[MSN] MEMBERS of a British film company have been questioned about the disappearance of an 18th-century portrait from one of its sets.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Wednesday, May 10, 2006 

Art vanishes from film set 

MEMBERS of a British film company have been questioned about the disappearance of an 18th-century portrait from one of its sets.

The €75,000 painting depicting the family of Richard Chapell Whaley disappeared from Newman House on St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin — one of the locations for Becoming Jane, a biopic of author Jane Austen.

The portrait had been on loan from the Whaley family to University College Dublin, which owns Newman house, when it mysteriously vanished earlier this month.

Gardaí have interviewed the filmmakers about the disappearance although it is not believed they were shooting in the room from which the portrait vanished. They have questioned everyone who had access to the building at the time of the theft.

The work, created in wax, is very fragile and those in art circles have been asked to help with its recovery.

Galleries and auction houses have been told to be on alert for it. It is still unclear why the thieves targeted this painting and ignored other expensive works.

After a slew of Hollywood adaptations of her famous novels, Austen herself comes under the spotlight in the film.

It charts the doomed romance between 20-year-old Austen and Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy. The little-known tale of thwarted love is believed to have inspired Austen’s later romantic works with Lefroy forming the basis for some of the male characters in her classic novel Pride and Prejudice. 

http://www.irishpost.co.uk/