Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Episode 45: The Gardner Heist, Part II
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SPEAKER_01Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay. How you doing? And I have my PhD in art history. Something that I put to use on this podcast where I tell you stuff about all kinds of things. So for all of those people out there who once asked, What the heck are you gonna do with a degree in art history? I bet that you are feeling pretty darn silly right now. What was that? You don't feel silly at all? Yeah, that's fair. Thank you for joining me for episode 45, which is part two of my coverage of the most requested topic that I get from listeners: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist. Now, this episode, episode 45, is obviously a follow-up to episode 44, which covered the heist, its aftermath, its protagonists, and its potential culprits. That's why I named it Everything But the Art. This episode is all about the art, nothing but the art, so help us God. And let me tell you, we might need that help from the Almighty, because this episode is long. It's so long. I know that I've said that for the past four episodes, but this one is going to be super sized. I will talk a little bit more about why that is on the other side of the introduction. But for those of you who are a little daunted by the length, I will be providing timestamps in the description of the episode that make it easier to either break it into more digestible pieces or listen to the parts that interest you most. Whether you listen to 15 minutes or the entire probably three hours, I record this at the top, so there's really no way of knowing. I do hope that if you like what you hear, you'll consider leaving the podcast a rating or a review wherever you listen. And for those who want to show a different kind of appreciation, you can now buy me a coffee, which is to say, send a few dollars my way. I only just started this in the last episode, and I have been absolutely floored by people's generosity. And if you have given one dollar or many more dollars, I am so very grateful. So thank you. Without further ado, let's get straight to it. The part where I tell you stuff about a rather unique collection of objects that despite being the target of one of the greatest art heists in modern history, the public really doesn't know all that much about. We're going to change that here. In the Gardner Heist Part 2, The Stolen Works, from the Concerts to the Coup. The reporter had been in the stranger's car for hours, his nerves jangling with a strange mix of excitement and fear as the wheels covered mile after mile in the darkest hours of the night. While he did not know his driver, the reporter did know the source who had arranged for this particular trip. He ran with a rough crowd, one that often overlapped with some of Boston's most hardened criminals. The reporter tried to focus on what might await him at his unknown destination. But he couldn't ignore the question that had been scratching at the back of his mind ever since he had climbed into the Blue Crown Victoria some hours before. Had there ever been a body in the trunk? Might there be in the future? Contemplating the answers to those questions was enough to make a man's palms sweat. Finally, the car pulled up alongside a warehouse, one that the reporter would later describe as barren and forsaken. It was two in the morning, yet across the street, figures prowled in the shadows outside of a low-income housing unit. The reporter's pulse skittered as a woman approached the car. The driver cracked the window. He skipped a greeting in favor of three simple words. Billy sent us. It was as good as open sesame. The reporter was soon standing outside of the warehouse, watching with growing unease as the driver pulled on a set of rubber gloves. But the reporter knew that there was no going back, and so he followed the driver into the warehouse. It was important to stay close, as they only had one flashlight between them. The ceiling of the lockup was low, requiring the reporter to duck as he followed the driver through the echoing dark up four flights of stairs. They emerged into a hallway lined with padlocked metal doors. The driver led the reporter down, stopping at a grated metal door that was no more or less extraordinary than any of the others. As the rested doors screeched open, the reporter tried to commit every second to memory. Even with the flashlight, it was too dark to see virtually anything except the plastic bins on wheels that dominated the floor space. The driver reached into one of those bins, and after a few tries, he selected an oversized cardboard tube. Despite his clear urgency to get in and get out, the driver was careful as he removed one of the airtight caps from the cardboard tube. He was even gentler as he extracted the contents within. It was a roll of canvas, one that the driver started to unfurl. The reporter watched, stunned, as each new inch of the painted surface was revealed. Even in the darkness, the image was beautiful. It showed a wooden boat being thrashed by the sea. The reporter had only seconds to convey it to memory before the driver concentrated the beam of light on one detail, the artist's signature, which he painted as if carved into the wood of the boat's rudder. Job done, the driver started to re-roll the canvas. Once the painting was safely back in its tube, the driver shined the flashlight into one of the plastic bins. There, the reporter saw a handful of other cardboard tubes of varying sizes. The driver simply said, That's the rest of them. As they emerged from the warehouse just minutes later, the reporter once again checked his watch. It was 2.15. They had been inside the warehouse for less than a quarter of an hour. The driver did not give the reporter a ride home, leaving him instead to flag down a rare cab milling about the area. Relief and regret flooded the reporter in equal measure as the cab pulled away from the curb. He knew exactly what he was leaving behind, but a deal was a deal, and there was no time to waste. The reporter took out his pocket notepad and pen, and there, in the back of that cab, he started to write. The first of those articles dropped in August of 1997, a week to the day after Mashberg's private viewing in that disgusting, Godforsaken warehouse. The newspaper that published it, the Boston Herald, was not subtle with this story. From some of the stuff I've heard, I don't think the Boston Herald like did subtlety back then. I don't know. That's just what I've what I've seen. I think it's got a bit better uh in recent decades. And now that I say that out loud, I have to remember to cancel my subscription to the Boston Herald because uh I'm done with this topic now, and I don't live in Boston. So future self, remember to do that. The Boston Herald declared on the front page in massive bolded capital letters, we've seen it. They did so above a reproduction of Rembrandt Van Rijn's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the very painting that Mashberg believes that he saw in that warehouse. When this story dropped, it had been over seven years since the heist at the Gardner Museum, the one that saw 13 precious works of art seemingly disappear as if into thin air, leaving in their wake empty frames, shattered glass, and broken dreams. But 1997 was a year of hope. The story that appeared in the Herald was just one of a series of events in that year that gave so many people real hope that maybe, just maybe, the Gardner Works might be coming home. But as they say in Ted Lasso, and I am sure other places as well, it's the hope that kills you. The Gardner Works did not return in 1997, or any year thereafter. Many, myself included, are more familiar with the empty frames and spaces that those works left behind rather than the works themselves. That is for a reason, because no one really talks about the 13 works stolen that night in March of 1990. And when they do, it's usually a cursory, surface-level, even reductive conversation. People simply say that the works were incredibly precious and valuable, which they are, but that alone is not enough for understanding. Even the Gardner works that do get mentioned most often, Storm on the Sea of Galilee and The Concert, don't receive that much actual attention. Very few people could tell you anything about them apart from the information that is repeated, like some kind of tagline. Rembrandt's only seascape, one of only 35 vermeers. But really, they're just telling you something you've already heard. It is the ultimate irony. The fact that the stolen works that everyone wants back so desperately are the thing that gets the least amount of coverage. But hey, I guess that's true crime for you. No one ever pays much attention to the victims. I'm not alone in recognizing this. Many of you who requested this as a topic specifically requested that I talk about the artworks themselves because no one else really has. That is, of course, until now. For this episode, I am going to walk you through all 13 works of art stolen during the Gardner Museum heist. They don't all get equal time, but I do talk about every one of them for probably at least 10 minutes, if not much longer. That is one of the reasons why it took so long for me to make this episode. Now I know, I know, I say that all the time. There's always a reason that the episode takes longer than expected. But this time it was the results of a complete rethinking and rewriting of how I approached that discussion. I also went through and included much more detail than I originally intended. There has also been some unexpected but very welcome, like adult life stuff that has happened that required a significant amount of my time, but was totally worth it. Because in two weeks I get to move home to Wisconsin, which is where I'm from. Despite the delay, I hope that you enjoy the episode and that it was worth the wait, because this one almost killed me. At one point, as the word count was ballooning and my free time was shrinking, I even considered doing a bunch of mini sodes. But I decided to cut the difference and do an entire, incredibly long episode that is essentially a bunch of mini-sodes stitched together. My rationale is that every one of these 13 works deserves its time to shine and for its story to be told. But keeping those stories bundled honors the fact that these works were taken together and represent a very strange, largely uncohesive group of objects. I also hope that in packaging all of this together, it encourages you to stay to learn about all of the Gardner works rather than just the few that get the most attention. Though I totally get it if that's all you're here for. And I have to say, I'm going out in a limb here. I'm being brave. This might be my favorite episode I have ever made. It embodies exactly what I have been trying to do with this podcast for seven and a half years, which is to introduce both myself and all of you to a wide variety of artworks from different places and times, all while telling my favorite thing in the whole world stories. This episode, my friends, contains so many stories. Arguably too many stories. Is there any such thing? Yes. This is exhibit A. But we are not going to acknowledge that. Instead, we are going to take an approximately three-hour tour through this inexplicably odd Baker's dozen of stolen works. Before we depart, I must ask that you please keep your arms and legs inside the tour bus at all times. Stuff about things in Art History Podcast cannot be held liable for any injuries received or lives lost. We can assure you that help is not on the way. Those legal disclaimers given, your comfort and enjoyment are, of course, our top priority. Please do enjoy the ride, which is departing here in three, two, one. Let's fan go. She had arrived at the Hotel Drou in the early afternoon, with two men in tow and one on the way. Each one of them would have a vital role to play in the day's activities. There was the woman's artist friend, Ralph Curtis, who was there for moral support. There was her French agent, Fernand Robert, who would be absolutely vital if this day were to be the success that the woman not only expected, but demanded. Finally, there was the woman's husband, Jack. He was the true perfect accomplice. In addition to being filthy rich, the man had the exact characteristic that she required most: the inability to tell his wife no. And so he and his pocketbook accompanied her to the hotel. It was Monday, December 5th. The year was 1892, and the woman had a date, if not with destiny, then at the very least with something Dutch. The 59 paintings up for auction had once belonged to a now deceased French art critic whose collection rivaled that of some small museums. The woman was determined to make at least one of them hers. She was particularly interested in a group of five paintings by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, who just a few decades ago had been a little known artist from the annals of history. The deceased man, whose works were now up for auction, had almost single-handedly resurrected the artist's reputation and collected several of his works along the way. One in particular caught the woman's attention, a modest sized oil painting of an interior bathed in light, one occupied by three figures: a woman in profile, a man with his back to the viewer, and a woman standing to the right, holding a book in one hand and gesturing with the other as she opened her mouth to sing. Each of the painted women wore pearl earrings that glinted in the soft light for which the artist was so well known. The woman had always loved pearls, almost as much as she loved music and art. Needless to say, she was determined to have the painting. But there was one problem. No women were allowed in the auction hall. But if this woman knew one thing, it was this. Where there was a will, there was a way. The woman had a plan. Now all it had to do was work. Banished to the periphery, the woman sat outside one of the sales room doors, in clear view of her agent Robert. She had a handkerchief at the ready. When a lot came up on which she wanted to bid, she held the handkerchief to her mouth, lowering it only when the bids exceeded what she was willing or perhaps able to pay. It was a simple system, one that should work. But in auctions, things moved quickly. They had to be quicker. There's no knowing what was going through the woman's mind as bidding on lot 31 started. But whatever she was thinking, she kept the handkerchief resolutely over her lips. Even as the bidding ventured past 10,000 francs, 15,000 francs, 20,000 francs. From what she could glean, there were two other bidders in the mix. Like her agent, they too were bidding on behalf of their institutions. One represented the National Gallery of London, and the other the Louvre. Both wanted this painting, but they had long ago established a truce. If caught in a bidding war against one another, they would both bow out like gentlemen. Little did they know that they were not bidding solely against each other, they were bidding against the woman. In the end, the woman got her prize, the glorious oil painting known as the concert. It had cost her and her husband dearly, 29,000 francs, which equated to 6,000 of the dollars that formed their fortunes back in Boston. When Isabella Stewart Gardner left that Paris hotel in March of 1892, she was changed. No longer a contender, she was now a collector. And the concert was only the beginning. One of them is a medium-sized oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age master Johannes Vermeer. That painting, the concert, measures in at just over two feet by two feet. It's not a true square, but close enough. The painting shows a domestic interior, one dominated by a black and white. Checkered floor that leads the eye to the three individuals at the very back of the room. Two women and a man. The woman on the left is seated at a harpsichord. She is rendered in full profile, with her eyes to focus intently on the work of her hands. Ones that the viewer can't quite see, thanks to the man seated beside her. His back is to the viewer, allowing us only a view of his shoulder length curls and his back, though if you look closely, you can see that he's playing a lyre. On the right, another woman completes the trifecta. She is standing in three-fourths view, intent on a piece of paper she holds in one hand, while raising her other hand delicately in the air. Her mouth is slightly parted, presumably ready to sing, and the pearls at her neck and in her ears shimmer in the light from an unseen window. In the foreground, closer to the viewer, several instruments lie silent on the table and the floor, as if inviting the viewer to pick one up and join the trio, an invitation fixed forever in oils and varnish. The concert is one of approximately 35 works that we can confidently attribute to Vermeer, who these days is widely considered up there with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and his countryman Rembrandt as one of the greatest painters, not just of his time, but the entire early modern period, which stretches roughly between about 1450 and 1750. Some might even argue that he's one of the greatest of all time. Like so many people I talk about on the podcast, and even in this episode, for someone so outrageously famous in the world of art history, we don't really know all that much about Vermeer, his life, or how he worked. I will, however, give you the highlights of what we do know. Vermeer was born in 1632 in Delft, a canal city in the Western Netherlands. He was the son of an art dealer, and from what little we know, he lived in relative comfort for the vast majority of his life. At the age of about 21, he marries into an even better-to-do family, and in December of that same year, he joins the Guild of Saint Luke, which comprised professional artists and craftsmen. Vermeer registered himself with the guild as a master