacked photos of suspects and murder scenes and corroborating evidence, all linked together by pieces of string. Instead of a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass, he uses precision binocular headband magnifiers, large benchtop microscopes, reverse​-image searches in online databases, and high-tech tactics, such as MA-XRF spectroscopy or dendrochronology, that apply laboratory analytics to decode a painting’s makeup and approximate age. As cutting-edge as his forensics may be, however, Schorer—​upon receiving that envelope in April 2021—found himself getting pulled into a strangely old-fashioned cold case.

The dossier consisted of whatever scant information was available about the nine paintings that had vanished in 1978: 43-year-old police reports, original bills of sale, insurance documents, invoices, and—most importantly to Schorer—photocopied reproductions of the actual trove: two Pissarros, two Renoirs, a Boudin, a Turner, and some intriguing old Dutch paintings.

The theft had personal implications. Several of the works had been bound for the permanent collection of WAM, where Schorer had previously served as board president and where a number of canvases he owns are currently on view. Yet despite his ties to the museum, no one had ever given him a clear description of the artworks taken in 1978—until the file arrived.

The package was mailed by Warner Fletcher, a Worcester law firm director, chairman of the $50 million Stoddard Charitable Trust, and secretary-treasurer of the $59 million Fletcher Foundation, organizations that have long supported WAM. The plundered artworks had belonged to Helen Estabrook Stoddard and Robert Stoddard, Fletcher’s aunt and her husband, both now deceased, who’d intended to bequeath some of them to WAM. Fletcher wasn’t holding his breath for Schorer to solve the largest private art theft in the city’s history. He just thought the unassuming sleuth might find a new way into the long-moribund search. “Maybe in your wanderings,” Fletcher suggested to him, “if ever you come across any of these, you might be helpful.”

Scoping the inventory in the envelope, Schorer gravitated to one painting in particular, a 17th-century icescape by Hendrick Avercamp. Among the towering figures of Holland’s Golden Age, Avercamp (1585–1634) is famous for his depictions of outdoor wintertime activities: Netherlanders skating and otherwise going about their business on frozen canals and waterways. In his densely peopled, somewhat freaky panoramas, figures enjoying what the Dutch call “ice fever” can be seen getting frisky in nippy haylofts, relieving themselves in subzero outhouses, hanging from dead-season gallows.

Avercamp made only 100 or so of his icy paintings. The artist, likely deaf and nonverbal, was known as “the mute of Kampen.” He remains, in the view of Wim Pijbes and Earl A. Powell III, respectively the emeritus directors of the Rijksmuseum and Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, “the acknowledged master of the winter scene.”

Schorer had owned one of Avercamp’s minor watercolors, which he’d auctioned off 10 weeks prior. But the stolen composition was a much bigger deal. Winter Sports, as it was known, appeared to be a masterpiece. A signed 1944 attestation included in Fletcher’s package qualified it as “one of the best works by this rare master.” It was nearly four centuries old and in a pristine state of preservation.

The Avercamp looked “extre-e-e-emely desirable,” Schorer emailed Fletcher. A winter scene of that type, he estimated, would today cost up to “$10 million if you can buy one but you can’t.” Per Sotheby’s, the last two comparable Avercamps had sold at auction for $7.75 and $8.6 million each. Schorer considered Winter Sports a “sui generis rarity.” He would only be able to establish a precise value after verifying its condition firsthand. He informed an astonished Fletcher, “I believe I can run it to ground in around 15 more minutes during the business day.”

The trail it left behind, he felt, would likely lead to the remaining Worcester paintings. But first he needed to establish what, exactly, had happened on the night of the theft.

Worcester, the second-biggest urban center in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a postindustrial city an hour west of Boston. As you drive into town, you are greeted by a Welcome sign in the shape of an open book with blank pages, as though you’re entering a story that hasn’t yet been written.

Some time after midnight on June 22, 1978, according to the police report, a vehicle containing an undetermined number of nondescript thieves cruised through the upscale neighborhood of Forest Grove. They turned onto Monmouth Road. The last home on the dead-end street was a stately blue-and-white fairy-tale mansion belonging to the art patrons Helen and Robert Stoddard. Their 36-acre property occupied one of the city’s choicest private lots. The gabled 10-bedroom home, dominated by dark wood and soaring ceilings, was done in high-end Arts and Crafts style. The walls were adorned with works by Eugène Delacroix, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marc Chagall.

In the midsummer darkness, the robbers made their way toward the Stoddards’ immense backyard. Ignoring the lavish gardens and the helipad, they sought a way in through the rear sunporch.

Helen Stoddard, known locally as “the grand dame of Worcester,” had attended the Sorbonne, where she’d developed a lifelong love of fine art, especially French Impressionism. At her urging, the couple had started collecting tableaux. The first piece they acquired was a small Renoir landscape; Helen couldn’t imagine living without it. An ardent Francophile, she’d helped establish WAM’s member council and would continue volunteering on museum committees into her 90s.

