Next Thing You Know, The Scream Will Turn Up On eBay

“The folks at [Germany’s] Pirmasens Museum had long given up hope that a cache of paintings by that city’s most famous 19th-century painter, Heinrich Burkel, would ever be found… Then this fall Heike Wittmer, the museum’s director and archivist, saw what looked like three of the missing Burkels on a Web site advertising an art auction in Concordville, Pa., outside Philadelphia. Wittmer contacted cultural officers in the German government, who in turn contacted the FBI’s new Art Crime Team… The paintings, valued at about $125,000, found their way in the 1960s to a New Jersey man who bequeathed them to his daughter about 20 years later.”