You may have read the fascinating story about a stolen painting that was recently recovered. If not, please read it - a great story! The website the boy in the story googled is run by MyArtClub, and it is called Stolen Fine Art.

The story behind the website really starts with Reet Herder. Reet has been a founding member of our website. In 2005 Reet let us know that she and 2 other artists had suffered a devastating loss, a theft of 17 paintings. Peter and I were shocked to hear how bad it was.

At MyArtClub.com we always like to respond to artist request for features, or listen to their business issues, and look for ways we can assist. This practice has been wonderful for both the artists and for our development as a service.

Peter and I put our heads together and figured we could host the images of stolen art as a collection. The MyArtClub site was already set up to host artist groups, so we simply leveraged that as a way to focus on this awful issue. We ask artists for a police reference number of some kind and police and artist contact information.

Harbouring Great Memories, recovered from this listing:

As you may see from the example on our form below, Reet was really the founding person involved in creating the form. Karma has a way doesn't it? She helped build a service that we host and hope it is of some use to artists, and voila – her art is the one found through the internet!

I telephoned Reet, to congratulate her on the recovery. Reet is amazed at not only the painting's recovery but the media attention! "All I did was paint it" she says. This was one of her earlier works, but she was happy with how it had turned out. It was based on a visit to Schooner Cove.

The story continues: as might be expected the painting itself was not in the best of conditions. However with luck Reet had prepared to create giclees from this art, and so offered this kind family a giclee in return which they accepted. Reet says " the giclee's colours look better".

I thanked Reet for being a long term MyArtClub artist, and especially for helping to start a service for artists, Stolen Fine Art, can now be said to be "proven effective"!!

If you have experienced theft of your art, we offer the service free to all artists, write for a submission form to us at [email protected]

There are also interesting organizations that focus on stolen fine art. You may enjoy the ARCA blog, written by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief,a Canadian based in LA, who kindly first alerted me to this story. ARCA stands for the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit organization promoting the study and research of art crime and cultural heritage protection. See her story about this here.

What has your experience been? Please add a comment to share your story!