Robert Stoddard ran a lucrative metal manufacturing business and was majority owner of the Worcester Telegram (later to become the Telegram & Gazette, which the New York Times company eventually bought for $295 million). An amateur helicopter pilot, he enjoyed vintage automobiles and could be seen driving around town in his Bentley sporting a porkpie hat. In 1958, he cofounded the right-wing John Birch Society, the extremist group that would help give rise to the modern conservative movement. If you tried to sit to his right at a table, he’d warn you that you might fall off the edge of the world. Retrograde politically, he was a big-spending philanthropist—and a prime target for a burglary. He also happened to be a notoriously deep sleeper.

On the night of the break-in, according to news reports, only Robert was home. His wife was in the hospital undergoing jaw surgery. He finished his usual pre-sleep milk and cookies and got into bed by 11:45 p.m.

Not long after, the thieves tried to force their way in by prying apart a jalousie window with a screwdriver. When that didn’t work, they broke the glass pane on the back breezeway door. The key to the deadbolt was sitting in the lock. Turning it, the crooks walked right in.

They helped themselves to snacks in the refrigerator and booze from the liquor cabinet. Since they’d come without proper carrying cases for the artworks, they slashed open pillows from the sofa, strewing fluff all over the floor. They stuffed paintings into pillowcases, police surmised, and packed smaller ivory objets and jewel boxes into antique fire buckets. They also rifled through Stoddard’s bedroom without disturbing his slumber. They placed a fire poker nearby, apparently in case he awoke and needed to be subdued. But he dozed through it all, even as the thieves ransacked the place.

Upon waking at 6 a.m., Stoddard found his glasses on the floor. His wallet was missing from the bedside bureau, as were two of his watches. The couple’s beloved Pissarro port scene, which had hung above their mantelpiece, was gone. So was Helen’s prized Renoir, the light of her life. Another seven paintings, including the Avercamp and the Turner, were now empty spots on the wall. A trail of footprints and pillow feathers marked the getaway route through the backyard.

“Bumblers Pull Off a Perfect Crime” read the headline in the Telegram. Worcester’s police department called it an “amateurish job” done by “petty thieves.” But for small-timers, they’d either gotten fantastically lucky or they’d known precisely which paintings were the most valuable. The Stoddards’ collection had been appraised for insurance purposes 11 months prior; all the priciest pieces were the very ones that had been taken. “It was as if,” officers noted, the “thieves had been given a list of paintings to steal.”

Even so, the ensuing investigation went nowhere. The sergeant assigned to the case would later acknowledge that the authorities had never even come up with a suspect. Insinuations that Robert Stoddard had orchestrated it for the insurance payout were summarily dismissed. His wealth was such that the amount he stood to receive from Liberty Mutual (on whose board of directors he served) was described as “a drop in the bucket.”

Perhaps the most arresting detail was that pillowcases played a part in the caper. Because a pillowcase was precisely what would end up leading Schorer to the Avercamp.

The manila envelope beside him, Schorer picked up his MacBook Pro and started searching Hendrick Avercamp images online, on the off chance he might find a digital footprint of the Stoddards’ winterscape. At first nothing relevant popped up. But as he scanned the Google search results, he had a thought: If I knew I had a hot painting, previously attributed to Avercamp, to whom would I attribute it if I wanted to push it through the market and get away with it? In other words, what would a fence do? The move, to any art detective, was obvious: try to sell it as something close to, but not exactly, the real thing.

Robert and Helen Estabrook Stoddard in the Worcester, Massachusetts, newspaper he had owned, featured in a 2000 story on an exhibition celebrating their collection.Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Schorer retried the image search using the name of the painter’s best-known disciple, his nephew Barent Avercamp. Within a few moments, a thumbnail appeared that matched the photocopied reproduction in his file. “Bingo!” he exclaimed, zooming in. As he’d suspected, the painting had been falsely ascribed to an Avercamp follower. Barent’s works were inferior to his uncle’s and worth substantially less—but also easier to peddle without drawing attention. Schorer clicked on the thumbnail, which brought him to a website called Pixels.com.

“That’s insane,” he muttered to himself, eyeing the screen. Reproductions of the pilfered Avercamp were being sold as decorative throw pillows. For $18.40, anyone could buy a pillowcase with the Stoddards’ long-lost icescape printed on it. The machine-washable coverlets weren’t the only products that featured the painting. The company’s print-on-demand technology meant you could get the Avercamp on a yoga mat, a coffee mug, a bath towel, or an iPhone case.

The original was last seen in 1978, before digital photography existed. So how, Schorer wondered, had Pixels.com gotten access to an image that could be reproduced on products? There was only one answer: Someone must have scanned it recently.

Schorer looked closer at the onscreen pillowcase. The underlying rendering, he noticed, belonged to a collection called Bridgeman Images, a digital fine art archive. For $39, Schorer was able to license a full-resolution version of that parent file. Opening it, he checked the metadata and spotted the initials L.S.F.A.L.—which he recognized as referring to Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts Ltd., a New York Old Masters dealer.