painter at the ripe old age of 22. From the minimal records that we have, Vermeer also worked as an art dealer like his father, and it's likely that it was this profession that most supported him and his family, in addition to the wealth of his mother-in-law. It is clear that he knew his stuff when it came to art, including the Italian Renaissance, as there are records of him being called in to authenticate works by the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael, and various Venetian painters. Even so, when Vermir signed documents, he would always put his profession as master painter, demonstrating his pride in what he did. In his 30s, he even spent two years on what was effectively the board of the Guild of St. Luke, which was extremely impressive. We only have about 35 works that are confidently attributed to the artist, and only three of those are dated. That makes it very tough to make any confident statements about Vermir or his work. But there are a few things that seem to differentiate early works from later works. For example, he painted a few biblical narratives in the early 1650s, while in the late 1650s and beyond, he primarily painted genre scenes, or moments of everyday life, with a strong preference for interior scenes featuring between one and three people, much like the concert. Vermeer's earlier works seem to be more heavily painted, by which I mean he literally uses more paint, while his later works are more delicate, with far less paint on the canvas surface, a point to which we shall return. What unites all of Vermeer's works, early or late, is his keen ability to layer paint to create certain optical effects and textures that are virtually unmatched by any other artist. That includes light, of which Vermeer was an absolute master. As one scholar says, even Vermeer's shadows are somehow luminous. Vermeer was also a master of color, including the interplay between various hues, and he often used extremely expensive and luxurious pigments to do so. While it's hard to say for sure why we have so few works by Vermeer compared to someone like Rembrandt, who has hundreds, one explanation is simply the fact that Vermeer's paintings required significant time and attention and detail to make. These are not the kinds of things that he was just churning out. There's also the fact that Vermeer's career only lasted about 20 years, as he died in 1675 when he was only in his early 40s. For reasons both known and unknown, the Vermeer family had a real financial fall from grace in the 1670s, a situation made all the more difficult by the fact that Vermir had 11 children, eight of whom were still living at home when he died in December of 1675. We don't know the cause of his death, but his widow wrote in a letter that, quote, he lapsed into such decay and decadence as if he had fallen into a frenzy, and in a day or a day and a half, he had gone from being healthy to being dead. End quote. Homie was straight up in the gutters. It wasn't until the 1830s that people once again started to take notice of this now little-known artist. The very uniquely named John Smith of London, an art historian like myself, wrote the following about Vermir. Quote, the painter is so little known by reason of the scarcity of his works that it is quite inexplicable how he attained the excellence many of them exhibit. The person most responsible for Vermir's rise in status was French art critic Théophile Touré, who also wrote under the pseudonym of William Berger. Théophile Touré first encountered Vermir when he was exiled from France in the late 1840s, during which he spent time in the Netherlands. While he was there, Touré was incredibly taken with a landscape painting of the city of Delft, but he was also surprised because he had never heard of the artist before, one Johannes Vermir. Touré's encounter with that landscape catalyzed a multi-decade effort to track down both works by and information about the artist, who Touré referred to as quote-unquote the Sphinx of Delft. Intriguing. The death of Vermere's greatest champion, Touray, did nothing to staunch the rise of appreciation for the Dutch painter. The Impressionists and post-impressionists in France in particular loved Vermir and his work, which isn't really surprising. There is something very impressionistic about Vermir's approach to painting, from his fascination with everyday moments to his application of paints onto the canvas. Now, to be clear, Vermir was very much a Dutch painter of the 17th century, and he did not use super expansive or loose brushstrokes as we come to expect of painters like Manet, Monet, and Degas. But there are little points of connection, quite literally. For example, Vermir sometimes used little dots of color to create certain effects, which is something that French impressionists and post-impressionists did on a much grander scale. But if there was one thing that drew 19th-century French painters to Vermir, it was his ability to render light, and specifically the relationship between light and color. That was something that deeply fascinated the Impressionists, especially someone like Claude Monet. Another artist who admired Vermir was Vincent van Gogh, who was taken with, quote, this strange painter's palette, end quote. He goes on to praise Vermeer's use of blues and lemon yellows and pearl grays, many of which are on display in the concert. And yes, we are going to ignore the irony of Vincent Van Gogh calling another artist strange. Vermeer likely painted the concerts in the mid-1660s, which is smack dab in the middle of his career. Despite being incredibly precious, the concert is not necessarily one of the more celebrated Vermeers. In fact, it's just straight up not. One major scholar of Vermeer simply refers to it as admirable. That's right, admirable. Not exactly a ringing praise, but there you go. Better to be admirable than many other things. That might lead you to ask, well, why is the concert one of the two paintings that everyone talks about when it comes to the heist? What makes it so special? It's a good question, and it's one that I waffle on, probably because I've never seen the work in person. Not to brag, but when the heist took place, I was negative eight days old. Please don't use that information to steal my identity. I promise that you don't want it. While maybe not a standout work of Vermeer's career, the concert is one of less than three dozen works painted by an artist who is now considered one of the greatest of all time. To boot, the concert hits all of the major points of what makes Vermeer and his work so captivating, from the light filtering in the window to the emphasis on music, a common Vermeer theme. There is also the kind of quiet mystery and everyday beauty of a domestic scene, one that simultaneously makes you feel like a voyeur, but also that leaves you with more questions than answers. Who are these people? What is the relationship between them? What are they performing? That brings me to one of my only quibbles about Vermeer and his work. Actually, it's not really about Vermeer at all, but rather how scholars have approached interpreting his works. It's not all of them by any means, but there are plenty of art historians out there who are determined to crack the code of Vermeer. I say code very deliberately because there's an almost Da Vinci Code-esque undertone, if not overtone, to some interpretations of Vermeer's work, including the concerts. I think Vermeer is one of the most gorgeous painters ever. He is so talented. But he is also a master of everyday quiet beauty, which is something I appreciate and deeply connect with. I therefore resist the idea that he is somehow whispering secrets to us, and that if we tune in to the right frequency or find the Vermeer cipher, all will be revealed. Like that to me is ridiculous. Now there are some arguments about how Vermeer's paintings have a moral or ethical bend to them, which I think is valid. But some people just take that way too far. The concert is one such example. So there are a few scholars out there who have argued that this painting has a strong moral lesson about sex and seduction being bad. Or at least, you know, that's the gist. This interpretation is largely due to one of the paintings in the background of the scene, the paintings within the painting, something that Vermeer did often. One of those paintings in the concert is a real painting. It's called the Percurus by Dutch artist Dirk Van Barberen. Coincidentally, that painting is now at the MFA Boston. Vermeer owned that work. He and his wife inherited it from his mother-in-law, and he was clearly a fan of it because he paints it in the background of multiple paintings. Van Barberen's The Procurus shows a very busty woman playing a lute, entertaining some gross old men who have recently or will soon be entertained in other less PG-13 ways. In that regard, the Percurus is also a concert of sorts, but a very different one than the one Vermeer shows. Some scholars have argued that the inclusion of the Percurus should inform our interpretation of the actual concert taking place in Vermeer's scene, namely, that there might be something else going on that we, the viewer, cannot perceive. Something sexual and seductive. While acknowledging that there were different standards for these types of things in the 1600s, I personally do not get any whiff of anything sexual about the concert. And I can barely make out the subject of Van Barberin's painting in the background. If anything, I think the juxtaposition between the central scene and the painting in the background emphasizes just how not sexy this particular concert is. I suppose that you could interpret the man holding the bridge of a lute in a, you know, certain phallic way, but also that's how you play the lute. So maybe your mind is just in the gutter, for which I do applaud you. Also, Vermeer owned the painting of the Percurus. Mind you, Vermeer did conceive 15 children with his wife, 11 of whom survived, so perhaps the painting is a bit of an aphrodisiac. However, to assume that its mere presence suggests immorality is to ignore the fact that these types of paintings were on display in very respectable Dutch households. One thing that I do agree with people on, specifically Isabella Stuart Gardner's biographers, is that the purchase of this painting ushered Mrs. Gardner into a new age of her life. It's the work that took her from a collector, which I envision with a lowercase C, to a collector, capital C. She won the work even while sitting out in the dang hallway, using her wits and her wiles to buy the painting out from under the very upturned noses of representatives of some of the biggest and best collections in the world. In buying this vermeer, Mrs. Gardner signaled that she was not here to play, and in fact could go toe-to-toe with some of the most formidable figures in the art world. She ultimately walked away 29,000 francs poorer, but one verme richer, which is a very fine thing to be. When it arrived in Boston in 1893, the concert became just the second verme in an American collection, and the first in Boston. It was a big deal. Before she built her museum in the early 1900s, Mrs. Gardner gave the concert pride of place in her drawing room, where it was eventually joined by paintings by Botticelli and Titian, in addition to many other precious things. A little less than a decade after arriving, the painting was moved to what was intended to be its permanent home in the Gardner Museum, where it occupied a half wall in the Dutch Room, though the only sign of it left today is, of course, its empty frame. To finish, not really to finish, we probably have another solid 10 minutes left, but whatever. I want to revisit the main opening narrative, the one that recounted Tom Mashberg's visit to that Brooklyn warehouse, where he swears up and down that he saw Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt. Mashberg has since revealed additional truths about that encounter. In 2015, he revealed that his guide was not, in fact, some random driver, but William Youngworth III himself, and that the warehouse was not on the outskirts of Boston, but rather in Brooklyn. To be clear, the encounter did happen, and it likely happened more or less in the way that Mashburg describes. It's just that in the late 90s, he felt a kind of duty of care towards his source, Youngworth. After a couple of decades, that duty of care has since expired. In the aftermath of that encounter, the FBI and the Gardner Museum were negotiating with Youngworth for the return of the Gardner works, of which he claimed he could get back 11. In those negotiations, Youngworth provided a vial of paint chips that quote unquote proved that he had access to the works. Those paint chips, however, did not match those collected at the crime scene. The FBI therefore poo-pooed the whole thing and simply asserted that Youngworth was once again running a con. Today, we are not so sure. Do you want to know what painting those chips perfectly matched with? That's right. The concert. Now it would be impossible to say 100% that the chips were in fact from the concert, because unlike the Rembrandt paintings, the concert was not cut from its frame, in part due to the fact that the concert was glazed. It had glass covering it. Instead of cutting it out, the thieves removed it from its frame, still attached to its stretcher, the internal framework that keeps the tension in the canvas. Ergo, therefore, there were no paint chips left behind for the conservation team to tweeze off the floor. In comparing the paint chips submitted by Youngworth to those collected at the crime scene, the FBI was correct in the fact that they didn't match, because they probably weren't from the same paintings. In the months that followed, though, the museum at least was still interested in pursuing this lead, even if the FBI was not. They called in additional professionals to analyze the pigments in the paint chips, including a man by the name of Hermann Kuhn, who had previously examined the pigments present in the concert back in the 1960s. He had actually studied the work itself, and determined that the chips provided to Mashburg were indeed consistent with those he had studied from the concert. Now there was no way to be sure, of course, but they were all sure enough that to this day the paint chips haunt one person in particular, Anthony Amore, the head of security and chief investigator for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who was not yet in that position when this was all taking place. In a 2020 article, Amore said, quote, there are a few things in this case that haunt me, and that's one of them. To have paint chips that are consistent not just with a Vermir, but with the concert is beyond luck. It means they, the paint chips, should be considered as a very strong piece of possible physical evidence. End quote. I personally don't know what's worse. The thought of someone shipping paint off the surface of Vermeer's the concert, or paint flaking off of it at all, or the idea that the FBI and the museum fumbled one of the greatest leads the case has ever had. Today, in 2025, the concert arguably remains the greatest blow of all of the works taken from the Gardner Museum in March of 1990. At that time, the painting was said to be worth upwards of $200 million. Today, the number would probably be closer to half a billion. It is an incomprehensible amount of money to pay for anything, much less layers of paints and varnish on a two by two canvas. But that's the nature of the world that we live in, one that Vermeer himself could have never imagined in his wildest dreams. For an artist who is almost forgotten, Vermeer's greatest legacy is his paintings, the things that provide real, tangible proof not just of his existence, but of his alchemy, his ability to render lights and color through the mixing of pigments and the placing of paint, efforts that immortalized the everyday beauty of the time and place in which he lived. The concert is part of that legacy, and it's also more than that. It is a precious and rare object, an artifact of a time gone by, but one rendered in a way that makes the moment feel so close. For the past 35 years, the concert has been as silent as it always was, but not in the same way it used to be. For so long, that silence has been one of anticipation, the hushed moment before a song. Like if you listened hard enough, you might hear the woman singing, the harpsichord playing, the lute strumming. Now, in the painting's absence, there is no anticipation. The silence is instead that of an empty grave. Or should I say, an empty frame. It looked like a little ghost, one that lingered white and patchy between the man and the woman. The phantom figure slipped a small arm over the woman's thigh. She placed her hand on top of it, her eyes fixing on the empty space between she and her husband, like she could sense the unseen presence there. As realization set in, the conservator's chest ached, and her eyes burned. The painting had been parts of the collection for over 70 years, and its familiarity had long ago chased away the strangeness of the composition and the unusual empty space between the two sitters, an anonymous man and woman in black. Now with the X-rays, all was explained. A child, almost certainly a young boy, had once stood between them. The artist had never finished painting the young boy. His form was little more than a sketch, a rough blocking out of form and volume. But something had happened, and instead of bringing the form to life with all the nuance and detail of the man and the woman, the artist instead painted over the child. There was no way to explain why this had happened. Such was the nature of having painted something over 300 years before, with virtually no record of who these individuals were, much less their story. But the conservator knew the most likely reason for such an omission, and she felt the sadness of it in her bones. The ache was made all the more acute by