Extract: Stealing Rembrandts

On October 10, 1994, a burglar with a sledgehammer smashed a window at the Rembrandt House Museum and stole a single painting, Man with a Beard (1647). The work had once been considered a Rembrandt, but is now attributed to an unidentified student of his. Its theft occasioned this inevitable headline in the International Herald Tribune: “Rembrandt Needed a Night Watchman”. Beard made its way back four years later after being seized from an Amsterdam lawyer who was reputed to be a shady intermediary for art recovery, having been involved in a Van Gogh case as well. The lawyer was privately reprimanded, a fairly light penalty for such transgressions by Dutch historical standards. In Rembrandt’s century, the judiciary was more ruthless when dealing with theft, housebreaking, and serving as a known fence. The penalties included amputation of a hand, nose or ear, branding and scarring of the cheek, and even the gallows for repeat offenders.

Even setting aside the World War Two years, when the Nazis set their vile standards for state-sponsored art looting, the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were active times for Rembrandt-coveting house breakers. In 1930, three paintings, said at the time to be by Rembrandt, An Old Beggar, Leonardo da Vinci, and The Reformer, were part of an 18-painting haul from the Carleton House Galleries on Lower Regent Street in London. All had been put on exhibition by private owners. Some were sliced from their frames, others removed from the frames while still attached to their wooden stretchers. Scotland Yard said the burglars had duplicate keys to the gallery, took only the most expensive items, and left no fingerprints. They were never rounded up, and the works remain unaccounted for to this day.

In Montreal in October 1964, The Death of Jacob (1641), a Rembrandt drawing, was stolen from the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. Valued at $30,000, the 10-inch-by-14½-inch Old Testament depiction was pilfered from its perch between two other Rembrandts in a second-floor gallery. Police speculated that the robber had hovered near the drawing with a screwdriver and loosened its screws from its wall bit by bit, stepping back and palming his tool whenever a guard or visitor passed by. A witness said later he had seen a six-foot, 200-pound man leave the museum with what appeared to be the drawing under his arm. The museum offered no reward and the drawing seemed lost to the ages. Five years later, a break came when three men in Bar Harbor Island, Florida, Max Cohen, Seymour Jacobsen, and Harvey Cohen, were indicted for “conspiring to receive, conceal, sell and dispose of stolen property having a value in excess of $5,000”. The property was the recovered Montreal Rembrandt.

Pictured right: Rembrandt's Self-Portrait (Bridgeman)

In 1968, thieves entered the Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and stole Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Man (1660). The Eastman House was an interesting choice for a Rembrandt theft. While it is considered a museum, photography rather than painting is the focus of its collection. In fact, the stolen 30-inch-by-40-inch oil portrait, purchased by George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak, was actually the property of the University of Rochester, to which Eastman, a New York native, had willed the piece upon his death in 1932. It was loaned by the university back to the Eastman House when the Eastman opened as a museum of photography in the 1940s.

Around 7am on January 31, guards making their rounds in the Eastman House noticed the Rembrandt missing. One of them, Charles Rampick, inspected the building entrance and found the front door unlatched. Police were summoned but found no clues indentifying the thieves. Portrait of a Young Man was quite heavy. Just months before, it had been removed from the museum’s walls to be photographed. Three men were needed to assist in the operation, as the work weighed close to 200 pounds, including its frame. This is likely why investigators discovered the frame discarded by the thieves and hanging on a nearby fence. Other than this, little was left behind for investigators to pounce upon.

'The police were there to conduct surveillance on three men seated in a station wagon

Some ten months afterward, a nondescript panel truck carrying 18 law enforcement officers rolled into the airport in Plattsburgh, New York, just east of Interstate 87, as dusk settled on the Lake Champlain town. Another half-dozen cops waited on the perimeter of the airport. Prompted by information from a Canadian source, the police were there to conduct surveillance on three men seated in a station wagon awaiting the arrival of a small chartered aircraft. At about 6:30pm, the plane arrived, and the police watched for an exchange between the three men and the passenger on the aircraft. One of the three men, 39-year-old Thomas F Gordon, a self-described “import-export consultant”, approached the plane and accepted a briefcase said to hold $50,000 from a pilot. That’s all the police needed to see to launch an arrest. As Gordon made his way back to the car, investigators seized him and his cohorts, charging them with criminal possession of stolen property. The pilots of the aircraft, however, were not arrested. Investigators determined they had no knowledge of the crime and were merely being used as unwitting couriers. Police found Portrait of a Young Man secreted in the station wagon, wrapped in tissue paper within a plywood box. It was returned to the Eastman House relatively unscathed, suffering just two small, repairable scratches on the painting’s background.

A 49-year-old handyman named James Otis Denham stole Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus in 2006 from a home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where he had been hired to do work. Denham did not set any standards for craftiness. After lifting the $6,000 item, he tried to sell it for $1,500 out of the trunk of his car - to a woman he met at a nearby Torchy’s Legends Bar. She noticed that the actual owner’s name was still on a document authenticating the work. She copied this provenance and learned that the etching was stolen after calling its owner, Barbara Dorney, to doublecheck its authenticity. Police arrested Denham when he was invited to exchange the etching for the cash. “At least he was stupid, and I got it back,” says Dorney.