Schorer knew Steigrad well enough to call him. As the telephone rang, he wondered if the Avercamp was still in Steigrad’s possession or if his gallery had already sold it. When Steigrad picked up, Schorer got right to the point: Larry, why are you fucking trafficking in stolen paintings from my museum? Steigrad was emphatic that he’d never bought or sold the painting; he’d simply photographed it when it had been on sale in 1995. “Where?” Schorer demanded. At the European Fine Art Foundation Fair (TEFAF), Steigrad replied, a highly reputable art market held annually in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Every painting sold at TEFAF undergoes a rigorous vetting process overseen by experts, conservators, and academic specialists. Because this painting had been submitted as a Barent Avercamp, it did not receive the same scrutiny that a Hendrick Avercamp would have. And from what Schorer could tell by the hi-res scan, the artist’s monogram-like signature, which superimposed the initial H over an A, appeared to have been forged: Someone seemed to have etched the initial B over the H.

Either way, it was the same painting that decades earlier had been purloined from the Stoddards. Unfortunately, Steigrad informed Schorer, the gallery that had represented the Avercamp at TEFAF was now defunct, and the owner had died. But through art-world connections, Schorer says he implored one of the gallery’s former partners to divulge the name of the individual who’d sold them the Avercamp.

His name was Sheldon Fish.

What I do is I look to find lost masterpieces,” explained Fish when I reached him in Lima, Peru—a proclamation not unlike those I had heard from Schorer. “I’ve made a lot of major discoveries.” When not rooting around for sleepers, Fish is the CEO of a South American cargo shipping company that transports hazardous substances and dangerous materials, “particularly explosives and radioactive goods.”

Throughout our call, Fish was adamant that he had not known the Avercamp was radioactive at the time he’d purchased it. “When you buy thousands of things, every now and then one of them ends up being stolen,” he offered breezily. “Believe me, if I knew or if I thought it were”—stolen, he meant—“I would run the other way.”

The FBI reclaimed the Stoddards’ 1902 Pissarro in a 1998 raid.Courtesy of Weschler’s.

(Searching Fish’s name online brought up reports of a theft of 18th-century artworks from a Peruvian church. Eight of the stolen paintings were allegedly consigned by Fish to an Iowa auction house, whereupon they were seized by the FBI. At the time, Fish denied knowing that the works were stolen. No charges were laid. Asked to comment, Fish noted that the sellers had given him a receipt: “You must always be careful who you are dealing with and get a signed receipt. Anyone who knowingly buys a stolen painting is an idiot.”)

During our conversation, Fish had initially told me he couldn’t recall where he’d found the Avercamp, though he did speak openly about having profited from it via the gallery that brought it to TEFAF. “I sold it for pretty good money: $100,000,” he claimed. “I remember the painting—but I don’t remember who I bought it from.… I wish I could be more helpful, you know. It’d be great to help.”

The more we talked, the less fuzzy his memories became. Upon first encountering the painting, he remembered, he could tell it was valuable. “I knew I was onto a score,” Fish said. “But he didn’t sell it to me as an Avercamp, obviously.” Who was the “he” who’d sold it? Fish couldn’t recall.

To prepare for our interview, Fish added, he’d asked his brother about the painting. The two of them often went treasure hunting together, and his brother thought they’d found it at Brimfield Antique Flea Markets, a half hour or so drive from Worcester. “You go from one booth to the other looking for the mistakes,” Fish explained. “Different experts are running around all over the place, like lunatics, trying to find a lost whatever it is.” By the end of our conversation, he’d concluded that he likely found it at Brimfield: “I’m fairly certain I got it from there.” He told me he didn’t have a receipt.

Still, Schorer now had a piece of the puzzle: Brimfield. Digging deeper into the events at the Stoddards’ home and the ensuing investigation, the sleuth noticed a curious connection. The only quasi-lead from the police investigation was a call Stoddard had received not long after the burglary, during which a voice with an indeterminate foreign accent claimed to know where the paintings were. And though the cops never identified the caller, they were able to track the call to a phone booth next to the interstate, 10 minutes from Brimfield.

One of the sellers booths at Brimfield during that time, Schorer learned, had been operated by a local antique dealer named Robert Cornell and his wife, Jennifer B. Abella-Cornell. Twenty years after the 1978 Worcester heist, the two had become suspects when the Pissarro from above the Stoddards’ mantel turned up at an auction house in Ohio. (Both Cornell and Abella-Cornell were questioned by the FBI; Robert Cornell denied all involvement, and no charges were ever filed.)

The artist’s great-grandson Joachim Pissarro noticed the auction listing and, realizing where the painting had come from, personally alerted Helen Stoddard. (Her husband had passed away in 1984.) She informed authorities, and the FBI moved swiftly to seize the artwork before it could go under the gavel. It had been expected to fetch up to $2 million. (It might now be worth four or five times that amount.)

At the time of the raid, the FBI began investigating how the Pissarro had ended up in Ohio. But they never managed to reconstruct the painting’s trajectory. Cornell and Abella-Cornell, by then divorced, had contradicted each other’s statements to authorities to such an extent that the FBI described attempts to establish the truth as being “like beating a dead horse.”