knowing the story of the woman who had bought this work and built the very museum that now housed it. That woman's life had been defined in large part by the loss of her only child before his second birthday. The 25-year-old mother had insisted on preparing her son's body for burial herself by washing him and combing his blonde curls. Of course, the woman could not have known about the ghostly presence of the child in the painting she purchased 33 years after burying her only child. She had agreed to buy the painting on the advice of a trusted advisor who had sent her photos of several works up for sale. The woman had not been as taken with the double portrait as with the other painting on offer by the same artist, a more dramatic composition of Christ and his disciples on a stormy sea. By comparison, the portrait was quiet, elegant, even austere, but it had charmed her all of the same. While a woman of her stature never begged, she admitted to making a skillful plea to her husband so that he might lend her the money to get both at once. When he said yes, she had been delighted. When the paintings arrived in Boston, however, she saw them with different eyes than those that had looked upon the photographs before purchase. A half year had passed since their sale in September, but it might as well have been a lifetime. When the woman first looked upon her purchase, it would have been impossible not to feel the cuts of shattering losses. Something that had nothing to do with some sixth cents for the invisible child whose ghostly form hid beneath the layers of varnish and paint. By the time the paintings had set sail for Boston in the early winter, life had taken from her the husband whose coin and goodwill had made it possible for her to purchase the portrait in the first place. She had then been a wife, like the painted woman. Now she was a widow. If the portrait was a knife, then the seascape was a balm. The woman knew the story as well as any, disciples boarding a boat with their master and setting off into the tranquil sea, only to find themselves in the midst of a terrible storm. The painting showed the worst of it, the battering waves and the terror of those who believed themselves lost, all juxtaposed with the tranquility of the man who watched steadfast amidst the madness. Soon he would raise his hands and calm the sea, commanding its stillness and quiet. He then chastised his disciples, the of little faith. They would not be forsaken, for he was there. And so the woman straightened her back and held her faith close. Unlike the sea rendered calm by Christ, Isabella Stuart Gardner had no intentions of silence or stillness. She was the storm. And Boston had better batten down the hatches because the city had no idea what she planned to do next. Of the 13 works stolen from the Gardner Museum, three were by Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, aka Rembrandt. Now, Rembrandt is one of the more popular topics that listeners ask me to cover. And believe me, I get it. He's one of my favorite artists, too. I do eventually intend to do an episode on Rembrandt, and if you have any ideas for what you'd like to learn about in that episode, please do let me know. But for right now, this 30-minute ditty will have to do. For those who don't know or maybe need a little refresher, that's okay too. Rembrandt was a prolific artist of the Dutch Golden Age. He was born in Leiden in 1606 and launched his career in about 1625, when he was just 19 years old. While he enjoyed plenty of success in Leiden, Rembrandt made it big when he moved to Amsterdam in the early 1630s, which is where his career absolutely skyrocketed. He produced art for decades and works across media, including painting, printmaking, and drawings. His greatest hits include The Night Watch, the anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tull, some biblical scenes like The Prodigal Son returning, and many, many portraits and self-portraits. Fascinatingly, all three of the Rembrandt works stolen from the Gardener date to Rembrandt's earliest years in Amsterdam. In fact, all three of them might even date to the same year. Give or take a little bit. 1633. Helpfully, the two paintings, Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Lady and Gentleman in Black, are dated. We know those were painted in 1633. But to start, I want to talk about the non-painting stolen, a tiny etching little bigger than a postage stamp. Most people would probably know Rembrandt as a painter first, but he was also an incredible printmaker, his preferred method of which was etching, a type of print that involves putting lines into copper plates, which can then be inked to create multiple impressions of an image. Rembrandt absolutely loved etching and produced hundreds of them over the course of his career. While Rembrandt did make prints to sell in his career, many of the prints that he made, especially the self-portraits, or portraits of himself by himself, were not meant for sale. Rembrandt was a bit of a visual alchemist. He was constantly experimenting with media and compositions and expressions, I mean, you name it. And he did a lot of that experimentation through drawings and prints, which were considerably less expensive than oil paintings. It made them the perfect media for just, you know, trying things out. The postage-sized print stolen during the Gardner Heist dates to about 1633. It is a self-portrait of Rembrandt. Again, he depicted himself, which is something that Rembrandt did all of the time. Over the course of his career, he did more than 80 self-portraits in a variety of media, 32 of which, like this one, were etchings. Despite what that might suggest, Rembrandt was probably not obsessed with himself, though he might have been. He was instead fascinated by human psychology and the challenge of capturing elements of a person's personality in visual form. That is what made him such a spectacular portraitist. This self-portrait, this teeny tiny one, only shows Rembrandt's head and a little bit of his neck, but it's mostly just head. He's in his late twenties, sporting a mustache, a goatee, and some pretty scraggly hair. His expression is one of quiet confidence. I also think that he looks very kind in this impression, which I really like. He's like a disheveled but lovable rogue. He wears a floppy brimmed hat that may or may not have a feather on it. I say may or may not, because there's a part of the cap just above the brim that is not etched. It creates what looks like a feathery blotted line. One entry I found on different impressions of the same print even calls the etching unfinished and references this blank area along the cap. And I think that that is spot on, because Rembrandt uses this hat, or a hat very much like it, but for Rembrandt, he he tended to use props quite a bit. So if you see something in one, you know, etching, drawing, painting, and you see it in another, it's usually the same quote unquote prop. In at least one other self-portrait from the time, a drawing at the National Gallery in DC, the cap does have what I believe is a feather. It's likely that Rembrandt intended to return to the etched self-portrait to put the feather in, but he never did, for whatever reason. You might be thinking, Lindsay, why would he make a bunch of prints when he knew he hadn't finished the etching? It's a good question. But with etchings, it's hard to tell what changes you want to make to the plate without printing it first. Or maybe Rembrandt was just experimenting with a new technique or idea, and he simply didn't feel the need to completely finish the work. This self-portrait was the first work by Rembrandt that Mrs. Gardner ever purchased. She would end up with five works by the master in total, including a painted self-portrait and a drawing, neither of which I am going to talk about because they weren't stolen. But this etching was the first. Exactly 104 years to the day before her museum was violated in 1990. She paid $120 for it. I don't know how much $120 in 1880s money would be today, but I can tell you for sure that it would be nothing to sneeze at. It would have probably been the equivalent of about a third to a fifth of the average person's salary for an entire year for a postage stamp-sized etching. The etching is listed in the 1886 sales catalog as Rembrandt au toit moustache, which translated means Rembrandt with three mustaches. Someone also wrote that title on the back of this particular impression of the print. I don't exactly know what the three mustaches are that the title of the work refers to, because I only see one, the one under his schnazz, but I have seen at least one person argue that there are indeed three mustaches in this print. One under Rembrandt's nose, his goatee, and whatever the white thing is on his hat, which I suppose does look like a hat mustache, if that were a thing, which it's not. I have also seen the self-portrait called some variation of self-portraits in a soft cap, which, let's be real, makes a lot more sense. There is something else written on the back of the Gardner impression, in addition to the title. An anonymous hand once wrote, quote, this beautiful little portrait is extremely rare. End quote. Now, rarity is a relative concept, especially when it comes to prints. With minimal effort, I found at least a dozen impressions of this particular prince out in the world. But that could still hypothetically qualify it as extremely rare. I just don't know. What I do know is that an impression of this same print sold at auction in January of 2024 for 32,500 pounds, or roughly 40,000 dollars. Allow me to remind you, this print is only slightly larger than a postage stamp. While there might not be a ton of impressions of this particular print out in the world, I do think that this print is one of the gardener objects that is most likely to surface if it indeed still exists. It's not one of a kind in the same way that a painting is. Someone could feasibly have this self-portrait hanging on their wall or on their mantelplace because it's not like there's only one impression of it out in the world. It's also something that someone might have purchased not knowing it was a stolen work. Like you're not accidentally buying a stolen vermeer, but you might accidentally buy a stolen etching. At the very least, it is a slightly more likely scenario. So listen up, this is my PSA, my public service announcement. If you or someone you know owns an impression of this print and you have permission to touch it, that is important. Let's not touch the art without permission. Please check the back of it. And while I am partially kidding, I am not totally kidding. You never know what might be your ticket to the millions. And by your ticket, I mean our ticket, because at this point, we are a team now, whether you like it or not. One work that you definitely would not purchase accidentally unless you were an idiot is Storm on the Sea of Galilee, a large-ish oil painting on canvas that Rembrandt painted in 1633. We know that again because he signed and dated the work. There is one thing that you hear over and over and over again about this work. That is that Storm on the Sea of Galilee was Rembrandt's only seascape, meaning that it was Rembrandt's only painting of the sea. There are two primary reasons why this matters. The first is that it gives you an indication of how one of the greatest artists of all time painted the sea. And not just the sea, but the sea undergoing a weather event. And while I made that all sound incredibly boring, Rembrandt painting weather events, it is visually fascinating. There's also the fact that being Rembrandt's only seascape, this painting is unlike any other that he ever made. Or should I say, the only one that we know of that is still, hopefully, in existence. That means there's a rarity factor at play, which is often one of the more important factors in determining a work of art's value. If you can indeed put value on a masterpiece, which happens literally every single day. People will tell you that it's priceless, but they're pretty good at putting prices on things. It's weird how that happens. Storm on the Sea of Galilee measures in at over five feet tall and four feet wide, making it the largest of the works taken during the heist. That big five by four painting shows a small-ish boat being tossed amongst the waves of a stormy sea, the titular Sea of Galilee, which technically is a large lake in northern Israel. Why is it called the sea if it's in fact a lake? Primarily because that's how it's referred to in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, where a story about Jesus Christ and his disciples on a boat in the Sea of Galilee appears in three of the four Gospels. You'll oftentimes hear this story referred to as a parable, so-called, because it teaches a lesson. This particular lesson starts with Christ and his apostles boarding a boat to sail across the Sea of Galilee. To start, everything is fine. Christ even falls asleep. While he is sleeping, however, a violent storm erupts on the sea, seemingly out of nowhere, and all of the apostles are panicking because it looks like the ship will sink. And so they wake the still sleeping Christ and beg him to do something. For his part, Christ is calm as a cucumber, and his disciples cannot believe it. They even ask him if he cares if they drown. And Jesus Christ, good old JC, is not having any of it. He raises his hands and commands the sea to be still and the wind to stop, and the elements obey him. Christ then turns to his disciples and reads them the riot act, asking them some version of why are you fearful? Do you not have faith? In other words, how can you think that you would perish when I am here? It's a lesson, a parable, that many people of faith hold very Very dear, this idea that even when everything is awful and it seems like the end, you have to have faith. While unique in the fact that it's, you know, Rembrandt's only seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee has a lot of the hallmarks of Rembrandt's early works. One of those was that when Rembrandt would paint a story, especially a biblical story, he would choose to depict the most dramatic parts of that narrative. That is exactly what is happening with Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Rembrandt is showing us the most pivotal moment of this scene, something that he accomplishes through a combination of composition, light, and action. The bucking bronco of a ship creates two strong diagonals across the canvas. One is the ship itself as it whips among the waves, and the other is the mast, which cuts through the sky, splitting it in two. There's the black sky of the storm on the right, and on the left, a break in the sky that allows sunlight to stream in. That light serves to illuminate the scene, and it shows us that in the boat itself, there is every kind of panic that you can imagine happening. That is, from everyone but Christ, who is as cool as a cucumber. Interestingly, uh, Rembrandt chooses to show Christ as awake. In most other depictions of this story in Dutch art, Christ is almost always asleep. That choice is interesting because it's one that highlights just how unbothered Christ is by the events unfolding. It's the difference between being unafraid because you're brave or confident and being unafraid because you are unconscious. Those are two very different things. Christ's disciples are decidedly less unbothered. There is a group at the left who are doing everything possible to keep the ship afloat, while there's others who gather around and grovel before Christ. There's also a few who are in between these two polar opposite reactions, including one guy who is simply vomiting over the side of the boat, which I find profoundly relatable. Rembrandt is also using light in a really cool way, in that one side of the boat, the left, where all of the men are hard at work trying to write the ship, they are bathed in light, while those groveling before Christ are in shadow. Given that light is often a symbol of God and his goodwill, one might interpret this as an indication that those who have not yet given up hope are being honored for their continued faith. It's not a perfect interpretation, I grant you, but I think that there is something there. More than anything, though, the choices that Rembrandt makes light-wise literally highlight the most active part of this scene. He is illuminating his talent at painting action, highlighting his own talents as a narrative painter. But one of my personal favorite details of the painting actually happens in the darkest portion of it, which not sure what that says about me, but it's cool, and I want to tell you about it. If you can find the ship's rudder and follow it back into the darkness, you can just make out the barest impression of ghostly ships that have not yet made it through the storm. It is a tiny detail, but it is spooky as heck, and I love it. Those of you with eagle eyes and the ability to count, a girl can dream, might recognize another detail that might strike you as strange. There are at least 14 men in this painting, if not 15. I say if not 15, because there are definitely 14 men in the boat, but there might be a figure in the dark space at the center of the boat, where there's like a kind of like boat interior, where I personally, like I think I see someone cowering inside of that space. It could also be miscellaneous stuff, I don't know, but I think I see a face. I have also found references in books to there being 14 disciples in the work, suggesting a total of 15 people. So my little theory about seeing someone cowering in that little interior space might actually be valid. Out in the open, there are definitely 14 people. Christ, his 12 disciples, and a 13th man. What we don't know is of the 13 men shown with Christ, which one is the 13th? If I had to bet money on it, however, I would choose the fellow who is standing in the boat at the very center, wearing a red cap and a blue tunic. He