A thousand ducats to bring back a painting: Johann Georg Worhatz deemed the proposition admirable. He knew well where the canvas lay. He had stolen it himself.
In Dresden, on the twenty-second day of October, 1788, it was discovered that the electoral gallery had lost its celebrated Magdalen—then ascribed to the hand of Correggio—together with two lesser paintings. The first was set in a frame of silver, lavishly embellished with precious gems. A few years prior, the state had turned away an offer of eighty thousand thalers for its purchase. Now it lay concealed in the lodging of a former shoemaker who cultivated dye-plants and sought the means to expand his trade. In its narrative of the larceny, the New Pitaval traces this man’s career from his earliest ventures to the single orthographic error that was to deliver him to the judges.
The Shoemaker Who Would Be Rich
Worhatz was born in Dresden in 1750, the son of a soldier. His schooling concluded, he was apprenticed to the cordwainer’s craft, travelled as a journeyman, and ultimately established himself as a master at Brunswick. In this calling, fortune favoured him. He was wont to boast of having shod a great part of the University of Helmstedt, employing as many as eight workmen beneath his roof. His affairs might easily have prospered without recourse to palaces, galleries, or housebreaking. Yet he was not content.
In 1778, after making the acquaintance of a certain Herr von Ponickau, he returned to Dresden, took a wife, and abandoned his lasts for husbandry. His enterprise held genuine appeal: he proposed to cultivate madder on a grand scale, the root of which furnished an indispensable dye. He possessed the art of presenting his trials as a work of public utility. A plot of ground near the Neustadt was granted him, accompanied by pecuniary subventions from the treasury. The plantations flourished; neighbouring proprietors engaged him to lay out similar plots upon their own estates. He presently ventured into the cultivation of cochineal. The chronicle readily concedes that his undertakings displayed both industry and ingenuity.
Yet the returns lagged far behind his schemes. Worhatz sought to extend his fields, to establish a manufactory in Bohemia, and to transform himself without delay from an enterprising planter into a man of fortune. His expenses and his debts grew in equal measure. He soon began to supply from other quarters the gold his plantations failed to yield. In the princely residences of the capital, he discovered furniture, costly stuffs, and plate. The Zwinger became the theatre of his nocturnal incursions. He carried off precious plate, but also window hangings; the booty had no need to be a masterpiece, provided it commanded a price.
His meaner thefts brought him his first taste of the law. In 1784 and 1785, according to the accounting of the chronicle, he made off with sixty-three beehives across the surrounding countryside. A portion of these he sold back to the peasantry, only to steal them anew. Such constant circulation ended by arousing suspicion. Apprehended and brought to trial, he was sentenced to ten years’ confinement. Sundry restitutions later procured a reduction of his term to four years.
The value placed upon his agricultural experiments had nevertheless earned him unusual indulgence during the proceedings. Loath to see his madder wither, the court left him at liberty upon his recognisance. Worhatz continued to steal. Silver ewers and basins vanished from the Zwinger; from the castle of Moritzburg he carried away costly stuffs and a timepiece. It was no longer a question of saving a venture through an isolated expedient; theft had become his steady occupation.
Three Paintings and No Buyer
Whilst visiting the electoral gallery, Worhatz had listened attentively to the attendants guiding foreign travellers before the works of art. He committed to memory those paintings extolled as the most precious. On the night of October 21 to 22, 1788, he penetrated the building—then situated upon the Neumarkt—despite the presence of a sentry upon the square. The chronicle records a night of storm and rain, which shielded his entry. He departed with the Magdalen, whose frame had first caught his eye, the Judgment of Paris by Van der Werff, and an old man’s head by Seybold.
At his lodging, the paintings were at first thrust into an empty beehive. Their vaunted worth offered no immediate solace to their new possessor. Melted silver might easily be turned into coin without preserving the contour of a princely ewer; a famous painting, by contrast, carried with it its own notoriety and the hue and cry of the police. Worhatz was later to declare that he had hoped to dispatch the canvases to Holland, sell them there, and invest the proceeds in a vast madder plantation on an estate in Bohemia. The plan remained mere talk; he lacked any market for such wares.
The reward proclaimed for the recovery of the treasures suggested another path. The authorities offered a thousand ducats, hinting that they would even shield the culprit’s name from public infamy if the canvases were safely returned. Worhatz, who had returned to the gallery to observe the sensation created by his crime, resolved to step forward obliquely as the man capable of recovering them. Retaining the Magdalen as a pledge, he deposited the two remaining canvases near the Catholic church one evening, accompanied by a letter. In it, he designated the hour and place where the thousand ducats were to be paid in exchange for the final painting.
A night watchman discovered the paintings and the missive. A box was duly deposited at the appointed station. Yet it contained only a promissory note, not the gold coin. To collect the sum, the bearer would have had to show his face. Worhatz took fright and retained the canvas. He had sought to pocket the bounty without ever meeting those who pledged it; the magistrates had sought to recover the painting without relinquishing the hunt. The box had satisfied neither party.
A Letter Too Many
There remained the ransom note. It was submitted to various officials, until one reader believed he recognized the script and a singular orthographic habit. The writer had spelt the word “Kurvürst” with a v, whereas the title of the Elector strictly demanded an f. This peculiarity awakened the memory of certain financial vouchers. Worhatz had received advances from the electoral treasury for his agricultural schemes and had signed the corresponding receipts. These acquittances were brought out and compared with the ransom demand. The hand and the blunder agreed in every stroke.
Six weeks after the burglary, Worhatz was apprehended. He denied everything at first, then conceded that he possessed some knowledge of the matter, while stoutly maintaining he had taken no part in the break-in. He asserted that the Magdalen was buried in a wood, and led the investigators on a wild goose chase for an entire day in search of a hiding place he claimed he could no longer find. While they searched fruitlessly among the trees, the painting lay safe within his own dwelling. A second and more rigorous search discovered it beneath a loose floorboard over the hearth.
Confronted with the recovered canvas, Worhatz confessed to this theft and several others. Not every larceny laid to his charge could be legally established. For those offenses proved against him, he was condemned to ten additional years of hard labour, added to the four already outstanding, preceded by public exposure in the pillory. Even at the expiration of his sentence, his release was to remain subject to the pleasure of the court. He was conducted to the house of correction at Zwickau on November 16, 1789. The chronicle discovers no certain trace of his ever walking forth a free man.
The Magdalen was restored to her place in the gallery. To unmask the man who had concealed her, there had been no need of a connoisseur capable of authenticating Correggio, nor of an illicit broker willing to purchase the prize. An attentive clerk had merely marked a misplaced consonant. The man who had sought to build his fortune upon an incomparable masterpiece had undone himself by a childish error he had already traced upon his public receipts.