The couple had lived 22 miles from Brimfield in a 30-room Victorian mansion called Amesmith. Cornell ran a gallery from their home, where works by Picasso and Chagall were on offer. A specialist in coins, particularly in detecting counterfeits, he fell on hard times in the early 1980s after he was convicted of receiving stolen property. He complained that law enforcement was trying to depict him as “the biggest fence in Western Massachusetts.” Initially found guilty, he was later acquitted on appeal. But the fallout from the trials and several tax audits eventually forced him to shutter his gallery.

When the Stoddards’ Pissarro surfaced, Cornell denied having had anything to do with it—or the original burglary. “I’ve never seen that painting,” he declared in the Worcester Telegram. “I can say that and be lying through my teeth. But the bottom line is that painting has never been in this house.”

Abella-Cornell claimed she’d found the painting in Cornell’s closet, wrapped in paper. She also insisted that earlier it had been mounted on a wall in Amesmith. The couple’s acrimonious breakup was compounded by Abella-Cornell’s involvement in a reported love triangle. As she informed investigators, she and Cornell were working the antiques circuit when, at a Cleveland coin show, she got romantically involved with the owner of a nearby wine bar. (Abella-Cornell did not respond to requests for comment; Cornell died in 2013.)

When the couple split up, Abella-Cornell allegedly took $30,000 in gems and rare coins from Cornell. He called the police, who promptly found most of the stolen goods in her possession. Four rare coins worth $10,000, however, were missing. She was forced to reimburse Cornell that amount and serve two years probation. (Media reports at the time stated that she pleaded guilty to avoid a trial and permanent record of conviction.) Without means to pay Cornell off, she told the FBI, she turned to the owner of the wine bar. He acknowledged, in the Telegram, that he then raised the funds to lend her. She said she brought him the Pissarro as collateral. Cornell disputed this, contending that she was attempting to frame him. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that their dueling accounts lacked hard proof, the FBI dropped the case. In November 1998, a month after the Pissarro was seized, Helen Stoddard passed away. The work—depicting a coastal harbor in Dieppe, France—was returned to WAM shortly thereafter.

According to reporter Frank Magiera, who covered the heist for the Telegram and spoke with all the parties, Abella-Cornell’s account sounded more credible than Cornell’s. “He struck me as being a very surly, suspicious person,” Magiera recalled, “a shady antique dealer.” Even so, he added: “We don’t have any real smoking gun that ties Cornell to this, other than Abella-Cornell.” Without any strong evidence, the entire Pissarro affair seemed to dissolve into a haze—not unlike the snowy backgrounds of Avercamp’s finest midwinter scenes.

A possible Rembrandt, circa 1629, that Schorer uncovered.Pulbic Domain.

Schorer had underestimated his initial assessment of the Stoddards’ Avercamp: that it would take only 15 minutes to run to ground. He chalked this up to what he called his arrogance. But he didn’t stop seeking its whereabouts; its online reappearance had opened further lines of inquiry.

To begin with, Schorer tracked down Abella-Cornell. He claimed that she provided him with two addresses where the other remaining stolen paintings might have conceivably been stashed. He told me he’d hired a private investigator to poke around. He also endeavored to establish who had purchased the Avercamp at the 1995 art fair.

A breakthrough came when he tracked down the descendants of the now deceased gallery owner from TEFAF. “I come in peace,” he wrote. Even so, he added that “the FBI has shown a willingness to take a heavy hand in this case.” The gallerist’s daughter did not answer his initial queries, but Schorer was persistent. After all, he’d been informed that the gallery’s records were in her garage. Months later, she agreed to search the archives. If she could unearth the sales receipts, they would likely identify the Avercamp buyer.

Schorer was patient. He knew time was often on the side of the tenacious sleuth. Moreover, he had another case he was running down about another Dutch painter. This one was named Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

In the fall of 2021, Schorer acquired one of the deepest sleepers he’d ever seen: a circa 1629 portrait of an elderly gin-nosed man, seemingly by Rembrandt. It had been put up for auction in Maryland as an “imitation in the manner of.” The estimated sale price: $1,000–$1,500. After a bidding war, Schorer won it for a healthy $288,000. If real, that would be a fraction of its value. (Rembrandts rarely come to market, but a pair of plausibly authentic portraits sold for $14.2 million in 2023, and 18 months earlier, the Dutch government, in association with the Rembrandt Association and the Rijksmuseum, had paid a whopping $198 million for a bona fide self-portrait.)

Art authentication efforts move slowly; broadly accepted conclusions can remain evasive. And so, while more time is needed to determine whether Schorer had found an actual Rembrandt, he and whoever he outbid weren’t alone in considering it genuine. Volker Manuth, the lead author of the artist’s 2019 catalogue raisonné, wouldn’t offer a categorical answer but, as he told me, “It is very likely that it has been painted by Rembrandt.”