is holding onto a rope and looking directly out at the viewer with a hand on his head, as if to beseech us for help. I don't know if that's the 13th guy, but what I do know is that the man looks an awful lot like a very familiar figure, Rembrandt himself. Now, I don't know that I believe that this is indeed a self-portrait. It definitely looks like one, but imagine the gall that a man has to have to paint himself not just as the 13th man among Christ and his disciples, but place himself at the center of the painting, in the middle of the boat, wearing pretty vivid blue and staring out at the viewer. It's a choice made all the more stunning by the fact that this painting was almost certainly commissioned. Someone likely asked Rembrandt to paint this. It's not like Rembrandt just woke up one day and decided to spend weeks and precious materials painting Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Like someone asked him to do this and paid him to do this. To put yourself in the middle of their painting looking out at the viewer is what we would call a bold move. Another hallmark of Rembrandt's early work was how colorful it was, especially compared to his later works, which embraced darker and more earthy tones. For a while, people weren't aware of just how bright the painting was. That is, until the 1980s, when it underwent conservation efforts, including a cleaning that removed retouches as well as yellowed varnish that had for a long time suppressed the full color range present in the painting, making it appear dull. And finally, at least for our purposes, when it comes to sort of how this adheres to the early style of Rembrandt, the Storm on the Sea of Galilee is very finely painted, and there is a significant level of detail. Later, Rembrandt would embrace a much sketchier, rougher brushstroke. For a painting so celebrated, it is, after all, Rembrandt's only seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee never really received all that much scholarly attention. We know virtually nothing about it other than it was painted in 1633 because Rembrandt dated it on the rudder. It's really hard to see in the reproduction, but if you look closely, especially at the one on Google Arts, you can just make out his name and the, you know, suggestion of a date. This would be the same signature and date that Tom Mashberg alleges that he saw in that Brooklyn warehouse back in 1997. Apart from the year it was made and the man who made it, everything else about Storm on the Sea of Galilee remains a bit of a mystery. But, fun fact. At one point, it was owned by a man named Jan Hope, which he then passed down to his son, Henry Philip Hope. Longtime listeners might remember Henry Philip Hope, who is the man who gave his name to the Hope Diamond. That's right. Storm on the Sea of Galilee and the Hope Diamond were once under the same roof. That is, until Henry Philip Hope lent the Rembrandt painting to his brother Thomas, who hung it on a wall in his home. And while I understand that paintings are meant to go on walls, but can you imagine having a Rembrandt painting, and not just any Rembrandt painting, Rembrandt's only seascape just hanging out on your wall. Even in the 1800s, that would have been wild. The painting was eventually passed down through the Hope family until, in September of 1889, Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased it and another very different Rembrandt painting. That brings us to the third and final of the Rembrandt works stolen from the Gardner, a double portrait with the very descriptive title of a lady and gentleman in black. This portrait of an upper middle class couple measures in at roughly four and a half by three and a half feet, making it slightly smaller than Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The couple appear to be in their 30s or their forties, and as the title suggests, they are both wearing mostly black clothing, with the addition, of course, of white ruffs at their necks, and for the woman, an incredible embroidered bodice and lashings of jewelry. The man stands looking very dapper, while the woman sits and is positioned a little closer to the foreground. The fashionable nature of the couple's outfits creates an interesting contrast with the sparse, shadowy interior that they inhabit. There is a faded map on the wall behind the man, and a chair with a red velvet cushion in the foreground. And that's about it. Like Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt painted this work in 1633, which again was within a year or two of him moving to Amsterdam. We do not know who the man and the woman are, though there is some speculation about who they might be. For example, scholar Isabella Van Egan was the first, at least to my knowledge, to hypothesize that the couple is Jan Pieters Brünings and his wife Hilgaunt Pieters Mountmaker. And low-key, in case you haven't noticed this already, my Dutch accent is somehow worse than my French one. I apologize to Dutch speakers everywhere. This theory about the portrait sitters' identities is interesting because we know for sure that Rembrandt did paint a portrait of Bruinigs and Mountmaker. We just don't know if it was this one. And it really probably wasn't, because we know that Broiniggs and Mountmaker were Mennonites, which is a Christian faith that embraces conservatism and austerity in all aspects of life, including clothing. That description does not apply to either of the figures in the portrait, especially the woman who wears that fancy bodice, lace cuffs, pearls, a diamond ring, hair jewelry. I mean, this couple is not Mennonite. But it is fun to speculate. In many ways, the portrait follows many conventions of the time and place in which it was made. 1633 Amsterdam. Couples' portraits like this were incredibly common in the Dutch Golden Age. But there's also some very strange things happening that don't make a ton of sense when you look at the picture for longer. Like first, when you see it and you think, oh, it's just a, you know, another Dutch couple's portrait, but after a while you think, huh, Homie made some weird decisions with this one. The first of those strange things is that there's really no relationship between the man and the woman. No visual relationship, anyway, other than the fact that they share the same space. If you split these up, making them independent portraits, you would have no idea that they go together. That might sound like a weird way to say things, but paired marriage portraits like that, where it's the man and the woman in their own sort of separate paintings, were also very common during that time, and you can usually pair up the man and the woman based on certain visual cues. Furthermore, the portrait has a bit of an odd composition in that there's quite a bit of empty space, including between the husband and the wife, and then the random empty chair in the left foreground. Like, why is there an empty chair just chilling in the foreground? What's up with that? In the 1970s, some of these minor oddities were explained when the portrait underwent conservation work, including a cleaning and an x-ray. The cleaning removed some yellow varnish and dirt, making the portrait much more legible, but it was the x-ray that left everyone stunned. Those x-rays revealed that there had originally been a third figure in the portrait, one that was very clearly a child who was standing directly beside the woman, with one hand in her lap and the other above his head. And I am saying he because the few people who have written about this painting, including art historian John Walsh, are pretty confident that it is in fact a boy. It has something to do with the haircut that this sort of like phantom child seems to have. The reason that we can see this child in these x-rays is because Rembrandt used white lead when rendering the figure, or should I say white lead paint. And that is why it shows up in x-rays despite being painted over. For more in x-rays, you can see the um episode about Raphael and the lady with the unicorn. Also, one of the mini sodes that I did on Van Gogh. I also talk about x-rays there. But y'all, when I first saw this figure, when I looked at these x-rays, I just saw the general shape of a child. Like, oh, that's a small person, must be a child. There is one reproduction of the X-ray where I see a face, and it is flippin' terrifying. It's like a zombie child, and I can't figure out if I am just seeing things in vague shapes, or if there is in fact a zombie child face happening. You'll have to go look at the reproductions for yourself, and you can tell me what you think. As for what the ghost zombie child is doing, he seems to be holding a stick of some kind, which may either be part of a toy setup, like a spinning whip for a top, or potentially just a whip, period. I grant you that those are very different activities. But it's hard to tell which one is happening without knowing what's going on in the lower left foreground. This explains the odd inclusion of the chair, which was clearly incorporated to cover something up. Whether that thing was a spinning top or an animal like a goat or a dog, is impossible to say. The x-rays show significant changes to the floor area as well, but it's much harder to figure out what was going on because the paints that Rembrandt was using in this darker section didn't have the same level of white lead in it, which is what makes the child's figure stand out on the x-ray. While a child with a spinning top is pretty self-explanatory, it's a kid playing with a toy, the prospect of a young Dutch child whipping a goat or a dog in a domestic interior is much weirder. If that was the case, it's almost certainly that there was not a small Dutch child actually whipping a dog or a goat. Instead, the activity would have been more symbolic. For example, in Dutch landscapes, there are often children whipping animals, something that is said to represent the taming of impulse. But to show that in a domestic interior would be very odd indeed. So odd that it may have inspired the painter or the patron to rethink these choices halfway through the painting of the portrait. There is also the possibility that the child was painted out for a different reason, one that was not related to the appropriateness of certain symbolic activities for a Dutch interior. Maybe the man and the woman just decided that they didn't want to include their child in the portraits. Or maybe the child died while Rembrandt was still working on the painting. And we do know that this decision was made while he was still working on it. This was not an after-the-fact removal. If that was the case, there would be much more detail on the figure, and there's just not. Of course, ever since 1970, whatever, when this was all first discovered, there's been this narrative that Isabella Stuart Gardner, who was devastated in her early 20s by the death of her almost two-year-old son, Jackie, that she was somehow drawn to this work, pulled into its orbit by this mutual sense of loss. Those who are more heavy-handed with this kind of interpretation, essentially suggest that some part of her sensed that there was this lost child in the painting. It's a good story, but it's not a realistic one. It would be similar to saying that Rembrandt, in painting this child out of the portrait, was divining his own future, as he would go on to mourn the loss of several children in his lifetime as well. At least three, if not four. But no one ever talks about that. Because again, that is novelistic, not realistic. That is all to say that there is absolutely no way that Isabella Stewart Gardner could have ever anticipated what was lurking beneath the paint and varnish of this canvas. She bought the work because her trusted friend and art consultant, Bernard Baronson, we're hearing a lot about him in this episode, he convinced her that it was a worthy investment, particularly as a pendant to Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Barrenson argued that these two paintings together showed Rembrandt's incredible range even as a young master, as both were painted in the same year. For her part, Mrs. Gardner admitted to being, quote-unquote, bitten by Rembrandt, and she demonstrated a particular yearning for Storm on the Sea of Galilee. That was her first choice by. In her letters, however, she also writes to Baronsen that she hopes to be able to purchase the pair. She even writes to Baronsen about making a skillful argument to her husband, who eventually lent her the money to purchase both works and one other. Now she says lent her the money. I don't know that she ever paid it back to him, but they were loaded, so it kind of doesn't matter. It's little wonder why she needed his cash, because Mrs. Gardner ended up paying twice the amount for the portrait as she did for Storm on the Sea of Galilee, which in retrospect is ironic, given how important Storm on the Sea of Galilee became for the Gardner collection. I'm not sure why Storm on the Sea of Galilee didn't sell for more money back in the day, given that, of course, say it with me, it was Rembrandt's only seascape. Then again, the art market has always been somewhat irrational, whether in the late 1800s or today. After purchasing these works, Mrs. Gardner seems to have cooled a bit in her bittenness with Rembrandt, though Baronson, who was Rembrandt Gaga, continued to encourage her to buy more works by the artist. At one point, he must have known that he was getting a little too pushy, because in a letter, he assured her that, quote, I am not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandts like any vulgar millionaire, end quote. In the end, Mrs. Gardner was only a semi vulgar millionaire. She owned five Rembrandts in total, three Paintings and two works on paper. Today, only two of those remain in her museum. One of those is one of Rembrandt's earliest painted self-portraits, one that the thieves removed from the wall but did not take with them. It could be that they forgot it, or perhaps they realized that being a panel painting, it was far too heavy for them to manage. Or perhaps they realized it wasn't as easy to get out of its frame as the canvas paintings, which the thieves cut out from the front. Whether by incompetence or choice, the self-portrait remains a highlight of the Gardner collection, and it eagerly awaits the return of its missing counterparts. Peter had simply intended to enjoy his afternoon at the museum, one that was so unlike his home institution, almost 4,000 miles away. Despite being oh so very far away from home, Peter's walk through the Dutch room in particular felt like a meeting with old friends. He had dedicated his career to studying the painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Though one, of course, stood out among the rest. Whether in his own time or the modern day, Rembrandt van Rijn had a way of doing that. There was one painting in particular that caught Peter's attention. It was displayed rather strangely, mounted on a half wall that acted as a kind of room divider. On one side, there was an unquestioned masterpiece of the collection, a confection of light and form by the hand of Vermeer. Of course, Peter knew the artist well. The Reichsmuseum boasted no fewer than four of this master's works, making it the greatest collection of Vermeers in the world. Peter was quite proud of this. But today it was the painting on the other side of the half-wall that caught his attention. This was no cozy interior bathed in sunlight. It was a wild, rugged landscape punctuated by humanity, a stone bridge, a distant town, a river mill, and of course the obelisk after which the painting was named. While the museum claimed that this work was by Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter was quite unsure. It was a lovely landscape, one that embodied many of the compositional elements of Rembrandt's own. But such things do not in autograph work by the master make. It was precisely the autograph that gave Peter pause, or rather, the signature, as it is called on a painting. The letters looked very strange indeed, an R followed by the suggestion of a date. While Rembrandt had varied his signature in his career, Peter knew of no other instances in which the master used a single R to declare his authorship. Peter looked closer. Yes, there was something very strange happening here. He swore that he could make out signs of other letters, ones that someone had clearly tried to mask. For his part, Peter was not particularly interested in being the one to question the painting's attribution. But he was a museum professional. It was his ethical duty to bring it to the curator's attention, and so he did. Peter suspected that his colleagues were not overly surprised, though they were certainly disappointed. They were down a Rembrandt and up a Flink. The trade had not been a good one. But time would be crueler still. In just a few short years, the museum would mourn a different kind of loss, one that would shake the very foundations on which the museum was built. Peter had been back in Amsterdam when the news broke. Thirteen precious works of art, stolen in the darkest hours of the night. It was every museum curator's nightmare. In the expansive halls of the Rijksmuseum, Peter tried to tell himself that what happened at the Gardner Museum would never happen here. But he knew better. When it came to masterpieces and money, it was not a matter of if, but when. The Gardner's time had come. Now it was only a question of which museum would be next. The painting titled Landscape with an obelisk is exactly what it sounds like, but it's also so much more. The work features a rugged landscape that is part wild, part tamed. In the foreground, so closest to the viewer, two men, one on horseback, one walking, pass by a huge, twisting, ancient tree. Behind them is a stone bridge over a rushing river. On the far bank, there is a water mill and a building, both of which are dwarfed by a large obelisk or stone pillar, that is the only man-made item