The paintings share real estate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” its “Most Wanted Terrorists” and the National Sex Offender Public Registry. In fact, when the F.B.I. posted a detailed listing of 137 artworks of fuzzy provenance from the collection of the late William M. V. Kingsland on Monday, the case had top billing on the department’s home page.

“Stolen Art Uncovered: Is It Yours?” read the headline. And the teaser: “In 2006, a treasure trove of art  some of it stolen  was found in a New York apartment. The search is on for the rightful owners.”

Actually, the search has been on for almost two years  though complications have conspired to slow things down, including a) the difficulty of tracking down the rightful owners of works that, if they were stolen at all, were probably stolen about 40 years ago, b) the fact that the likely perpetrator of the alleged thefts is dead, and c) the fact that few of the rightful owners appear to know or care that the artworks have turned up in this particular collection.

The curious case of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, a threadbare eccentric and an amateur genealogist of the Upper East Side, began in the summer of 2006, when, a few months after he died (at the age of either 58 or 62), it was discovered that his birth name was Melvyn Kohn, that he resided not on Fifth Avenue but in a small apartment on East 72nd Street, and that he had not  counter to his claims  attended Groton or Harvard, nor had he once been married to a French royal.