Stolen Grandma Moses paintings delivered to museum

Where the artworks have been all this time - and exactly who sent them back and why - are still a mystery.

"It was someone who honestly loved them and wanted to own them and enjoy them," museum curator Deborah Federhen said. "If they wanted to sell them, they would have broken them up and not kept them as a set of seven but tried to dispose of them one by one."

The brightly colored New England landscapes were stolen in 1984 from the Rose Valley, Pa., home of Margaret Carr shortly after the woman's death. She had bequeathed the paintings to the private Bennington Museum.

AP PHOTO Seven paintings by Anna Mary Robertson Moses, a.k.a. Grandma Moses, stolen in 1984 were anonymously returned to a Vermont museum yesterday.

The artworks - whose combined value was estimated by the Bennington museum at $250,000 to $500,000 - were not seen again until they arrived at the museum in February in good shape, still in their original, two-tone painted wooden frames.

Each crate contained a cryptic computer note in bright purple ink and a hard-to-read typeface. Each note, inexplicably signed "Ring Sar," lists the names and dates of the paintings and says: "Please send the attached following for a seven-year anonymous loan" - a reference, perhaps, to the seven-year statute of limitations for prosecuting the transportation of stolen property across state lines.

The museum contacted the FBI, the Pennsylvania State Police and an international registry of lost art in New York City. The New York gallery that handles Grandma Moses' estate helped identify the works.

The Pennsylvania State Police have reopened the investigation. But the museum's attempts to trace the shipper have been unsuccessful. The packages were sent by a shipping company from Quakertown, Pa., but the receipt contained a phony company name and a false fax number.

After two months in a safe, and 14 years in a place only few know of, the paintings finally hang on the walls of the Bennington Museum.

"They took the scenic route," Federhen said.

Grandma Moses, born Anna Mary Robertson, took up painting in her late 70s and lived in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., near Bennington. Ms. Carr and her sister became friends with the artist and used to visit her.

04-16-98