Tuesday 24 March 2020

Keeping To An Arts Theme,

here are a few that you will not be seeing in real life,


above Édouard Manet, “Chez Tortoni” (C. 1875), oil on canvas (Courtesy the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), on the morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as policemen entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and walked away with 13 masterpieces worth half of a billion dollars. Three decades after, it remains the largest unsolved art heist in history,it took only 81 minutes for the thieves to lift works by Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Jan van Eyck, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. Since then, attempts to capture the culprits have all failed, and now, the museum is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the stolen artwork. 

a separate reward of $100,000 is being offered for the return of Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s Napoleonic “Eagle Finial” (1813-1814), as the empty frames still hang on the Gardner’s walls, the British art and antique shipping company PACK & SEND is marking the 30th anniversary of the heist with a list of the 40 most important stolen or missing pieces of art, according to the company, the missing artworks have a combined value of nearly $1 billion,


Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” (1633), oil on canvas (Courtesy the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), according to reports, over 50,000 thefts occur each year, fuelling a black market business estimated at $6 billion. But only 10% percent of stolen artworks are ever recovered, as Newsweek reported in 2014. That, in part, is due to understaffed law enforcement agencies: The FBI has only 20 special agents dedicated to art theft and the US And the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit in the United Kingdom only has three officers (as of 2017), so when hopefully this crisis is over, you can keep an eye out for any of the 40 works cropping up in a charity shop near you, well you never know?


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