ROGUE’S GALLERY

Fake Frog Prince Painting Brings Down Museum’s Art Thief

The museum worker swiped valuable paintings and replaced them with forgeries, a court ruled.

A museum worker in Germany was convicted of stealing four valuable paintings and replacing them with fakes in order to sell the originals to fund a lavish lifestyle, a court ruled this month. The employee, referred to only as “S.K.,” swiped the works by early 20th century German artists from storage at the Deutsches Museum in Munich over the course of almost two years, selling three of the paintings at auction. The technical worker’s scam was only detected when an in-house appraiser checked one of the paintings—“The Frog Prince Fairy Tale” by Franz von Stuck—and realized the canvas did not match the museum’s catalog entry. S.K. was sentenced to a commuted prison term of one year and nine months and ordered to pay the approximately $63,000 he pocketed from selling the paintings.