in the painting that rivals the otherwise overwhelming landscape. But this is no mighty Egyptian monolith. In Holland, these stone markers were used to mark territorial boundaries, not to honor pharaohs. In the distance, a small city nearly blends into the countryside, one dominated on the right by a rocky cliff. As if this weren't all dramatic enough, dark clouds roll in overhead. It seems like our travelers in the front are about to get a little wet. This landscape by Govart Flink is approximately two by two and a half feet. Unlike every other painting stolen in the Gardner Heist, this work was not painted on canvas, but rather is oil paint on panel, which is to say wood, specifically oak. As you hopefully gleaned from the intro narrative, this painting has not always been attributed to Govart Flink. Govart? Govart. I don't know. I think it's Govart, but that just seems weird to me to say, but we'll we'll try. For a long time, the landscape with an obelisk was instead said to be a work by Rembrandt. Yes, the Rembrandt we just spent 45 minutes talking about. But of course it's not. It is instead a painting by his pupil, Flink. Flink was born in 1615 in Cleve, a city in present-day Germany that is close to the border with the Netherlands. Back in the day, Cleve was the capital of the Duchy of Cleves, aka home to our girl Anne of Cleves. For more on her, see Mini Sode 8. Flink, however, moved to Amsterdam in the 1630s, where he spent his late teens in Rembrandt's workshop before venturing out on his own. He painted the landscape with the obelisk, the Gardner work under discussion here, in 1638, when he was about 23 years old. The landscape itself is likely one that Flink imagined rather than something he would have painted from life. There are no known areas of Holland, aka the Netherlands, with a territorial obelisk among rugged mountains. But hey, what's a 23-year-old in Amsterdam supposed to do for fun? But think up imaginary landscapes, you know? We don't know all that much about Flink and his life. We do know that he works in a variety of genres, including portraiture, and that he was very highly regarded. In some cases, he even received commissions over Rembrandt, his former teacher. In the first half or so of his career, Flink's style really emulated that of Rembrandt, which makes sense because he trained with him. But later in the second half of his career, Flink was very clearly taken with the work of another Flemish great, Peter Paul Rubens. And so Flink shifted towards a more Rubinesque versus Rembrandt style. At one point, Flink was so good at impersonating Rembrandt's style that there is zero doubt in my mind that there are probably Rembrandt paintings out there that are in fact by Flink. This landscape, though, is not one of them. Flink signed his own name to it. That's a pretty good indication that he was not trying to pass this off as a Rembrandt, which he was very capable of doing. Someone else, however, was trying to do exactly that. We aren't sure what the exact story is, but we do know that until the early 1800s, this work was always listed in inventories as being by Flink. Then around 1816 or so, it starts to appear in catalogs as a Rembrandt, giving us a pretty good idea of when this whole bait and switch happened. One hypothesis for how this whole case of deliberately mistaken identity came to be, involves Napoleon. Yes, Napoleon. But no, not that Napoleon, and not the other Napoleon either, both of whom we'll eventually talk about later. We are instead talking about Jerome Bonaparte, also known as Jerome Napoleon, the younger brother of the Napoleon, the first one. This painting by Flink of the landscape with an obelisk was one of the first of many that made it into the hands of Jerome Bonaparte during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s. It turns out that taking things that aren't yours simply because you can was a family trait that these brothers shared. Sometime between 1816-h and 1853, someone, question mark who deliberately altered the painting so that the F in Flink's signature came to look like an R, and the rest of the letters were obscured. Someone was obviously trying to pass this off as a Rembrandt. I'm going to blame Jerome because why not? The guy seems like he was pretty awful. There's really only one reason that you would try to pass off a painting as a Rembrandt that isn't really a Rembrandt. To get more money when you sell it. But the joke is on Jerome because it didn't work. In 1854, the painting, now masquerading as a Rembrandt, sold for 9 pounds. According to an inflation calculator of dubious accuracy, that would be the equivalent of about $1,500 today for a painting allegedly by Rembrandt. I don't know why it didn't sell for more, but from what I can tell from the reproduction on the Gardner website, it's a lovely and finely painted landscape. But let's be real, even the best landscapes don't tend to make the average person's toes tingle. That said, the painting's value did increase exponentially through the decades. In 1884, for example, it sold for just over 4,500 francs. In 1900, Isabella Stuart Gardner also purchased the painting for 4,500. This time, though, we're talking pounds, which held significantly more value than francs. To put that into perspective, Mrs. Gardner bought Storm on the Sea of Galilee two years earlier for 6,000 pounds. At the turn of the 20th century, $1,500 was a lot of money, like more money than people made in a year kind of money. But still, it's an interesting comparison that the landscape only went for $1,500 less than Rembrandt's, say it with me, only Seascape. On the flip side, £4,500 in 1898 was a heck of a lot of money to pay for a painting that you don't even like. So, Lindsay, why would she buy a work that she didn't really like? I would say peer pressure, but peer is a strong, if not inappropriate, word for this situation. Mrs. Gardner was operating based on the advice and, let's say, um effusive declarations of her longtime art advisor Bernard Barenson. He had written her the following in a letter in which he urged her to buy the landscape. Quote, Your eyes will tell you better than my poor prose what a poem is, of what exquisitely intimate feeling, how it contains within itself the graciousness of Claude Lorraine, the magic of Turner, the idyllic charm of Corot, but all raised to a higher power, constituting a work of exquisite, sweet pathos and profound feeling. I think it's safe to say that Baronson's toes were indeed tingling. Mrs. Gardner's not so much. She bought the work Sight Unseen, and when it arrived, she let her displeasure be known to Baronson, writing, quote, The Rembrandt left me cold, and it was only because you seemed so anxious about it that I wired to get it. End quote. These days, the fact that this landscape was ever mistaken for a Rembrandt is somewhat uh not shocking, that's not the right word, but also not surprising. Befuddling, if you will. Befuddling. Then again, hindsight is 2020. To be gracious, I like to be that from time to time. Make sure, you know, the muscle still works beneath the dust. Neither Flink nor Rembrandt painted all of that many landscapes. As of the 1980s, there were only two known landscapes by Flink out in the world, even though we know that he painted about 30. And Rembrandt was sort of of a similar nature. He didn't paint all that many landscapes. So there isn't a ton of data to compare the two. An article written by Cynthia Schneider in 1984 presents some points of departure between Rembrandt and Flink's existing landscapes. She first acknowledges that there are definitely similarities between how the two artists operated, which is only natural given that Flink spent about three years in Rembrandt's workshop. Schneider also points out very clear breaks between the two artists. For example, Flink's handling of line is softer and more delicate, almost feathery, whereas Rembrandt has a penchant, a penchant, for more calligraphic lines, like you'd expect of a pen, even if he was using a brush. Flink also used colors that never appear in any of Rembrandt's known landscapes, including the use of pale greens, blues, and pinks to render highlights. Even in the 1800s, people noticed those points of departure and called the landscape's authorship into question. None of this, however, was formally investigated until Peter Shatbourne paid a visit to Boston. Shatbourne was a curator in the drawings cabinet of the Rijksmuseum, which is the biggest museum in Amsterdam. It's huge and it is filled to the brim with Dutch Golden Age art, including a ton of Rembrandts and several flinks. But it wasn't just the style of the landscape with the obelisk that gave Shatborn pause when he visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He didn't really even need to look at any of that, although I'm sure he did, because he could actually see with his eyes that the signature in the bottom corner had been messed with and that there appeared to be another underneath it. I find this really interesting, especially as this painting was very closely studied and worked on in 1974 by a very well-respected conservator, Gabriel Koppelmann. It was during this conservation project that Koppelmann determined that the painting had been cleaned several times in its history, and that those cleanings had the opposite effect than what was intended. They damaged and wore down passages of the painted surface, particularly the darker areas. There were also areas where the paint had become more translucent, which is something that can happen over time and was not necessarily due to any human intervention. If anyone is in Los Angeles and wants to undertake a little investigative work, it appears that Copelman's papers from various conservation projects are now in the Getty Archive. Those materials include x-rays from the 1974 cleaning of this work. I, for one, would be fascinated to look at those notes and x-rays and figure out if Copelman had any indication that this work was not by Rembrandt. I cannot imagine that the signature on top of a signature would not have shown up in some capacity during that work. But I also acknowledge that, number one, I am not a conservator. Maybe we can get our buddy Jean on the blower and she can give her her two cents about that. But also that I am very cynical when it comes to these kinds of things. I've worked at several museums, and I think it's safe to say that many curators, and maybe even conservators, would gnaw their left arm off if it meant retaining a work's status as a Rembrandt. Is it ethical? No. But it is good business, and denial is not just a river in Egypt. People have convinced themselves of weirder things in life than, you know, oh, that lovely painting is a Rembrandt, and no one can tell me otherwise. Unless that no one is a museum professional from the Reichsmuseum, because when they say something, you listen, no matter how much it hurts. Ironically, it might be that this mistaken identity with landscape with an obelisk being thought to be by Rembrandt for so long that got the work stolen during the Gardner Heist. It makes absolutely no sense why the thieves would have taken this work on panel when there was another painting on panel in the gallery that was 100% by Rembrandt, a self-portrait, no less. But the thieves did not take that one, even though they did remove it from the wall. I've seen some hypotheses that the thieves realized the portrait was on panel, and so they didn't take it because it was too heavy, but so is the landscape. And the portrait and the landscape are fairly similar in size. So, like, what the heck? Out of curiosity, I did ask my aforementioned and often mentioned buddy Jean how much these things weigh, and her very practical response was that she would probably be able to carry a panel of this size up a flight of stairs by herself. As someone who has moved into and out of several apartments by myself and is currently preparing for another move, uh, one of the many reasons why this episode was late, I appreciate this description and know exactly what she's talking about. One or potentially two people who could definitely carry this work were the two men who entered the Gardner Museum on March 18th, 1990. Because the landscape is on wood, there was no need to cut it with a knife like they did with the actual Rembrandt's. They simply removed it from its Frame, and presumably carried or rolled it from the scene. At least one of the security guards in the basement said that they thought they might have heard wheels against the floor above their head, which was probably something similar to those bins on wheels that Tom Mashberg saw in the Brooklyn lockup, though they weren't necessarily the same ones. Unfortunately, the fact that the painting is on panel is not a reason to think it would be any more durable than the works on canvas. Not to break anyone's bubble, but 350 plus-year-old oak panels don't do great when subjected to changing temperatures and humidity levels. They crack, they crumble, they do all sorts of not great things. At the very least, they can't be rolled up, but there's about a billion other things that could happen to them that are no bueno. Gavart Flink's Landscape with an obelisk is a polarizing work. It enchanted Bernard Baronson, who considered it a masterwork of a Rembrandt landscape, while it left Isabella Stuart Gardner cold, even and perhaps especially after she paid top dollar for it. But that's the thing about art. Different people react to different works in different ways, no matter how much or how little money they cost, or who may or may not have painted them. That's what makes conversations about art interesting, particularly when you have an open enough mind to not just consider but respect other perspectives. I for one hope to one day see Flink's landscape back on the walls of the gardener. And whether it leaves me cold or lights my fire, I will be very glad that it's home. It was all on the menu at Cafe Tortoni, a long-standing Parisian establishment at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Taïbault. The cafe had opened during the waning days of the revolution, not by a Parisian, but by a Neapolitan glacier or ice cream maker. His name was Velloni. After a series of bad business decisions and perhaps a bit of fickle fate, the man named Velloni was forced to rename his business. In doing so, he chose to honor his most loyal garcon, a man by the name of Tortoni. It was by this name that the cafe earned its fame, in large part because of the ice creams it served, including shaved ices flavored with sugary syrups and sorbets in a variety of flavors. While not new to Paris, Tortoni's confections were still novel to many Parisians and visitors alike, including Tortoni's famous Glasse Plombier, an almond-flavored ice cream served with candy fruits soaked in Kirsch. But for Veloni, who was not nearly as talented a businessman as he was an ice cream maker, the novelty of life itself had melted away. Turning his back on the city of light, Vellone ventured into the darkness of his cellar, where he chose to meet death at the end of a noose. In the wake of Velloni's death, the man named Tortoni took over the cafe that already bore his name. Thankfully, he proved as talented a businessman as he did a garcon, and by the mid-1800s, Cafe Tortoni was one of the most popular cafes in all of Paris, where it attracted both artists and elites at all times of day. That included the evenings, when those enjoying a night at the opera, a few blocks away, would regularly leave before the show concluded, willing to forego the final act if it meant getting to Tortoni's before the after-opera rush. In the late 1850s, the clientele at Tortoni's included a young man whose well-to-do parents had once thought him destined for a naval career. Instead, he had chosen to become a painter. But calling this man a mere painter is like calling Cafe Tortoni's famous plombier a mere palate cleanser, when it was, in fact, the whole damn meal. The painter, whose name was Edouard, was soon to become the talk of the town, a vanguard whose loose brushstrokes and visions of modern Paris infuriated many by bucking the prim and proper ways that art had been made in the capital for decades. Whether a naked woman lounging on the grass or a modern crowd enjoying music at the Touleries, Edouard's paintings inspired fury so acute that at least one man threatened to commit violence if forced to remain in a room with one of his paintings for too long. While Edouard the painter enjoyed titillating the crowds that flocked to his works in Paris, the man himself was quiet, sensitive. There was little that he enjoyed more than spending long hours sipping coffee, wine, and liqueur on the terrace of Tortoni's. Oftentimes he would bring the materials of his craft, painting quick sketches of the city and the people and the pace that so fascinated him. Cafe Tortoni was the very place to become intoxicated, not just on absinthe and the luxury of liqueur-soaked ices, but on Paris and life itself. It was that elusive thrill of being alive that Edward tried to capture in each brush stroke and daub of paint, rendering not just the way life looked, but the way it felt and sounded. The chatter of passers-by on the street, the shimmer of the air around oil lamps, the bite and chew of Kirsch-soaked candied fruit between the teeth, and of course, the burn of the Green Devil as it slipped down the throat and settled low in the belly. Edward understood that life happened in moments, and he chose to spend many of his at Tortoni's. That is, until his failing body could no longer wander the streets of Paris that he had once so adored. Soon, too soon, the artist was gone. His life slipped away as quickly as the drips of condensation down the cut glass of a half-eaten ice cream. Like it had for Edouard Menet, time too would come for Tertones. The modernity that had once seemed like magic had become the mundane. It was the new beer halls and brasseries that now called most strongly