That same conclusion was reached by Manuth’s esteemed predecessor, Abraham Bredius, whose landmark 1935 survey of Rembrandt’s complete paintings included the portrait as Study of a Man With a Swollen Nose. Regardless, Schorer’s putative Rembrandt hadn’t been heard of since World War II. And yet, unlike many paintings looted by the Nazis, this one, with proper papers in tow, had been smuggled to the US from Europe as the war broke out. The portrait was then sold, legally, to the chairman of Velcro Companies. In short: Its provenance appeared spotless.

The painting fell into dormancy after being donated to a Benedictine monastery in California. In the intervening decades, it nearly went up in flames in two separate forest fires. When rescued from the first blaze, one monk asked the other, who’d snatched it off the wall at the last second: “Why did you take that?” The brothers dismissed the idea of it being an honest-to-God Rembrandt as laughable, so they finally ended up consigning it to an auction house. (The monks had appraisers weigh in, only to be told the work couldn’t possibly have been by the master.)

After his winning bid, Schorer brought a high-end 3D reproduction of the painting to the monastery as a donation. The surviving monks there were still in a state of semi-shock over the fact that they’d unwittingly owned such a pricey work.

Schorer told them he’d found an eyelash in the impasto and was testing to see if its DNA matched Rembrandt’s. (He was not, however, aware of any genetic databases he could check it against.) Either way, probing into it seemed to matter more to him than solving the problem. Working with Old Masters gets philosophical at times; attaining a clear resolution isn’t always possible. In art, some questions can’t be answered—as Schorer says, using a musical metaphor, they simply “hang out there in the ether as a chord unresolved.” He doesn’t tend to dwell on such perplexities; he just moves on to the next case. “Investigating the unseen in the twilight hour is how I enjoy spending my life,” he explains. After dinner at the monastery, he confided to me that he had come to a realization: His pursuit, in effect, was a never-ending quest for some kind of religious illumination that he knew might never come.

The hunt for the lost Avercamp continued into Masters Week and Master Drawings New York in January 2023—auctions and gallery shows featuring old works. (More on the Avercamp saga shortly.) At that point, Schorer unveiled his Rembrandt at an invitation-only cocktail reception on the Upper East Side. Elegant guests streamed in, some wearing oversized scarves, others with glittering cuff links. Mayfair accents could be heard over voices speaking German or Dutch. Schorer, sporting a royal blue suit with matching sneakers, winkingly and self-deprecatingly introduced himself to new arrivals as a research assistant.

For the occasion, he’d hung his recently acquired 1629 portrait next to a self-portrait made around the same time by Rembrandt’s dashing friend and competitor, Jan Lievens. (Their early works can be almost impossible to tell apart.) The Lievens was on loan from Theodore Roosevelt’s descendants. Schorer had been at a wedding in their home when he recognized Lievens’s face on the wall. “I found it in the foyer,” he told me. “I went around asking, ‘Who is the proprietor?’ The last time it was mentioned was decades ago. I don’t think it has ever been on public view.”

At the reception, a professorial man in a bow tie took in the display, rapt. “I’m having a moment,” he gasped. “This Lievens hasn’t been seen in over a century, and Cliff found it at someone’s house.” He was Lloyd DeWitt, a coauthor of Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered and at the time chief curator at Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art.

The Lievens, DeWitt added, was “very, very shocking to see.… This one wasn’t even cataloged. Or known.” By placing the supposed Rembrandt portrait next to one by Lievens, Schorer was trying to accomplish two things: first, to show an undisputed work compared to a disputed one from the same moment in time; second, to show how his ability to unearth sleepers can play a deeper role in scholarship. There was also a degree of showmanship to the scene; he was doing it, he said, “to throw meat to the wolves.”

Inquisitive visitors admired Schorer’s find. Whether by Rembrandt or not, it depicted a wizened man with a bulbous nose, wispy facial hair, and downcast eyes, his sad, thin lips parted in mid-sigh. He appeared to be homeless or a beggar—“a tramp,” someone suggested. The brushstrokes were loose and casual, in Rembrandt’s signature experimental style, but the artist still captured the sitter’s essence, his burden of worries, his frailty.

Not long after the vernissage, a vetting committee designated the portrait as “attributed to Rembrandt” as opposed to simply “by Rembrandt.” This meant that not everyone was convinced about its veracity. (Schorer clarifies that their decision is not permanent and can be revisited in the future; the committee may have been erring on the side of caution.) When Schorer sought to poll delegates to find out who the detractors were, some present allegedly cautioned him that he was being “strident and obnoxious.” According to one witness, an attendee piped up in Schorer’s defense: He’s just enthusiastic, he’s not strident.

Whatever his attitude may have been, it’s hard to encapsulate an individual as singular as Schorer. During our first phone call, when I had proposed writing about his art-hound accomplishments, he responded: “I’d like to be the furniture, if I may.” I laughed, not quite understanding. Then, over the course of our meetings, I came to realize what he meant: a protagonist in the background, more or less unnoticed.

The fact is, however, he is hard not to notice. In person, Schorer’s six-foot-one frame is offset by a slight hunch, creating the impression of someone prepared to pounce at any moment. A polymath, he balances his erudition with a sardonic, arcane sense of humor. (When I told him I found a particular art historian’s style to be purple, he corrected me: “Lavender is his prose; it is dancing off the poppies.”)

