(Bangkok) A 900-year-old statue displayed for 30 years at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum (Met) in New York moved into a Thai museum on Tuesday after being stolen almost 50 years ago by a famous collector.
“The Golden Boy,” a precious 129-centimeter bronze piece, was returned following a New York court action that linked it to Douglas Latchford, a British art collector and dealer indicted in 2019 for running a vast antiquities trafficking network from Southeast Asia. He died in 2020.
Exhibited from 1988 to 2023 at the Met, one of the largest museums on the planet, the statue was discovered near the Cambodian border during archaeological excavations more than 50 years ago.
Latchford allegedly smuggled her out of Thailand in 1975.
The Met returned a second 43-centimeter bronze sculpture, also linked to this collector, representing a kneeling woman praying with her hands clasped above her head.
A growing number of museums around the world have undertaken to return works that have been contested by the countries from which they originated.
“We are honored to have recovered these artifacts, which are forever in their homeland,” commented Director General of the Department of Fine Arts of Thailand Phnombootra Chandrachoti at the National Museum in Bangkok.
“However, efforts to return looted objects do not stop there,” he added to journalists.
“We intend to recover them all. »
The two statues returned to Thailand are part of a batch of 16 Khmer sculptures, including 14 returned to Cambodia by the Met, which said it was removing from its collection “all Angkorian sculptural works that the museum knows to be are associated with Latchford.
Douglas Latchford, who died aged 88 at his home in Bangkok, was widely regarded as a leading scholar of Cambodian antiquities, referenced in books on the art of the Khmer Empire.
In 2019, he was charged by New York prosecutors with smuggling looted Cambodian works and helping sell them on the international art market.
Cambodia fueled antiquities trafficking at its expense during the years of conflict and instability when the Khmer Rouge were in power, between 1975 and 1979.