to the members of the rising middle class. Luxury ice creams were deemed too impractical, and absinthe too taboo. Cafe Tortoni shuttered its doors before the century was out. Life was as it would never be again, not just for the cafe, but for all of Paris. But the magic remained, not in the streets of Paris, but in the broken brushstrokes of Edouard Manet's canvases. Every daub of paint a tiny testament to an age gone by, to spaces and people that had once held joy and reverie, and of course, to a man who had sought so desperately to capture it all, so that we too might enjoy and remember those shimmering days spent enjoying an ice cream in the city of light. Of the 13 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, only one of them appears to have been stolen by a phantom. A small oil painting by Edward Manet, known as Shea Tortoni. This was the only painting taken from the first floor, where Shea Tortoni hung in the blue room, small and unassuming, above an antique table and below a much larger Manet portrait. According to the security logs, the only person who entered the blue room that night was the security guard Rick Abbith, who swiped in and out of the gallery as directed during what would be his only round of the night. Notwithstanding some freak event, the security sensors in that gallery were in perfect working condition. Initially, the police, the real police, may not have even known the painting had been taken, if not for the very clear clue that the thieves left behind. As they exited the building, loot in tow, they placed the empty frame of Shay Tortoni on the director of securities chair, an action that was clearly a taunt. If it weren't for the fact that it was stolen, Shea Tortoni probably would be a pretty obscure painting in Manet's career. It is a small sketch-like rendering of a man enjoying an afternoon writing at a cafe. Rather strangely, because there's much more expensive things, valuable things, prettier things even, Shea Tortoni might be my favorite of the five paintings taken that day. I know that that's a bit of art historical heresy, but I did once photoshop Gus into that painting. And whenever I look at it, I see Gus in a top hat with a little pen clutched in his mitt of a paw. For those of you who aren't familiar with that reference, you can make your life a little more magical by checking out some of the historic posts on the podcast's Instagram page. R.I.P. to the big man with the big paws. Most other people who look at this work do not see a reproduction featuring a large yellow lab midnighting as a Parisian dandy. They instead see a young mustachioed man wearing a top hat and a frock coat. That man is sitting at a cafe table, scribbling away in a notebook while enjoying a miscellaneous amber beverage in a short stemmed glass. Still in the act of writing, the man looks up, like someone just called out his name. The overall effect is one of a candid photograph, albeit one rendered blotchily in oils. In many ways, this painting encapsulates the prolific career of its painter, Edouard Manet, who was a pioneering figure in the advent of not just Impressionism, but of modernism overall in France. Some of his most widely recognized works include Olympia, aka Naked Lady on a Couch, Les Déjeuner sur l'herbe, aka Naked Ladies Hanging Out with Some Closed Gentlemen in a Park, and a Bar at the Folie Belger, aka a Parisian lady bartender behind a marble counter waiting to take an order. For someone so important to the history of arts, we don't know too too much about Manet, especially compared to his contemporaries like Edgar Dega, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. The reason we know so much about someone like Gauguin or Van Gogh is because they left behind hundreds of letters. We don't have that with Manet. We know that he was born in Paris in January of 1832 to an upper class family. While he was supposed to pursue a career as a naval officer, he ultimately became an artist. And not just that, but a watershed figure in Paris's art scene, and I suppose eventually in the history of art in general. These days, in 2025, Manet's paintings are extremely inoffensive. Uh, maybe, you know, minus some of the naked ladies. You could show just about any one of them to your nana, and she would think it was a perfectly acceptable painting. But hoop boy, in the 1850s and 1860s Paris, people reacted like Manet was committing artistic arson. As I said in the narrative portion that introduced this bit, one of his paintings showing a bunch of people enjoying a concert, like there's literally no one naked in it at all, they're just out enjoying a concert, made one man so angry that he threatened to commit violence, though it is unclear whether that was in general or specifically toward the painting, the concerts at the Tuileries. Manet's approach to both what he painted and how he painted it was unlike anything that Paris had ever seen. He used quick, broken brush strokes and chose to paint modern scenes of Paris, of regular people out doing regular things. These were all totally new concepts in Paris at the time, and Manet's full embrace of newness, of a different way of doing things, utterly upset everyone who preferred tradition and the way things always were. In addition to this focus on modern life in Paris, Manet's work is characterized by loose brush strokes and dabs and daubs of paint that capture the impression of a scene, but not necessarily its exact details. Some of his works are more precise than others, with Shea Tortoni being one of the more looser, sort of sketchier paintings, and that's actually probably what it was. Manet was known to bring out his painting supplies and just do sketches while out and about. The size would also be a good suggestion of what this was, that it was a sketch, because the painting is a little bit bigger than your average piece of printing paper, while Manet's finished works, or you know, like not sketches, are generally speaking much larger. So one of the questions that I had going into this was who the heck is Tortoni and why are we at his house? That is what Shea Tortoni translates to. It translates to at the house of Tortoni. Or more simply, just at Tortoni's. That is how I, Lindsay, found a research rabbit hole down which to venture, and I thus spent an entire Sunday afternoon reading about ice cream culture in Paris in the 19th century. Like I said last episode, when it comes to research, I have a problem. Here's a little bit about what I found. Cafe Tortoni was one of the more happening cafes in Paris. It attracted a variety of individuals, from the fancy, well-to-do types to artists and even incognito royalty. The cafe was particularly well known for its ice creams and other ice-based desserts, including shaved ice, sorbet, and granitas. But think fancy, fancy ice cream that was very novel and probably pretty expensive. And that wasn't just all Tortones served. It's what they were known for. But in the mornings, stockbrokers would come and drink coffee. In the afternoon, artists would come and talk about and exchange their works over glasses of Absinthe, also known as the Green Devil or the Green Fairy. And in the evening, people flocked to Tortoni's for after-theater drinks and desserts. For a painting that is so well known by its name, Shea Tortoni, we don't actually know if this painting indeed shows someone at Tortoni's. There's no level of specificity that would suggest a particular cafe. I've even seen one scholar of Manet's work insist that this man is not at Tortoni's, but is instead at Cafe Nouvelle Athènes, which was another hot spot in Paris. But I find that equally ridiculous because, again, there is zero level of specificity as to what this cafe is. Before the year 1920, the painting was simply referred to as Le Journaliste, a title that was given likely not because this man was for sure a journalist, but rather because he appears to be writing in a notebook. Years later, someone simply called him a journalist, and that was that. It was only later, in 1920 and 1922, that the painting first appears in sales catalogs under a different name, Cafe Tortoni. We have no idea why someone chose to call it such, though we do know that Manet did frequent Cafe Tortoni. It was one of his favorite haunts in the city, but that's not saying a lot because he had quite a few of those. The man loved a cafe. There's also some theories, not just about what cafe is being depicted, but who the man is in the painting. The most common theory is that it's not a journalist at all, but rather Georges Chenard Houcher, who was the first to own the painting. So people naturally have thought, you know, like, oh, if he was the first to own it, it must be him. That identification, however, falls apart when you consider that most art historians date Shea Tortoni to between 1875 and 1880, when Shina Huchet was at most 16 years old. The gentleman depicted in Shea Tortoni looks young, but not that young. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't really matter who this man is or whether the cafe is in fact Tortoni's. What matters is that Shea Tortoni, whether it was in fact Tortoni's or not, exemplifies Manet's commitment to painting modern life in Paris and his engagement with cafe culture, which define much of his life and career, both of which were cut short when he died in 1883. He was just 51 years old. Chez Tortoni was a relatively late addition to Mrs. Gardner's collection. She purchased it in January of 1922 for $3,400. In some way, it was a surprising purchase, because Mrs. Gardner demonstrated a strong preference for old master painters from centuries past, not modern painters with whom she was a contemporary. And she was a contemporary of Manet. He was less than a decade older than her, and they were both knocking around Paris in the mid to late 1850s, when Mrs. Gardner was attending boarding school in the city. She also returned to Paris numerous times throughout her life. It was a city that she knew very well. While not confirmed, I personally like to think that Mrs. Gardner enjoyed some ice creams at Tortoni's. Seems like it would be her kind of place. While Mrs. Gardner's motivations for purchasing Shea Tortoni are unclear, I like to think that she felt a pull towards this small painting because it recaptured a glimpse of modern Paris, a city that Mrs. Gardner absolutely adored. Maybe not as much as Venice, sure, but it was in Paris that she first met her husband Jack, who was the 19-year-old brother of the then 16-year-old Isabella Stewart's schoolfriend. Though it would be a couple more years before their courtship started in earnest. While perhaps only real in my head, I like to think that when the 80-some-year-old Mrs. Gardner first saw her newest acquisition of Shea Tortoni, with the dapper young man Manet had rendered in Oils, that she was transported back, if only for a moment, to those golden days in Paris when she still had so much life and love in front of her. It's a theory, but it's one that doesn't strike me as all that far-fetched. Who doesn't want to reflect on some of the happiest times in their life? Manet's paintings are a great way of doing that. There's little objective about them. In trying to capture how a moment feels as much as how it looked, Manet opened up the doors for interpretation and Projection of seeing what we want or choose to see in the broken brush strokes of a man who sought to capture the most fleeting of moments, the ones that most people might not even notice. She Tortoni itself is a painting that most people passing through the Gardner Museum probably wouldn't spare a second glance to. If anything, the empty frame is more of an eye grabber than the painting ever was. When it was still in a gallery, the painting blended in, and not in a bad way. Mrs. Gardner loved and delighted in individual objects, but when it came to curating her museum, she arranged works to be seen together in certain spaces that she decorated a certain way. The Blue Room was more of a memory box than an art gallery, and it features many works by artists that Mrs. Gardner personally knew, including many works by John Singer Sgt and a few by Ralph Curtis, the artist friend who accompanied Mrs. Gardner to the auction at which she bought the concert. There are also works by Lewis Kronberg, who is an artist I don't know, but I do know that he helped Mrs. Gardner get Shea Tortoni. He was the one who purchased it on her behalf in New York in 1922. The little painting would fit perfectly into this room, and so to see an empty frame is jarring in a way that the painting itself would not have been, because it belonged. As for where it is now, Shay Tortoni is one of the few Gardner works that was allegedly seen in the years following the heist. While Shay Tortoni does not get the love that the concert and Storm on the Sea of Galilee get, you do occasionally see it mentioned in coverage of the heist, either when discussing Rick Abbith, the security guard, or one of the potential suspects, a man by the name of George Reisfelder. For more on them, see episode 44. At least two people attest to seeing a small oil painting of a man in a top hat hanging in Reisfelder's apartment before he died in 1991. Those two people are his brother Richard and Richard's ex-wife Donna. Donna specifically says that she remembers the painting because, one, it wasn't something that you might expect Reisfelder to have, and two, it was in a cheap gold frame, the kind that you might buy at a big box store like Walmart's. That frame cuts a very sharp contrast to the fineness of the painting. Today you might not actually think anything of it, because you can buy very high-quality textured reproductions of these and other works, but in 1991, that was not a common thing. And so the painting in the gold frame on Reisfelder's wall stood out like a sore thumb. After George Reisfelder's death, Richard Reisfelder never saw the painting again, and he has no idea where it is today. In one Boston Herald article, though, he makes it very clear what he would do with the painting if he ever did find it. Quote, I want to give it to Anthony Amore as a present. End quote. Anthony Amore is, of course, the gardener's chief of security and the primary investigator for the museum on the case. I, for one, love presents, and my birthday happens to be in March. If anyone wants to give me something, a stolen painting that we can turn in together would certainly do the trick. Afterwards, maybe we can even get some ice cream. Of course, it won't be as good as Tortoni's, but it'll do. That was the original ending to this section, but I had to come on and do a little addendum because in the past two days, as I have been editing, I noticed a little change to the Gardener's website entry for Shea Tortoni. For some reason, on October 27th, 2025, the object commentary was updated with a little blurb about the Gardner heist and reiterates the fact that there is a $10 million reward for the return of the 13 works in good condition. It also lists the phone number and email to contact with any information and reiterates a promise of confidentiality and anonymity. Now I'm not in the business of starting any, you know, like new theories, getting people's hopes up, whatever, but I find it intriguing that Shea Tortoni is the only work whose website has been updated. And I know for a fact that this little blurb was not there two days ago when I last consulted it. After six months of researching this topic, I know these object websites better than my own face. Now, they might be in the process of updating all of the entries, likely in response to the recent Louvre heist and capitalizing on some renewed public interest in historical art crimes. That is a very valid and probably the most likely scenario. But, as of October 29th, two days after I noticed that initial change, Shay Tortoni is still the only entry that has been updated. It's probably nothing, but it could be something. I'm just saying that we might be getting ice cream together sooner rather than later. As to whether that ice cream will be enhancing a celebration or soothing disappointment, only time will tell. I, Lindsay, will be eating ice cream either way. Men, both familiar and strange, now stood among his belongings, whispering in low tones. They were contemplating the sheer number of boxes and stacks of paper that occupied the floors and tables of this apartment, the one the ghost had never called home, even as the body he had left behind had spent years within its walls, shut away like a hermit in a cave. The man the ghost had been had hated this place, the one he was forced to inhabit after his longtime home had been demolished to do what Paris often did: make room for the new. He was only just now seeing it for the first time in earnest. In the final years of his life, his eyes had failed him, plunging the world into darkness. But now he saw things clearly. Even after over half a decade, he hadn't bothered to unpack anything but the necessities, the ones these men were paying no attention. The rest of his life, including over six decades, as one of the most prolific artists in the city, moldered in boxes, collecting dust. It was through those boxes that the men now sorted. The ghost looked over their shoulders as they pulled out this work and that. Each one a snapshot of the life he had once lived and the impressions of it that he had captured on paper and canvas. There was so much of him here, so many memories, ones that he had all but forgotten as age had eaten away at not just his senses, but his sense of self. Now, each and every one would be sold off piecemeal to the highest bidder. It was everything that the ghost had feared during his life. He wished now that he had had this strength, first of spirits and later of body, to destroy all that he did not wish the world to see. In his lifetime, doing so would have felt like a betrayal, a self-mutilation on par with that of Mr. Wilde's Dorian Gray. Instead, the man had made those around him promise