Largely unaccustomed to publicity, Schorer seemed reluctant when I initially suggested I follow one of his ongoing cases—specifically the Worcester heist, with its alluring Avercamp. Schorer was also firmly reticent, at first, about sharing personal information. Given his keenly developed sense of sight, he struck me as both wanting—and wanting not—to be seen, to be the kind of furniture that’s on display in a glass house. It was only after I pointed out that Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales tend to start on Baker Street—the gumshoe Holmes sitting in front of the crackling hearth, lost in thought and puffing on his pipe—that he finally agreed to have me over to the Gropius house.

I arrive on a misty September Monday in Provincetown. A hurricane has just blown by, leaving charcoal-hued rain clouds in its wake. Schorer’s glass home rises above the bay where the Mayflower first stopped in the New World. A verdigris plaque at his front gate commemorates the “Pilgrims’ Landing” historical site.

He and Kris bring me into their living room, where Schorer likes to do investigative work. Birch logs lie in the marble fireplace, strictly for decor; their 60-ton geothermal system regulates the interior temperature year-round. Kris recalls the moment when Schorer first opened up about the Avercamp discovery: “He came to me and said, ‘I found this painting on a pillowcase.’ I was like, Okay, now he’s started finding them in his mind.”

“It was already in the rearview mirror 14 seconds later,” Schorer adds. “I wanted to find out where the other missing paintings had gone.”

The paucity of paintings on display in their home is striking, suggesting that the art is secondary to the pursuit. But there is another consideration: The walls, after all, are primarily glass panes. The house itself is the artwork, Schorer insists. Gropius and his Architects Collaborative partners had conceived of the dwelling as a “gesamtkunstwerk”: a total work of art. Everything from the doorknobs and cabinets to the retractable wooden panels that conceal the TV and hi-fi were custom designed. Frank Sinatra is said to have performed on the living room’s Steinway at the housewarming party six decades earlier.

Schorer’s paintings, he and Kris explain, are mainly kept off-site—in storage or on loan to museums. There are, however, a number of sculptures of ancient gods scattered about. A large Song dynasty statue of a deity. A troupe of Egyptian figurines, including an Isis and a Horus. A 17th-century sculpture of Poseidon conquering the waves: a gift from FDR to Churchill. Schorer mentions nonchalantly that he’d acquired it in 2020 when he helped auction off the contents of the Waldorf Astoria.

We make our way into the dining room, where I meet the couple’s two purebred rottweilers, Tyson and Nikki, whom they call their kids. Kris recommends not attempting to pet them. As we sit together, I say I’m hoping to understand how an autodidact such as Schorer has come to operate in such rarified spheres. The dogs glower in my direction. But Kris encourages Schorer to speak candidly: “Open your feelings, for the love of God, Cliff.”

Schorer had a difficult childhood. His parents—neither particularly interested in art—separated when he was a boy. Their divorce litigation lasted years. Often in the care of grandparents, Schorer became precociously independent, spending much of his time alone in Boston. “I was on my own as of 11,” he explains.

His father, Clifford Schorer Jr., an entrepreneur and professor at Columbia Business School, corroborates this account. “Cliff very early on decided to take care of himself,” he tells me. “He didn’t want the conventional kind of parenting or to be part of the family nest.” His father recalls that the teenage Cliff would disappear for days on trips to Manhattan. Once, when asked where he’d been, he claimed to have spent time hanging with Andy Warhol. His father didn’t believe him. But then Warhol himself called the house a few days later. “The guy is dinner and a show,” Cliff Jr. says of his son.

After Schorer dropped out of high school, he started coding. Some of the software he wrote made him $27,000. When he was 17, he founded Bottom Line Exchange Company, which purchased items, mainly computing equipment and office furniture, that other companies needed to move.

To make ends meet, he drove a taxi. Branching out, he bought a soon-to-be-bankrupt database company that was selling its whole operation for the price of its only real equity: two Xerox photocopiers worth $6,000. When Schorer inspected the facility, he noticed an old 25,000-square-foot UNIVAC computer. While the owner didn’t think it was worth much, Schorer, a hardware geek, knew it contained 24-karat-gold parts. The company also had 170 employees who had to be laid off; Schorer, though only a teenager, did so. He then hired a team to disassemble the UNIVAC and strip out the gold. “We ended up getting $67,000 or $70,000 from the gold,” he recounts. “I was well on my way at that point.”

When the computer manufacturing bubble burst in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Schorer found himself snapping up failing companies—and their real estate. He went on acquisition sprees, hoarding assets. At one point, by his estimate, the warehouse facilities for what he called his “crazy catastrophe of storage” took up a million square feet of space. He also invested in construction ventures and fast-food franchises, funneling his profits into a bottomless passion for art.

Schorer started becoming a serious collector in his early 20s, focusing initially on Chinese porcelain. He amassed and sold hundreds of pieces at auction. After a trip to Paris, he began getting into Baroque paintings, which he researched in Harvard’s libraries. (Auction houses, before the internet, mailed listings of offerings there.) In time, one sleeper led to another, even as his entrepreneurial projects snowballed. But all of them, on some level, connected back to his childhood.

