Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft (1997): Empty frames as fixture

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft On 18 March 1990 thirteen works vanished from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Empty frames still hang; the FBI reward stands and the case remains unsolved. In the early hours of 18 March 1990, the day after St Patrick's Day, thirteen works left the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston's Fenway. The haul included Johannes Vermeer's The Concert, Rembrandt van Rijn's only known seascape The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a second Rembrandt oil, a Rembrandt etching, Édouard Manet's Chez Tortoni, five Edgar Degas works on paper, a Govaert Flinck landscape, a Chinese bronze gu and a bronze eagle finial from a Napoleonic flag.

The museum opened in 1903 as Isabella Stewart Gardner's Venetian-style palace. Her 1924 will required that the collection stay as she arranged it. After the theft the empty frames were left on the walls of the Dutch Room and nearby galleries — a curatorial decision that became the public face of the unsolved file. The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a case that is still open more than three decades later.

In 2013 the FBI said it believed it had identified the thieves as members of a New England organised-crime group and that the works had moved through organised-crime circles. No painting has been recovered. The museum's reward, raised to $10 million in 2017 for information leading to the return of all thirteen works in good condition, still stands. Possessing the stolen objects remains a federal crime even though the original theft's statute of limitations has run.