It’s hard to write a second In Memoriam in less than one year for someone who spent a goodly part of their life dedicated to the recovery of stolen art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the first days after Charles Hill’s death, on Saturday, February 20th, words completely eluded me. Trying to think of what I could write or should write, and knowing a man’s successes are not a sum of his career, I also thought to his family trying to cope with his unexpected loss. These are the people who knew Charley, not as a respected Detective Chief Inspector or private investigator, but by the more important titles he held: Father and Husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In writing this goodbye, I mulled over some of the conversations Charley and I had over the years, most of which occurred in letters that often made me laugh out loud for their wit and sarcasm, doled out in equal measure. More rarely, when our paths would cross in Rome or in England, I was fortunate enough to listen to his soft-spoken quips about art as currency in the underworld, about clan funerals in Tullamore, County Offaly, or his work with the Historic Houses Association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember one conversation seven years ago almost to the day when Charley was doing what Charley loved, chasing a pair of picturesque Venetian scenes by the 18th-century Italian painter Francesco Lazzaro Guardi. These two landscape paintings depicting Venice, really bothered him, as they are the last of eighteen artworks stolen by Dublin gangster Martin Cahill’s gang during a 1986 burglary at Russborough House, that remain missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in 1993 Hill had already worked on the multicountry investigation that recovered Goya\u2019s Do\u00f1a Antonia Z\u00e1rate, Gabriel Metsu\u2019s Man Writing a Letter, Antione Vestier\u2019s Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe and Johannes Vermeer\u2019s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, taken from the same stately Irish home. Although the Vermeer pleased Charley the most, perhaps because it was one of just two Vermeers in private collections, (the second is owned by Queen Elizabeth II), it was the two Guardi paintings that remained outstanding that prevented him from closing the Russborough House case with satisfaction. For the paintings already recovered, Hill had posed as a dapper, if not dubious, art dealer claiming to have Arab buyers lined up to purchase the stolen paintings. To bring them home, he met with the underworld accomplices alone in a multi-storey car park at the Antwerp airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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NB: His friends called him Charley, never Charles and certainly not Charlie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n