Connecticut man indicted for stealing Courbet painting

A Connecticut man accused of stealing a Gustave Courbet painting from Matthiesen Gallery in New York has been indicted by a federal grand jury.

Thomas Doyle, 68, was arrested in Norwalk on Thursday and has been charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years.

Prosecutors accused Doyle of scheming for more than two years to defraud Matthiesen Gallery, which was not identified in the indictment, out of Courbet’s Mother and Child on a Hammock. Matthiesen Gallery identified itself last month as the gallery when it filed a federal lawsuit against Doyle.

Doyle first introduced himself to Patrick Matthiesen in a December 2022 email, allegedly presenting himself as also being in the art trade. In later conversations over email and WhatsApp, he allegedly pretended to manage the “art side” of a family trust with assets worth billions of dollars, according to prosecutors.

In June 2024, Matthiesen agreed to let Doyle take custody of the Courbet painting to show it to a potential buyer. The next month, Doyle allegedly told the dealer he had found a buyer and Matthiesen authorized Doyle to sell it on his behalf for $550,000.

Instead, Doyle allegedly had the painting delivered to his business partner, Shalva Sarukhanishvili, and fabricated a false provenance for the work. Sarukhanishvili then sold it to Jill Newhouse Gallery for $115,000 in early October 2024, which wired payment to Doyle’s alleged associate. Sarukhanishvili then paid Doyle $109,250.

“Doyle never remitted to [Matthiesen] any proceeds from the sale,” prosecutors said. “By February 2025, Doyle had spent all the proceeds from the sale of the Hammock on personal expenses and his own debts.”

Prosecutors said that Doyle later blamed his failure to pay Matthiesen on the purported buyer, who he falsely said had not yet paid. In March, he confessed to Matthiesen that he had “betrayed” and “lied” to him about the painting.

Matthiesen’s civil lawsuit also names Jill Newhouse Gallery and Landau as defendants. Attorneys for the gallery and Landau called the claims against them meritless in comments to ARTnews after the lawsuit was filed.

In the criminal case, prosecutors noted that Doyle previously pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in 2011 for orchestrating the fraudulent purchase of Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Portrait of a Girl.

During his sentencing in that case, The New York Times reported that Judge Colleen McMahon noted that Doyle had 11 previous convictions and called him a “career criminal by any definition of the term.” He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Among those prior convictions, Doyle also spent more than two years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2007 to stealing a bronze sculpture of a nude dancer from an art collector.

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