The Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist
Thirteen works, empty frames, and a mystery unsolved after three decades
Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
In the early hours after St. Patrick's Day 1990, two men dressed as police officers talked their way into the Gardner Museum and left with thirteen works of art. It remains the largest unsolved property theft in history.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the buzzer at a side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming to be responding to a disturbance. The lone guard let them in — a violation of protocol. Within minutes the thieves had handcuffed both night guards in the basement.
Over eighty-one minutes they moved through the galleries, cutting Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and other canvases from their frames. Among the thirteen objects taken were Vermeer's The Concert, works by Degas and Manet, and a Chinese bronze beaker. The total value has been estimated at half a billion dollars.
No arrests have ever been made, and not one object has been recovered. The FBI has stated it believes it knows the identity of the thieves — associates of a criminal organization — but the trail of the artworks themselves has gone cold. A standing reward of ten million dollars remains on offer.
By the terms of Isabella Stewart Gardner's will, the museum's arrangement cannot be altered. And so the empty frames still hang, exactly where they hung, a permanent memorial to absence and an open invitation for the works to come home.