Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft : A palace built to stay still · 428

The Gardner theft is the largest unsolved art theft on the United States public record: a named list of works, empty frames, an FBI file and no courtroom ending. The Concert is one of only about three dozen paintings securely given to Vermeer. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is Rembrandt's only seascape. Together with A Lady and Gentleman in Black and a small Rembrandt self-portrait etching, they made the Dutch Room the centre of the loss. Manet's Chez Tortoni was taken from the Blue Room.

The Degas group was works on paper, not the museum's most famous oils. The Shang-dynasty or later Chinese gu and the flag finial show that the take was not a single-school shopping list. Insurance did not replace the objects: Gardner's will and the museum's practice treat the collection as a fixed installation, not a liquid inventory.

Boston papers dated the event to a holiday weekend when the Fenway was still loud from St Patrick's celebrations. Two men gained entry after presenting themselves as police officers answering a disturbance. This page does not reconstruct how they moved through the galleries. The public record is what was missing at dawn and what the night watch later told investigators.