Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft — Thirteen works taken · 162

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.

The museum closed for a short period, then reopened with the frames still in place. Ulrich Boser, Stephen Kurkjian and later FBI briefings became the English-language spine of the story. The Boston Globe treated the theft as a local wound; national magazines treated it as the American art crime.