what the Isabella stewart Gardner Museum heist means for museums around the world today

by Sam Dieringer Deputy Features Editor

Originally published March 15

Eighty-one minutes. On the night of March 18, 1990, 81 minutes was how long it took two thieves dressed as police officers to steal 13 of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s most prized artworks. The thieves ran away with up to $500 million worth of art, including multiple works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Degas, as well as a painting by the renowned Johannes Vermeer. Above all else, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft is, to this day, the single largest property theft in the world, with repercussions that have reverberated for decades.

Thirty-three years later, the whereabouts of the artworks remains a mystery. Will they ever be found? Who took them in the first place? How have the thieves gotten away with it for this long? For most of these questions, we may never know the answer. What we do know, however, is that the Gardner heist’s legacy lives on and continues to impact museums around the world.

Andrew McClellan, a Tufts professor of history of art and architecture who studies the Gardner Museum, vividly remembers the day of the heist.

“It was a dreadful day. It was actually my birthday. … The scale of it and the audacity of the theft were shocking, but the losses were extraordinary in the sense that the thieves stole some of the most prized objects in the collection,” McClellan said.

McClellan alluded to the fact that this heist remains puzzling due to the seemingly random nature of items stolen.

“They left even more valuable things there too. … It’s strange. It remains a peculiar theft in the sense that it seems almost random in some ways, and yet, so random that it seems targeted,” McClellan said.

Kelly Horan, deputy editor of the Ideas section of The Boston Globe, worked as senior producer and senior reporter for “Last Seen,” a joint WBUR and Boston Globe podcast on the Gardner heist. Horan attempted to explain the “randomness” of the heist through her research on past art heists in the Boston area.

Based on multiple heists in the 1970s of other paintings by the Dutch artist Rembrandt in the Boston area, she asserted that the Gardner thieves were likely commissioned to primarily steal Rembrandt paintings.

“[The Museum of Fine Arts’ Rembrandt] was used successfully as a bargaining chip for

BY BECKY POVILL

an art thief who faced doing a lot of [prison] time for another art theft that he’d committed,” Horan said. “I could see how that would activate the ‘spidey sense’ of criminals, who’d be like, ‘Oh, so Rembrandt is good to steal.’ And it’s always been my theory that the thieves were commissioned by someone else to steal the Rembrandts and that they went in there for the Rembrandts.”

As for the rest of the stolen art, Horan believes the thieves took as they pleased, including sketches by French impressionist Edgar Degas and an eagle finial from a Napoleonic flag display.

“The other things that they stole, to me, suggests that they weren’t so much being selective as freelancing and grabbing stuff that they just liked. … I really believe that one of the thieves liked the Degas sketches because he spent a lot of time at the racetracks and liked horses,” Horan said. While Horan believes the thieves stole items that drew personal intrigue, she said the nature of art theft rarely attracts thieves that steal art for pleasure. Instead, the art is “fenced,” or sold to buyers around the globe. see HEIST, page 5