US Returns to Harvard U a Censer Stolen 35 Years Ago

choi

Geoff Edgers, End of a 35-Year Hunt; Global effort recovers $1.5m jade piece stolen from Harvard in 1979 (front-page top article). Boston Globe, Jan 22, 2014.
www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/0 ... cx95mN5N/story.html

Quote:

(a) "The object, donated to the museum in 1942, disappeared just after Thanksgiving 1979. Someone forced open a display case [at Harvard's Fogg Museum] to steal it, according to reports at the time. It remained out of the public eye until 2009, when it popped up at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

(b) "The [Federal] investigators determined that the object was moved to the Midwest after being taken from the Fogg, and they say it probably remained there for decades before being smuggled to South Korea. Next, the jade was brought to Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

"The object was being prepared for a fall 2009 Sotheby’s auction at a starting price of $500,000, but the private seller did not provide any documentation about the work’s ownership history.

"That led Sotheby’s to run the censer through the Art Loss Register of London, which maintains an international database of more than 360,000 stolen, looted, disputed, or missing works from around the world.


Note:
(a) "the shimmering green jade censer, or incense burner, is from the Qing Dynasty"

censer (n): "a vessel for burning incense; especially :  a covered incense burner swung on chains in a religious ritual"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censer
(an illustration)
(b)
(i) Harvard: "The Fogg Museum is Harvard’s oldest art museum." Harvard has two additional art museums.
(ii) Fogg Museum
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogg_Museum

, whose n 2 quote
Ken Gewertz, Color, Form, Action and Teaching. Harvard Gazette (a campus newspaper), Apr 4, 2002
news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/04.04/16-fogg.html
("The first Fogg Museum, known as Hunt Hall, was built in 1893 and demolished in 1974 to make way for Canaday. The 'new' Fogg was built in 1925 where the home of Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz once stood — the original Agassiz neighborhood. The building is named for William Hayes Fogg, a Maine merchant who was born in 1817, left school at 14, and grew rich in the China trade. After he died in 1884, his widow, Elizabeth, left $200,000 and the couple's Asian art collection to Harvard")
(A) Canaday. Harvard College Freshman Dean's Office, undated (under the heading Freshman Dorms)
www.fdo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb. ... name=Dorms_Oak.html
("Canaday, which houses 255 students, is Harvard’s newest and largest freshman dorm as well as one of the most conveniently located in the entire Yard")
(B) Canaday is a last name: "Americanized form of Irish–Scottish Kennedy"
(C) The northern English surname Fogg: "from Middle English fogge ‘aftermath,’ ie grass left to grow after the hay has been cut, also applied to long grass in a water meadow. * * * Modern English fog ‘thick mist’ is first attested in the 16th century and is unlikely to be the source for a surname."
(D) fog (n; probably back-formation from foggy; First Known Use 1544)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fog
(E) aftermath (n; after + math (mowing, crop); First Known Use 1523):
"a second-growth crop —called also rowen"
First Known Use: 1523
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aftermath