Its subject is simple, yet haunting: a small bird chained by the foot to its perch. The Goldfinch, painted in the 17th century by Carel Fabritius, is among the world’s most famous works of art, thanks in part to its central place in the Pulitzer prize-winning novel of the same name, where, when stolen, it triggers a sequence of events that will affect all the characters.
The real Goldfinch – the popularity of which will only be further enhanced by the release of the much-anticipated film – has never been stolen. But audacious art heists are far from fictional, despite some of the most notorious instances appearing to have been dreamed up by Hollywood’s most inventive scriptwriters.
Today, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the world’s best-known portrait, smiles enigmatically from behind thick bulletproof glass at the Louvre in Paris, with armed guards and invisible motion sensors ensuring her safety. The Fort Knox levels of security are the result of the crime that first made the painting a star attraction.
On the morning of August 21, 1911, while the Louvre was closed, three Italian handymen slipped out of the supply closet they’d spent the night hiding in and lifted the painting from the wall. They stripped it of its frame and case, bundled it into a blanket and whisked it on to a train out of the city. When its absence was discovered, it went from being unheard of by the public to a household name.
American tycoon and art lover JP Morgan was suspected of commissioning the theft. Pablo Picasso was also questioned as a suspect. The real culprit, Vincenzo Peruggia, realised the work was too hot to sell, so he stashed it in the false bottom of a trunk in his Paris boarding house. Two years later, when he finally attempted to sell it to an art dealer in Florence, he was arrested and sentenced to just eight months in jail. The Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre, where it has remained ever since.
In 1987, Le Jardin by Henri Matisse suffered the same fate when it was stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Burglars broke through the museum’s front entrance with a sledgehammer and unscrewed the painting from the wall, escaping before guards arrived. Its whereabouts remained a mystery for 25 years, despite the thieves attempting to sell it back to the museum for exorbitant sums. In January 2013, it was finally recovered after a London-based art dealer, Charles Roberts, was offered the painting by a Polish collector.
Cezanne’s Pewter Pitcher and Fruit also vanished for more than two decades after it was stolen, along with six others, from the Massachusetts home of its American owner, Michael Bakwin, in 1978. One of the suspected thieves was subsequently shot dead by two men who came to his home to collect a poker debt, after which the artworks passed into the hands of his lawyer, Robert Mardirosian, who moved them around the globe, from Monaco to Geneva. When he tried to auction them, the Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen art, halted the sale and the Cezanne was returned to its owner. Two months after getting it back in 1999, Bakwin sold it at Sotheby’s for more than £18m. Mardirosian was eventually convicted in 2008.
One of the most ambitious heists of all, in which 20 paintings were snatched, took place at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 1991. Although the thieves made it out of the building, the paintings were all discovered 35 minutes later in an abandoned car. Sadly, three – Wheatfield With Crows, Still Life With Bible and Still Life With Fruit – were badly torn. Four men, including two museum guards, were convicted of the theft.
The Scream by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch holds the distinction of being the target of not one, but two daring thefts. Paal Enger, a former professional footballer, had already served three years in prison for stealing Munch’s The Vampire when he stole The Scream from Norway’s National Gallery in 1994. After a raid lasting 90 seconds, involving Enger and his accomplices breaking in through a window, he left a note on the wall where the painting had hung that read: “Thanks for the bad security!”
Not one to lay low, Enger announced the birth of his son in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, which read that he had arrived “med et Skrik’” – “with a scream”. A recovery operation was mounted by British experts, including Charles Hill, who posed as a representative of a Californian museum and convinced Enger’s associates that it would pay the £700,000 the painting was being ransomed for. Enger was captured and sentenced to six and a half years, while Hill recovered the painting. “I have had one or two moments of delight in my career and one of them was picking up The Scream and realising it was the real thing,” he said.
Armed men stole another version of the painting from the Munch Museum in 2004. Two years later, three men were convicted of planning the robbery, although the painting remained missing. In August 2006, police recovered it, but how it happened remains shrouded in mystery.
What all these heists have in common is their thieves’ inability to sell the work after stealing it. As Robert Wittman, who led the FBI’s art crime team, has pointed out: “When somebody steals a world-famous painting, they quickly discover it’s too famous to fence.” Hill believes there may be another reason for their crimes. “An art thief catches the disease, you see,” he said. “They are not necessarily art lovers, but they view the works as trophies.”
With the release of The Goldfinch on 27 September, you’ll be able to find out for yourself whether the film’s characters fare any better than the article’s real-world art thieves.
Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch is released nationwide on 27 September