that they would do what he could not. Now, those same people stood amidst the piles and the boxes, cataloging his life's work and preparing it for sale. Whether cowardice or kindness, they had at least waited to make their moves, biding their time until death had claimed the final dregs of life that had clung to the artist for so long. Once upon a time, the man would have raged against this indignity, but now he only felt profound sadness. But worst of all was the stamp. These people, the ones he had called family and trusted as friends, knew that the man had never signed a work until it was ready for sale. It was for that very reason that the hundreds of drawings, prints, and paintings through which they now sorted bore no sign of his name. But these men had a plan to change that. They had engineered a stamp, one that, when pressed into the corner of a drawing, might fool some into thinking the work had been signed. But even those that did not fool would see value in those five letters, taking them as a sign of legitimacy rendered in crimson ink. But for the ghost, the ink was as good as blood forced unwillingly from his very veins. All the ghost could do now was watch, sad and regretful, as he lingered between this place and the next, fading a little more each time the red stamp was pressed to the corner of a page, of a painting, of a print. If spoken aloud as many times as it was stamped, the name would lose its shape, its meaning, sounding ever stranger on the tongue. A thousand times over again, degas. Of the thirteen works stolen during the Gardner heist, six are works on paper. One etching, the Rembrandt self-portrait, and five drawings by French artist Edgar Degas. The taking of these drawings was one of the many strange choices made by the Gardner thieves that morning. They had had to walk through several galleries to get to the small room where the drawings were displayed. Those through rooms included the early Italian and Raphael rooms, which, true to their names, contain works by some of the most celebrated individuals in Italian arts. During the heist, one thief walked through those rooms, past masterpieces of Italian art, to the short gallery, where the Degas drawings were displayed in custom-built cabinets that Mrs. Gardner herself helped design. When shut, the cabinet looked like a plain cabinet. You'd think you'd be able to open the doors and it would reveal an interior storage space. Instead, the doors revealed hinged panels that you could essentially flip through like big wooden pages. The five Dugar drawings were on the exterior of that cabinet, which, from the limited crime scene photos that I have seen, had remained shut during the theft. The thieves took the works by smashing out the front glazing and snatching the drawings. They also nabbed an Eagle Finial or flag topper that was just a few feet away. Of all of the 13 works that I talk about, even the Eagle Finial, these were the ones that I was thinking to myself, I'm not gonna have anything to say. There's nothing to say, but oh boy, was I wrong. To be clear, Edgar Degas, the author of these stolen works, is not someone to sneeze at. He's not not a big deal. Degas is a massive name in art history, and his works go for millions of dollars. On a personal note, he is one of my favorite artists, at least visually speaking. I really like his pastels of dancers. Questioning why the thieves took these drawings is not as much about Dugah, but rather why the thieves didn't target other much higher value items. Before we discuss those drawings, which I go to in more detail than I expected, such as The Life of Me, I think some background on Degas is warranted. That'll help put into context some of this sort of what the heckery of these drawings. Degas was born in Paris in 1834, making him a direct contemporary of Edouard Manet and just a little older than Isabella Stuart Gardner. Even from a young age, Degas showed significant artistic aptitude, but his father hoped his son would become a lawyer. Instead, Degas failed out of law school and went to art school instead. Typical. But it's also fortuitous, because Degas became one of the most celebrated artists of Impressionism that there ever was. Dugas lived well into his 80s, so he had a very long career, during which he worked across multiple media. He is best known for his oil paintings, pastels, and these days especially, sculptures in bronze. He was also a prolific printmaker, working in both etchings and lithographs. Like his contemporary Manet, and many other artists of the time, Degas embraced the concept of modernity, the idea of modern life out and about in the city of Paris, and he had certain themes that he would return to again and again with an almost obsessive fascination, including dancers, jockeys, horses, and bathers, which is to say, women taking baths. Are those fixations weird and problematic? Probably, but that's a can of worms for a different episode. The first of the five works is a landscape-ish type deal showing a procession of people and horses near Florence, Italy. The drawing probably dates to the mid to late 1850s, when Degas was in his early twenties and traveling through Italy. Degas's father had family in Naples, and Degas spent the better part of three years moving between Naples, Rome, and Florence, among some other places, studying the works of the Italian greats. The procession near Florence has a kind of Polaroid quality to it, not just in that it seems to capture a moment in time, but also in that it has a kind of blurred quality to it. My 80s and 90s kids know what's up. Part of that is, of course, deliberate. After all, Degas was an impressionist, but it was also informed by the materials that Degat chose to use. Degas used pencil and sepia wash, which is akin to like a very lightly tinted watercolor, to render this landscape and procession on a 6x8 piece of paper. As for what it shows, there's some branches and foliage in the immediate foreground, a procession of ghostly looking figures in the midground, and a vague impression of Florence, or really just a city, in the background. If it weren't for the title, I would not even know that this procession was happening near Florence, a city that I have been to multiple times. That is in part due to how Degas rendered the scene. But I also think it's compounded by the fact that the drawing is over 150 years old, and from the reproduction on the Gardner website, doesn't look like it's in the greatest of conditions. But again, it's like 150 plus years old. What are you gonna do? My guess is that Degas made this drawing for himself as a kind of memento either during or soon after his travels. It was likely not something that anyone else was meant to see. He would have known that this was Florence, and that's really all that would have mattered. As far as I know, Dugah never returned to Italy after his three-year stay in his early twenties, but he remembered the experience with great fondness even decades later. He even called those years, quote, the most extraordinary period of my life. End quote. I too have spent quite a bit of time in Italy, and I have to say, I agree. At the Gardner Museum, the drawing of the procession through Florence shared a frame with another work, a watercolored titled Leaving the Paddock. In the Netflix series, This Is a Robbery, highly recommend. They show what these works looked like in the gallery. What struck me in looking at this was how small this work is. And that's that's a little weird because I know all of the measurements of the works, at least, you know, roughly, but when you only encounter them on a computer screen, it messes with your expectations. Leaving the paddock is only four by six and a half inches. To contextualize that, the average photo print that you can get from like Walgreens is four by six. The drawingslash watercolor, we're just gonna call it a drawing, shows two jockeys on horseback transitioning between the paddock, the holding area for horses, and a race track. The perspective is of a person standing with their back to the paddock, watching the jockeys and the horses proceed through a kind of outdoor corridor that leads to the track. Put it this way: all you see of the horses are their butts. One of the horses, including its butt and its jockey, are considerably closer, whereas the other sort of fades into the scene a bit as the horse makes its way onto the track. But that is not all that this work shows. You're getting the entire sense of the scene, the whole race day atmosphere as witnessed by someone standing outside of the race course. There's people buying tickets, or now that I'm thinking about it, probably placing bets. There's a crowd of people in the stands in the distance. There's passers-by, latecomers. It's a day at the racetrack. As with most things that Degas did, the style of the drawing is impressionistic. It's sketchy. But at the same time, there's also a high level of detail, particularly in the middle and left side of the work. Those have a much higher level of finish than the right, which is far sketchier and clearly unfinished. The fact that this was indeed an exercise is evident in the fact that Degau clearly drew several options for the main horse's legs before settling on what he ended up using. While he colored the, you know, quote-unquote final legs, if you will, with watercolor, he left a ton of pencil marks behind that show how he was considering positioning the legs. It's like seeing him think on the paper. While there is no date for this work, my best guess is that it's from the 1870s, maybe the early 1880s, before Dega, who went blind later in life, started to significantly lose his vision. I have a hard time imagining someone with advanced vision loss being able to do something not just this detailed but this small. Then again, like I said, it's just a guess. Whenever it was made, the drawing, and the one that we'll talk about next as well, is emblematic of Dugas's intense interest in horses and specifically horse racing, which is something that became very popular in Paris during his lifetime. It wasn't just the horses or the race day atmosphere that fascinated Degas. He was also profoundly interested in the men, the jockeys, who rode these horses. That is the subject of the third Gardner drawing, one given the title Three Mounted Jockeys. This is one of the largest drawings stolen during the heist, clocking in at 9.5 by 12 inches, making it slightly bigger than a leaf of printing paper. The drawing shows three jockeys. But these aren't three guys side by side on horses, though there are drawings by Digga of that very thing. It is instead the same jockey, or appears to be the same jockey, drawn several different times in different orientations. One is bigger and takes up half of the sheet. Whereas the others are smaller and oriented differently. I don't know if he started with the big one or the smaller ones, but at some point he rotated the paper 180 degrees and continued on sketching. The main jockey, which is to say the biggest one, appears to be pulling back on the reins of his horse. I've even seen some art historians refer to the fact that he might be preparing to dismount the horse, though I personally don't think that that's the case. While I can see why someone might think that, given the placement of a highlight under the reins, that does kind of make it look like he's thrown up the leg. I think it's just a weird placement of a highlight that might be emphasized in a poor reproduction. And that is no shade on the gardener, which is just doing the best it can with the old resources that it has. Then you have the two other jockeys, which are much smaller and are oriented kind of upside down compared to the bigger jockey. The more finished of the two is forward-facing, looks pretty unremarkable, while the other one, which is barely finished, may show a jockey almost dismounting or perhaps just looking back. The poses definitely aren't definitive, in part because the horses on which these jockeys sit are really just suggestions rendered in simple line. As for what purpose this kind of sketch served, all we can do is guess. Some sketches Dugas made relate more closely to known paintings than others. And I've seen a couple of art historians, specifically Gene Sutherland Boggs, hypothesize that Dugas may have used these sketches as kind of stock figures. He's obviously not bringing jockeys on horseback into his studio when he wants to paint a race scene. So having these kinds of studies would have been very helpful references. There's also the fact that Dugat was obsessive when it came to his art. He would draw things again and again and again, and he rarely, if ever, threw anything out. In addition to jockeys, Degas also had a fixation with dancers and performances. The final two drawings by Dugat, taken in the Gardener Heist, speak to his engagement with that sphere. I am going to talk about these together because they are both preparatory drawings for the same project. We know that Dugas made these drawings in 1884, which is when the 50-year-old artist agreed to design a program for a charity soiree in Paris. The idea was that various performers and musicians would come together for an evening of short performances, people would buy tickets, and all of that money would go to the school the benefit was being held for, which was located in Nantes. Degas had had a few friends who attended the school back in the day, which might explain how he got involved in the project. It's an unusual case in his career because Degas was a very private artist and man. It was very uncommon for him to engage in more commercial, public-facing projects. But hey, if it's a favor for a friend and for a good cause, why not? Degas worked on this project for weeks, and he produced four preliminary drawings and several etchings in anticipation of the final product, which took the form of a lithographic print. I am not going to go into lithography too deeply because ultimately the drawings at the Gardener are not lithographs, they are preparatory drawings for a lithograph, but the gist of it is that lithography was a type of printmaking that was very different from etching. It involves fixing an image onto a smooth limestone slab using various solvents, chemicals, and the basic principle that oil and water repel each other. Artists could draw straight on the stone or transfer an image through another means. The Gardner drawings are two of the four preparatory works that Degas made for the program project. The drawings then led to an etching, which is what was used to transfer the image onto the lithographic stone, which was then used to print the program. Weirdly, given that they are for the same project, the drawings themselves are not exactly the same size, but they're pretty similar. One of the drawings is 9.5 inches by 12.5 inches, while the other is 10.5 inches by 15 inches, so slightly bigger. And I am, of course, rounding to the nearest half, so that's just a rough estimate, it's not exact. The drawings are also similar, but not similar, in the fact that they are both on paper, but different kinds of paper. One is slightly thicker, while the other is more of a tracing paper texture. But even back in the 90s, when people could see these works, that difference might not be totally apparent, because at some point each of the drawings was glued onto another sheet of paper. A likely well-intentioned move that caused significant damage to the works, like rips. With regards to the images on the drawings, each one is divided into four equal quadrants, three of which contain images. The fourth quadrant at the bottom right is blank, leaving room for the actual program, the text, to be printed. If I am interpreting the drawings correctly, each of the three quadrants containing images are not necessarily related to each other. I think of them as little vignettes that represent various components of the evening. That is definitely true of at least one of the quadrants on the lower left, where there are boats and two billowing smoke stacks, both of which seem to evoke some aspect of the city of Nantes, which is where the school that was benefiting from this soiree was located. The upper two quadrants of the drawings have a more subtle separation. I personally think that they represent two separate parts of the show, though I suppose it could be interpreted as a single moment in which multiple things are happening on stage. Allow me to explain. You know they're dancers because one is in a tutu and they both be pointing them toes. A ballet person could probably even name the move that they're doing, but I unfortunately am not that person. In the upper right quadrant, there's a lot more going on. At the top, there's a woman who is singing. Like the ballet dancers, only part of her is visible, mostly her torso and her arms. She has a book in one hand, which is her libretto that she sings from, while the other is touching her chest as she presumably sings. The lower parts of this quadrant is dominated by an orchestra pit. It's rendered in such a way that the blank quadrant below, which is where the program would go, becomes a kind of wall separating the viewer from the pit. And you know it's an orchestra pit because the top of a harp and the neck and scroll of a double bass emerge from it, creating that sense that there's some kind of wall, and on the other side there are musicians. There's also a conductor who is the only figure with a head in this entire design. There is also an object that I think is supposed to be a bow for the double bass that extends beyond the pit into the lower right quadrant, which again is blank in the anticipation of text. I like this detail of the bow extending beyond the quadrant because it creates a cool sense of space and interrupts the otherwise very obvious compartmentalization of the scene. Unfortunately, that detail was removed before printing. That description of the visuals covers both of the drawings. As for how the two different one of them has