

It appeared to be a mundane parcel like scores of others lovingly posted across the ocean in the run-up to the holiday season: a package labelled “art craft/toy” with a value put at $37 (£24) and the message “Happy Christmas”.

But when US customs officers examined the contents, they found a stolen Picasso painting worth at least $2.5m, which had been lost for 14 years. The 1911 Cubist masterwork, La Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser), had been registered missing from the storeroom at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2001.

The package arrived in Newark from Belgium just before Christmas last year. Sent via FedEx, it was marked Joyeux Noël (Happy Christmas). Picasso’s small oil on canvas, measuring 33cm by 46cm, was hidden inside.

The package first arrived at a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City on 17 December. The next day, it was moved on to Port Newark and was seized. The sender was marked as someone named “Robert” with an address in Belgium, according to the New York Times.

The identity of the person who sent it and the intended destination were not released. Loretta Lynch, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, filed a civil suit to return the painting to France, announcing: “A lost treasure has been found.”

She said seizure of the painting would “extract it from the grasp of the black market in stolen art so that it can be returned to its rightful owner”.

Anthony Scandiffio, a special agent of Homeland Security Investigations, which took control of the painting after customs officials flagged it up, said: “The recovery of the La Coiffeuse sends a strong message to thieves that the market to sell stolen antiquities in the United States is drying up.”

The painting, which belongs to the French national collection, was last shown in Munich in 1998. It was then placed in storage at the Pompidou Centre in Paris but when a loan request was made by another museum in 2001, staff realised it was missing and reported it to police.

After the New York discovery, it was unclear whether the astonishing find in a postal depot at the busiest time of year for parcels was random good fortune by customs or part of a special operation. So far no arrests have been reported on either side of the Atlantic.

James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel for the London-based Art Loss Register of stolen art, told the Guardian: “In our experience, we would consider this kind of discovery to be extremely rare. There must be a large number of similar parcels passing through customs every day. For this one to be spotted is either remarkably good luck – testament to the skill with which the Department of Homeland Security operate – or the result of some kind of tip-off or surveillance.”

He added: “It’s very rare indeed for a Picasso to simply turn up in the post and be spotted like this.”

In Paris, the Pompidou Centre said it hoped to get the painting back in the next few weeks. Its president, Alain Seban, said he was moved by “this happy ending” to the saga of the work’s disappearance and expressed “deep gratitude” to the customs services. He hoped to put the painting back on show to the public quickly, perhaps to coincide with a re-hanging of the modern collection at the end of May.

Picasso is the most stolen artist in the world because of his prolific output in a lengthy career, his recognisable signature and valuable works. There are almost 1,300 missing Picassos on the Art Loss Register. Many of the painter’s works have been stolen from galleries and museums across the world, raising issues about security.

In 2009 [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jun/09/picasso-sketchbook-stolen-paris], a Picasso sketchbook worth more than €8m (£5.8m) was stolen from Paris’s Picasso museum. The red sketchbook of 32 pencil-drawings from between 1917 and 1924 was believed to have been on display on the first floor in an unlocked exhibition case without an alarm.

In some cases, stolen Picassos have been quickly recovered. In 2011, a wine sommelier wearing dark glasses who walked out of a San Francisco art gallery with the 1965 Picasso pencil-drawing, Tête de Femme, under his arm, was arrested within 24 hours at a hotel. He later pleaded guilty after a further Picasso and other paintings were found at his apartment.