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In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, 13 works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Guards admitted two men posing as police officers responding to a disturbance call, and the thieves bound the guards and looted the museum over the next hour.
Mar 3, 2022 · A Tantalizing Clue Emerges in the Unsolved Gardner Museum Art Heist. Boston police officers tell local media that the 1991 murder of Jimmy Marks might be linked to modern history’s biggest...
- Nora Mcgreevy
Sophie Calle. Artist Sophie Calle reflects on the theft. What is known about the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist—the single largest property theft in the world.
- 'The Concert' Johannes Vermeer. 1663-1666. This small painting, slightly more than two-feet square, was displayed back-to-back with Govaert Flinck’s “Landscape with Obelisk” on a small tabletop in the Gardner Museum’s magnificent Dutch Room.
- 'A Lady And Gentleman In Black' Rembrandt van Rijn. 1633. All of the Rembrandts in Mrs. Gardner’s collection were produced by the early 1630s, when Rembrandt was only 26 or 27 years old (though his sensitive self-portrait — which wasn’t stolen — dates from four years earlier).
- 'Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee' Rembrandt van Rijn. 1633. Four artworks to the right of the stolen "Lady And Gentleman In Black" in the Dutch Room hangs the empty frame of the most famous of the missing paintings, “Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee,” an illustration of an even more famous passage in the New Testament (Matthew, 8)
- 'Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man' Rembrandt van Rijn. 1633. This tiny etching, just 1 inch and ¾ wide by nearly 2 inches high, is one of those Rembrandt marvels.
- Nora Mcgreevy
- The thieves likely succeeded due to canny planning, luck and lax security. Wealthy American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner constructed her namesake museum out of her private, Venetian palazzo–inspired home in the hope that it would provide “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.”
- The perpetrators stole masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt. but left the most expensive painting in the building untouched. The thieves made a beeline for some of the museum’s greatest treasures, including Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only known seascape painted by Rembrandt; A Lady and Gentleman in Black, also by Rembrandt; and Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert, one of just dozens of the Dutch Old Master’s paintings to survive today.
- The FBI has named suspects in the crime, but the works remain missing. In 2013, the FBI announced that it had identified the two thieves with a “high degree of confidence.”
- Theories big and small abound, but certain answers are hard to come by. As the Guardian reports, dozens of theories ranging from conspiratorial to credible have cropped up over the years.
May 19, 2024 · The robbery is a treasure trove of surprising facts and unexpected plot twists. Here are five things that make the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and its famous theft, so interesting.
Learn About the Theft. What happened at the Gardner Museum in the early hours of March 18, 1990—the night that 13 works of art were stolen in the single largest property theft in the world? Retrace the steps of the thieves with Anthony Amore, Director of Security, and explore how the loss of these masterpieces affects how we experience ...
