$7 Stolen Renoir has to be returned to museum...

The frame is what caught Martha Fuqua's, a former physical education teacher from Virginia, eyes when she found a small napkin sized painting at a flea market in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in 2009. Despite the name plate at the bottom of the frame that said the words 'Renoir 1841-1919'. She stored the Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting garbage bag in her house for the next 2 1/2 years.

The 1879 painting titled 'Paysage Bords de Seine' (which is French for 'Landscape on the Banks of the Seine' was actually stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in November 16/17 1951. It wasn't until Fuqua's mother Marcia, who was an art teacher and an artist, told her to get the piece appraised in the Summer of 2012 (which the piece was estimated at $75,000 to $100,000) that got the attention of the BMA. The FBI seized the piece while legal proceedings were occurring. Fuqua believes that the painting should be returned to her because "she was unaware of it having been stolen or of it being genuine." The FBI claim that the piece is actually worth $22,000.

The judge ultimately ruled last week that the paintings ownership can not be claimed by Fuqua since the painting was stolen from the museum. The piece was originally the property of Saidie May, an art collector and one of the leading benefactors of the BMA. Her then husband Herbert bought the painting in 1926 while in Paris from the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery; May later loaned the piece to the museum in 1937. When May died in May of 1951, she bequeathed the collection to the museum and was stolen while being processed legally.