Results for “rembrandt”
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Robbery
In 1972 thieves entered the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through a skylight and took eighteen paintings, including a Rembrandt landscape. Almost all remain missing — Canada's largest art theft.
The Dulwich Rembrandt Theft (1966)
Rembrandt's small portrait 'Jacob de Gheyn III' was stolen from Dulwich in 1966 — the first of four thefts that earned it the nickname 'the Takeaway Rembrandt'. Each time, it came back.
The Nationalmuseum Sweden Robbery
On New Year's Eve 2000, armed men seized a Rembrandt self-portrait and two Renoirs from Stockholm's Nationalmuseum and escaped by boat, using car fires as a diversion. All three were eventually recovered.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery Theft (1961)
England's oldest public picture gallery lost a group of Old Master paintings to thieves in 1961. The works were recovered, an early sign of the gallery's recurring vulnerability.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist
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. With a current value of $1 Billion.
Tony Tetro
American forger who produced highly convincing works attributed to Dalí, Chagall, Miró, and Rembrandt. Convicted in California in the 1990s, he later drew headlines when fakes he made surfaced in a British royal residence.
Hans-Joachim Bohlmann
Between 1977 and 2006, the German serial vandal attacked more than 50 paintings, inflicting damage estimated at over 270 million Deutsche Marks (roughly €138 million). Armed not with knives or hammers, but bottles of concentrated sulfuric acid, he permanently scarred works by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Paul Klee, becoming one of the most destructive figures in the history of museum crime. Bohlmann's life was marked by severe mental illness from adolescence. After years of psychiatric treatment—including electroshock therapy, heavy medication, and even a controversial lobotomy that failed to improve his condition—his life took a tragic turn in 1977 when his wife died after falling from a window while cleaning their apartment. Bohlmann later claimed her death triggered his attacks on art. Just days after the funeral, he purchased sulfuric acid and began targeting museums. His first museum victim was Paul Klee's Golden Fish at Hamburg's Kunsthalle. Within months, museums across Germany were on edge as he moved from city to city, spraying acid directly onto paintings. He frequently aimed at the faces of portraits, seeking to inflict the greatest possible damage. Among his most devastating attacks were acid assaults on Lucas Cranach the Elder's portraits of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora, Rubens's Archduke Albrecht, several Rembrandts in Kassel, and in 1988, three masterpieces by Albrecht Dürer at Munich's Alte Pinakothek, causing an estimated €35 million in damage. Arrested repeatedly, Bohlmann served prison sentences and spent years in psychiatric hospitals, but each release was followed by new attacks. Even after authorities prohibited him from purchasing sulfuric acid, he turned to arson before eventually returning to museum vandalism. In a strange twist, Bohlmann participated in art therapy during his confinement, producing roughly 1,500 paintings over nine years. The treatment, however, did little to curb his destructive impulses. His final major attack came in 2006 at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, where he doused Bartholomeus van der Helst's monumental Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster with lighter fluid and set it ablaze. Fortunately, most of the damage was confined to the painting's varnish layer, allowing conservators to restore the work. Unlike most criminals featured in art history, Bohlmann wasn't driven by money or prestige. He wanted recognition through destruction. Every attack generated headlines, reinforced his notoriety, and forced museums to confront an unsettling reality: one determined individual with a small bottle of acid could inflict damage that centuries of history could never fully repair.
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee
Rembrandt's only known seascape, cut from its frame during the 1990 Gardner heist and still missing.
Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer
A Frans Hals painting so frequently stolen — in 1988, 2011, and 2020 — that it rivals the Dulwich Rembrandt for the title of most-stolen artwork. Recovered each time.
The Polish Rider
A Rembrandt (or workshop) equestrian portrait at the Frick Collection — the subject of theft scares and attribution battles, but never successfully stolen.
Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III
The small Rembrandt portrait from Dulwich known as 'the Takeaway Rembrandt' — stolen four times and recovered every time, earning it the record for most-frequently-stolen artwork.
Self-Portrait (etching)
A postage-stamp-sized Rembrandt self-portrait etching, the smallest of the objects taken in the 1990 Gardner heist.
Dulwich Picture Gallery
England's first purpose-built public art gallery — repeatedly targeted, most famously for a much-stolen Rembrandt.
Three Decades On, the Gardner Reward Still Stands at $10 Million
The museum reaffirms its offer as investigators mark another anniversary of the unsolved 1990 heist.
So You Stole a Masterpiece. Now What?
A Painting Under Siege
Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch' has been knifed (1911), slashed with a bread knife into dozens of zigzag cuts (1975), and sprayed with sulfuric acid (1990) — surviving all three.