The financial value will recover if the paintings return. The years during which scholars could not examine them, the years during which visitors could not stand in front of them, the scholarship that could not be done—those do not recover. They are simply lost, and the only remedy is that no more years accumulate.
The frames wait for the paintings to end the accumulation.
—
## What a Recovery Would Mean
Art recoveries happen. The record of stolen masterworks returned—sometimes decades after their theft—is a real record, not a hypothetical one.
In 2015, a Renoir stolen from a Baltimore home in 1951 was found at a flea market in West Virginia and returned to its rightful owners. In 2012, paintings stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004, including Edvard Munch’s *The Scream*, were recovered. In 2002, Dutch masterworks stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1991 were recovered in Egypt. Recovery is slow, often unexpected, and rarely dramatic—but it happens.
The Gardner works, in this context, are not categorically unrecoverable. They are long-missing, which is different. Long-missing things have been found before. The mechanism is usually one of a few types: a law enforcement operation that uncovers them, a criminal coming forward in exchange for reduced charges or a reward, or the ordinary circulation of property that reveals hidden things—an estate sale, a storage unit, a renovation project that opens a wall.
For the Gardner works, Kelly’s expectation—that they will eventually surface in an attic or storage unit when the criminal networks that originally controlled them have fully dissolved—reflects the third mechanism. This is not the most satisfying narrative of recovery. There is no dramatic arrest, no moment in which an investigator finally unlocks the case. It is simply the ordinary process of time producing visibility.