Schorer’s interest in art began at age six, with a children’s book called From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In it, two young siblings run away from home and hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book treats art as something to escape into, whether from loneliness, boredom, or an unhappy family life. As a child, Schorer loved the Met—and the American Museum of Natural History, which kindled an obsession with paleontology.

This obsession reached its zenith in 2008, when Schorer spent $942,797 for the nearly complete skeleton of a 23-foot-long triceratops from North Dakota’s Badlands. A New York Times op-ed denounced the fact that a 65-million-​year-old dinosaur specimen had somehow ended up in private hands. He eventually found a home for it, in a combination gift and sale, at the Boston Museum of Science, stipulating that it be listed as having come from an “anonymous donor” and that it be named Triceratops Cliff, after his grandfather, Clifford Schorer Sr. “The name is the same, unfortunately, so people know who it is,” said Schorer, again wanting to have it both ways: seen and unseen.

At times, the dizzying extent of his exploits can seem to defy credulity. Even so, all the curators and insiders I have consulted for this story vouch for Schorer. Some mention a propensity for exaggeration or for conflating speculation with irrefutable fact. But Schorer merely seems to have figured out how the art business works. Frederick Ilchman, the Art of Europe chair at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, tells me that the institution, courtesy of Schorer, acquired three major European modernist paintings from Agnews in 2023. Ilchman characterized Schorer as a brilliant, if eccentric, risk-taker, adding, “To be a good connoisseur, you have to be eccentric and take a risk.”

Part of his fascination with sleepers—​which are, after all, bargain-priced items—seems to stem from a constitutional frugality. Kris emphasizes how Schorer’s sole overarching interest is art, which means he doesn’t care much for everything else: clothing, food, even comfort. Despite his self-evident wealth, Schorer, during my Provincetown visit, suggests we meet for dinner at 4:30 p.m. to catch the early bird special. After the waitress informs us that the restaurant has stopped offering off-hours discounts, he vows never to return. Then, when we pile into his Prius, the stereo starts playing a podcast at such a rapid rate that I can scarcely make out the words. He says he likes listening to podcasts at 2.5x speed (4x speed if the speaker has a British accent and talks slowly). Kris laments Schorer’s proclivity for watching films at double speed. “Why waste two hours on a movie,” asks Schorer, “if you can do it in one?”

When the two of them first met, Kris thought Schorer was a spy. After their second date, at the Cheesecake Factory, they walked to Schorer’s town house in downtown Boston. At the time, it contained 120 large-scale Old Masters paintings. “It was so creepy,” Kris now recalls. “It was like entering the Louvre. There were four floors of paintings. Everything was ancient.” The religious iconography on display featured a preponderance of murders and martyrdoms. “Crosses everywhere—nuns, you know?” Kris says, with a shudder. “There wasn’t an inch without a painting.”

Schorer still has many of those monumental canvases stored in warehouses. “I don’t think I owned anything made after 1900,” he adds, chuckling. “I wouldn’t let anyone clean” the town house. The bathroom had original 1851 fixtures. Velvet draperies covered the windows to keep sunlight out. The lighting scheme favored gas-burning sconces and candles. The overall effect was “Welcome to old lady land,” he beams, clearly proud of the anachronistic world he’d built.

“We shouldn’t live in the 17th century all the time,” says Kris.

Schorer disagrees. But the conversation reminds him of a line he’d written: “In the era of electric light, only the extravagant will burn tallow candles.” It is derived from the narrative section of a symphony about Thomas Edison’s life that Schorer cocomposed for the Boston Pops Orchestra that premiered in 1997. When we settle in at the glass house, he proceeds to play us the 21-minute recording. A passage about grief, he notes, is autobiographical. “I could not let my personal pain distract me,” recites the symphonic Edison. “For above all time is my enemy.” These verses reflect how Schorer has transformed the tallow of his own childhood into extravagant achievements.

“Cliff cannot rest,” Kris says, over swells of music as Edison proclaims his workaholic desire to continue exploring right until his funeral. “I think he always keeps working so hard because he’s afraid he will be poor one day—like when he was young.” (“What psychology,” counters Schorer, who points out that working on a project-by-project basis, as he does, necessarily differs from having steady income.)

Several months later, Schorer’s patience was rewarded. He received an email from the daughter of the TEFAF gallerist. Attached was the bill of sale for the Avercamp. Armed with this new lead, he determined that in 1995, the painting had gone to a prominent Dutch family that had made its fortune in footwear. They’d purchased it legally, as a work by Barent Avercamp. Schorer soon found their home on Google Earth—“a big mansion”—and started sending letters demanding the painting’s return to WAM in exchange for the amount they had originally paid at the long-ago art fair. (The owners have requested anonymity.)

