In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum after claiming to respond to a disturbance. They restrained the guards and stole 13 works, including Vermeer's "The Concert," Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee," works by Degas and Manet, and a Napoleonic eagle finial. The Gardner Museum's own account describes the breach of protocol and the thieves' movement through the galleries, while the Wikipedia extract summarizes the theft's scale and continuing unresolved status. The case became one of the most consequential art crimes in modern museum history because the works remain missing and the empty frames are preserved in the galleries.
The theft permanently changed museum-security discourse and left some of the world's most famous unrecovered artworks missing.
