Daily US Times: Police in Germany have issued an appeal for information after two valuable 17th Century oil paintings were discovered dumped in a road-side skip.
The oil paintings are believed to be by Italian artist Pietro Bellotti and Dutch Samuel van Hoogstraten, police said.
Last month, a man found the paintings at a motorway service station on the A7 south of Würzburg in Bavaria.
He handed them into Cologne police and no one has yet claimed the artworks.
According to police, an initial assessment by an art expert concluded the two framed paintings were originals.
One of the oil paintings is a portrait of a boy wearing a red hat with an unknown date. Police say it was painted by Samuel van Hoogstraten, a writer and painter who lived in the Netherlands between 1627 and 1678.
The other painting is a smiling self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti, a lesser-known Italian painter who lived from 1625 to 1700.
Cologne police are appealing for anyone who recognises the artworks or who knows how they ended up in the skip to come forward.
Hoogstraten is best known for his experiments in perspective, an art technique that gives work a 3D look.
Hoogstraten was born in Dordrecht and studied under his compatriot, the famed Baroque painter Rembrandt, in the Dutch capital Amsterdam.
His treatise, Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting, published after his death, is regarded as a valuable insight into Rembrandt’s views on painting.
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