At first, Schorer thought he’d simply get the Avercamp back. After all, theft is illegal; missing property ought to be returned. In the fine art market, however, what’s right isn’t always the same as what’s legal. Looted works don’t necessarily get handed over to their prior or lawful owner, as the Elgin Marbles attest. “It’s not fair that somebody gets to keep stolen art—but that’s often how it works,” says Erin Thompson, professor of art crime at the City University of New York. Certain kinds of theft were long ago legalized by colonialist powers, allowing plundered objects and resources to enrich European nations. And while some countries and jurisdictions are evolving, others are not.

Had the Avercamp been sold in America, odds are it would have already been confiscated by law enforcement. “There are huge differences between the way people in the US and in Europe approach the recovery of stolen art,” notes James Ratcliffe, general counsel at the Art Loss Register, a London organization specializing in such transactions. “In the Netherlands, even a thief can get title to a stolen artwork if they have it for long enough.” Conversely, American authorities have been aggressively enforcing restitution claims, even for decades-old cases. Last year, for example, New York’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit seized and repatriated an ancient Anatolian bronze bust that had been in WAM’s collection since 1966.

The museum’s experience with that bust would lead one to assume that the inverse would also hold true: that its own stolen goods would be returned swiftly. But Schorer’s and WAM’s legal team’s retrieval efforts soon became mired in international art-law technicalities.

First, there were the owners of the painting. Rather than acknowledge receipt of Schorer’s letters, he said, the family ignored them and lawyered up. Then, as his messages continued to go unanswered, he approached Dutch authorities, trusting that the police could seize it. To no avail. He wanted to involve Interpol, Scotland Yard, the FBI’s art squad—but, he says, none could help.

Growing antsy, he went public with the story. As reported in Artnet News and Boston magazine, Schorer threatened to initiate legal proceedings against the family if the painting was not returned within 40 days. That tactic didn’t work either, but the media attention did bring another Avercampian individual out of the woodwork: Arthur Brand, a Dutch art detective who hosts a TV show in the Netherlands about tracking down and recovering hot artworks. Sometimes described in press accounts as the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” he’d made his name finding objects like Oscar Wilde’s ring, Hitler’s horses, and a missing Van Gogh. He told Schorer he wanted to help get the Avercamp back.

Brand, having gleaned through news reports that a Dutch family had purchased the painting, contacted Schorer and offered to mediate. Because of his popular television program, he’d likely be more persuasive than Schorer. “What I do is try to get paintings back that are stolen, and which might disappear forever,” Brand tells me. He contrasts this with Schorer’s sleeper hunting, which, he points out, usually does not involve criminal spoils. The Avercamp overlaps between their respective areas of expertise—as well as their two continents’ legal realities.

Due to his status as a Dutch TV personality, Brand managed to communicate with the family. They were concerned, above all, with keeping their name out of the press. He advised them to do the moral thing and return the painting, on the condition that they not lose money on it: “If they offer you such a deal,” he counseled them, “you should accept it.”

With Brand having wrangled the family to the bargaining table, Schorer and WAM’s side offered to make them whole without allowing them to profit from the theft. This, despite the fact that the family, so Brand assures me, was well aware that their Avercamp was a real-deal Hendrick and therefore worth significantly more than what they bought it for. But they would likely face difficulties if they ever tried to sell it.

When the insurance company agreed to cooperate with the museum in order to get the painting returned, it seemed like a resolution might be close. Unfortunately, according to Schorer and Brand, the various sides then started haggling over taxes and other fees. Throughout the next year, as Schorer and Brand conveyed the fitful progress of the negotiations, I had to remind myself that a sleeper hunter, by definition, seeks value. Art is about beauty—but it’s also a big-money game. And businesspeople don’t get rich by compromising; they do so by chiseling. Developments slowed to a trickle while Schorer spoke of pushing “a very angry accelerator pedal.” Seasons passed; I often thought of the forlorn-looking scrounger in his liminal Rembrandt portrait.

Then, suddenly, on Easter Sunday 2024, I received a note saying that the two sides had come to terms. “A year after originally planned,” Schorer wrote. In the very next line, without pausing, he revealed that he was onto a new chase. “I’ve been contacted,” he went on, about “a major Rubens presumed lost in WWII.… I may drop all and go to Switzerland to see if it is real. Looks right.” He was moving on to another adventure—but he was hopeful that the Avercamp would, in the end, return to Worcester.

Regarding the other missing Stoddard paintings, Schorer says there are further morsels left on the trail that might eventually lead him to that quarry. He has started to sniff them out more doggedly. At the same time, he’s still trying to get his recently resurfaced tramp unanimously recognized as a Rembrandt, having cowritten a book with Simon Worrall on the subject, entitled The Lost Rembrandt.

He’s also begun spearheading an immense art restitution case, involving a Leonardo, several Dürers, and more than 150 other foundational works of art in the Western corpus, on behalf of a Dutch Jewish bank dismantled by the Nazi regime. Schorer’s efforts in the matter started coming to fruition this summer, when he brought to market a Flemish Baroque work that had belonged to the bank until its liquidation in 1940, only to be presented as a birthday gift, two years later, to Adolf Hitler. Schorer describes this latest challenge as “the first battle in the biggest war of my life.”

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