more detail than the other. I see this primarily in the people, who are more fully realized and detailed, and the ships in the lower left quadrant, which are clearly ships. In the other, they just kind of look like cross-hatched lines. We can make the educated guess that the more detailed drawing was the final one before Degas created an etching of the image that was eventually transferred to the lithographic stone and used to make the program. In addition to being a crucial part of this process, these drawings capture some of the hallmarks of Degas's approach to composition. In many prints and paintings, Degas rejected traditional viewpoints in favor of capturing something of the experience of attending a performance versus the performance itself. For example, he would include things that obstruct a person's view, like the tops of people's heads and the upper parts of instruments, which we see here. Rather coolly, we do still have impressions of this program, the finished program, which allow us to see the final product. Now, to be honest, I was not very impressed by the program. It not only looks a bit too rudimentary and sketch-like, but there's also a really odd juxtaposition between the images that Dugat created and the font used to print the program, which is really, really fancy. I, for one, much prefer the drawings than the actual printed product. Even Dugas was not crazy about the outcome of the print. Okay, maybe that's not entirely accurate, but he was pissed when he found out that about seven years later, someone exhibited the program in an exhibition about printmaking at the Ecolet de Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was the only Degas print included, prompting him to write a very strongly worded letter to the organizer of the event, as well as to his printer, the man who made the programs, and as it turns out, kept several copies for himself, one of which he lent to this exhibition. The letter from Dega makes it very clear that he was furious about all of this, and he even called the inclusion of the program in the show a joke. This hullabaloo leads nicely into the final point that I want to make about these five drawings by Dugas, which is that they were probably never intended to see the light of day. Dugas' later life was rife with controversy and tragedy, both for reasons of his own making and not. In addition to his failing eyesight and health, it became very clear in the last 15 to 20 years of his life that Dugah was both an anti-Semite and a misogynist, which is to say that he held deeply prejudiced views against Jewish people and women. Dugah lost many of his friends because of these views, and he became increasingly isolated as a result, becoming essentially a hermit. Dugah was also something of a hoarder, and he kept virtually every scrap of paper he had ever drawn something on. After his death in 1917, Degas's apartment was filled to the brim with his own personal art collection and boxes upon boxes of drawings, prints, and other works that he had kept over the course of his 60-plus year career. When he was still of sound mind, Degas had gotten someone's word. I'm not sure if it was a family member or a friend, I think it was a friend. But either way, he got someone to promise him that they would destroy the majority of the works he left behind in his apartment. While he could never destroy the works himself, Dugar could also not imagine them out in the world for public consumption, hence the promise. The fact that we are talking about five such works tells you exactly how this story ends. Worst of all, from a betrayal perspective, is the fact that his family made a stamp of Dugas's signature that they dipped in red ink and put on the corner of every single drawing that remained in the apartment, all with the intention of proving their authenticity at auction. The untrained eye might not even realize that the stamp is not a true signature. But for those of us who know better, which is me and now you, the signature is a collection of literal and figurative scarlet letters. Ones that prompt us to question whether or not the work we are looking at is one that Dagas ever intended for us to see. One of Dagas's few remaining friends called these actions exactly what they were: treason. But Dagas's family didn't care. They had works to sell and money to make. There were so many works left behind in his apartment/slash studio that his family had to host four separate auctions over the course of two years to sell them all. It was at the last of these auctions that Mrs. Gardner purchased the five works discussed here. She paid between 330 and 1,400 francs for each drawing, all of which were sold in pairs. She paid the least for the plans for the program, and the most for the drawing of the three mounted jockeys, which was paired with a drawing of a horse that is still in the Gardner collection. There is really no saying why Mrs. Gardner was drawn to these drawings. Well, there's a little pun there, drawn to the drawings. It could be as simple as she bought them because she liked them and she could. She clearly had reasons, though, because she rejected or declined to purchase the two other designs for the program that were sold at the same time, one of which sold at auction in 2010 for $40,000 for a graphite drawing on paper. That is insane. There is also no good explanation for why the thieves behind the Gardner Heist targeted these works, and they did target them. One thief left the Dutch room, walked to the short gallery, punched the glass out from the frames, and pocketed these five works. These drawings were not trophies. Low-level Boston mobsters wearing fake bad mustaches are not targeting these drawings out of the blue. Someone told them to steal them. Why? The simplest answer is often the most likely. Much like Mrs. Gardner when she first bought them, maybe this mysterious puppet master instructed the thieves to take the drawings because they wanted them, and they could. In that respect, the sale of these drawings in 1919 by the Dugoff family shares a common motivation with their taking from the Gardner Museum some 70 years later, greed. Both of these actions were thefts of sorts, one quite literally, and the other more figuratively. Both are shameful in their own way. But one of those betrayals gave art to the world, while the other took it away, depriving generations of people from the chance to see wonderful things. And these drawings are just that. They are wonderful things, albeit ones that we were probably never meant to see. Now, are they masterpieces? No, absolutely not. But let me let you in on a little secret. Come here. Come here. A work of art does not have to be a masterpiece for us to mourn its loss. And to think otherwise is a real damn shame. He was also sweating. That had a way of happening when Bobby came around. Bobby and Paul went way back, but their lives had diverged in major ways over the decades. Even so, Paul was fond of Bobby, in whose face he could still see the shadows of a teenaged friend. Now Bobby was more like a client, one who would bring Paul various items to appraise and potentially sell. Paul had not been expecting Bobby on that spring morning in 1990, when Bobby stepped into view of the security camera on the outside of the Boston building in which Paul ran his business. Seeing him on the camera, Paul inwardly cursed. He and Bobby had known each other since they were kids, but in recent years, each encounter had become more uncomfortable than the last. When your childhood friend has been jailed multiple times for robbery and served as the driver for one of Boston's most notorious mob figures, it was only natural that Paul doubted Bobby's stories about where he'd gotten that ruby ring or that diamond necklace. Paul didn't even like to ask. Today, Bobby was holding a bulky package, one that could not have possibly contained jewelry. Sweat prickled on Paul's forehead as Bobby took the seat across from his desk. He wasted no time in unwrapping the package. When the shiny eagle head poked out of the wrappings, Paul's stomach dropped into his toes, and his heart pounded a warning against his sternum. He wanted to vomit. The object was about 10 inches tall, an eagle perched on a square plinth. The bird's wings were opened wide and its head was turned to the side, beak hardly open. Paul recognized it at once, and not because he was an expert in Napoleonic symbols. You would be hard pressed to find someone in Boston who couldn't identify the work. It had been in the papers for weeks, as one of the many works stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum in March. Horrified, Paul said the first thing that came to mind. Jesus, Bobby, why didn't you steal the Mona Lisa? Bobby, however, seemed quite pleased with himself. He laughed at his longtime friend's clear dismay, even held out the finial, urging Paul to hold it to get a sense of its weight. But Paul kept his hands resolutely on the desk. The last thing he needed was his fingerprints all over the gilded surface of a thefted object. It was the easiest appraisal of Paul's career to date. It did not matter how much bronze it comprised or the layer of gilding that covered its surface, the finial was utterly and completely worthless, as no one in their right mind would ever buy such a high-profile stolen good. As they would say in the Boston mob scene, the finial was too hot to handle. Bobby was not pleased with this response, but Paul didn't care. Paul didn't want to know anything more than he already did. And more than anything, he wanted Bobby to leave. As Paul watched his childhood friend retreat down the hallway, repackaged item in hand, he couldn't quell the feeling he always had when he and Bobby parted ways. That deep sense of foreboding that he might never see Bobby again. He never did. Less than a year later, Bobby disappeared, only to reappear a few weeks later, dead in the trunk of his abandoned car. Paul's heart ached for his old friend, but his grief was mixed with guilt. He could not deny a glimmer of relief that Bobby Donati would never darken his doorstep again with his stolen work in tow. As for the Eagle Finial, Paul wished he had never seen it at all. It did not matter that he had no plans to go to the police or the museum. Doing that would have been as good as digging his own grave, or perhaps putting his own body in a trunk. It didn't matter that his information might lead to the recovery of the Gardner works. Sure, he would be a hero to the city, but at what cost? Even the $1 million reward had little attraction. Paul had a family. He had a life. A dead man, even if a millionaire, Has neither. It took over two decades for Paul to dredge up the courage to tell his story, first to the police, and then a few years later, to the world. He knew it was probably too late, but when it came to the Gardner works, late was better than never. He had seen the finial. He knew it was in Bobby Donati's possession in the aftermath of the heist. As for where it was now, Paul only knew one thing. It was not with Bobby Donati. Grab a bit of paper towel, dab the edge of your lips, because I know that you have been positively frothing at the mouth for our penultimate object. The famous, the infamous, the absolutely thrilling gold-plated eagle finial. That's right. I wrote 3,000 words about a flag accessory, and you now get to hear all about it. What a time to be alive. I do not know what's more inexplicable. The fact that the thieves stole the bird-themed flag accessory, or that they first tried to steal the flag to which it belongs. A tri-color silk flag bearing the insignia of the 1st Regiment of Grenadiers of Foot of Napoleon's Imperial Guard. Yes, you heard that mouthful correctly. The first regiment of Grenadiers of Foot of Napoleon's Imperial Guard. If my brief scratching of the surface of Napoleonic army strategy is any indication, the 1st Regiment of Grenadiers of Foot was an elite and incredibly devoted group of soldiers in Napoleon's army, who had the job of flanking the Emperor at the Battle of Waterloo. Their flag, like their formal name, is a lot. The flag is composed of tri-color silk bands in blue, white, and red, and on the surface of that silk is a veritable explosion of gold embroidery, including the full name of the army regiment, and all kinds of imperial symbols, including the crown, a bunch of bees, an N surrounded by a laurel wreath, and of course, eagles. Let's just say that there is absolutely nothing subtle about this thing, which is fitting, because we are talking about Napoleon, the Napoleon, Napoleon I. A man who did not know the definition of subtlety. Far from it. He was a man who absolutely adored ostentation. For those who are unaware, like I'm sure you've heard of him, but you might not have heard of him, if you know what I mean. Napoleon Bonaparte was Emperor of France from 1804 to 1814, after which he was exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy. He did make a spectacular return to power in 1815, one that lasted all of three months before a little battle known as Waterloo saw Napoleon defeated for good. I mean, he survived that battle, but he was exiled for real for real to the island of St. Helens off the coast of Western Africa, which is where he died in 1821. As much as I dislike Napoleon as a concept, a character, historical figure, man, you know, basically all of the ways you can dislike someone, I cannot deny that Napoleon was really good at branding and using images in very effective ways. One of his preferred symbols was the eagle, which was big in both the Roman and the Carolingian empires, but also others. The eagle has long been and continues to be a symbol of power and strength. In July of 1804, just months after being declared emperor, for the first time, Napoleon decreed that the eagle in the manor of antiquity was to become the official emblem of the First Empire. As a result, it would also top the flags of each of his military regiments. In doing this, Napoleon took inspiration directly from the eagle standards used during Roman times, which is to say the sort of like eagle emblems they carried around on a stick. This is just one of the many ways that Napoleon evoked imagery of ancient Rome during his time as emperor. He was absolutely obsessed with the Romans. And not like, you know, pay for a photograph of the gladiator outside the Colosseum, kind of obsessed. Napoleon was obsessed to the point where he actually made himself emperor and became one of the most powerful people in the entire world. Like that's the level of obsession that we're talking here. The eagles that Napoleon ordered in 1804 were designed after a drawing by one of his favorite sculptors, Antoine Denis Chaudet, and were cast in bronze and gilded by Pierre-Philippe Toumir. The finials measure in at just above 10 inches tall. They show the Imperial Eagle perched and upright, with its wings spread and its head to the side, giving a very strong, proud profile. The eagle's beak is slightly open, and one of its claws is clutching a rod that is meant to symbolize the thunderbolt of Jupiter, aka Zeus. Now, this is where I have the biggest beef with this eagle finial. That's right, I have beef with a flag accessory. Because the average person is not going to know that this is a thunderbolt. That is, unless they got up so close to it that they could see the thunderbolt pattern on its otherwise very non-thunderbolty looking rod thing. Now that one I will blame on the ancient Romans, who were the ones who came up with the worst imitation of a thunderbolt that I have ever seen. One way I can think to describe it is two closed pine cones stuck together end to end, but with like a swirly pattern, like those twisty lollipops that you can buy, the ones that have a kind of corkscrew shape. Like I said, it's a terrible interpretation of a thunderbolt, and I will take it up with the ancient Romans the next time that I see them. Thunderbolt shade aside, there were several versions of this eagle made over the course of the First Empire, which lasted about a decade. The first batch from 1804 were by far the most artistically accomplished and aesthetically sophisticated. They were much more detailed and finely crafted, especially when it came to things like the feathers, different textures, the talons, and even the Thunderbolt. Later Thunderbolts somehow looked even less like a Thunderbolt than they did to begin with, which, let me tell you, is saying something. While aesthetically and artistically very accomplished, there was one significant drawback to these early eagles. They were incredibly heavy, weighing in at between four to five pounds. That might not seem like a lot, but anyone who has lifted a small chihuahua knows that four to five pounds is not negligible, especially if you are carrying that thing into battle. The eagles made in 1804 were distributed in this big to-do event, known very appropriately as the distribution of the Eagle Standards. French painter Jacques-Louis David painted a version of that event, in which you can actually see these flags and finials in action. It is pretty cool to see a version of what this scene might have looked like, even through the, you know, sycophantic hero worship filter that David puts on all of his Napoleonic scenes. Now the Gardner finial is very clearly not one of the originals from 1804. It is still a lovely object, presumably, I've never seen it, but it is not as visually sophisticated as that first model. The museum website dates the finial to 1813 to 1814, meaning it was probably one of the last eagles made before Napoleon fell from power in 1814, at which point a ton of eagles and other imperial stuff was trashed. When Napoleon had a resurgence in 1815, there was another batch of eagles made to replenish the supply, which once again largely fell from grace when Napoleon finally got his little tush exiled for good. I would assume that a lot of those finials were melted down for the bronze, but that's just based on general historical knowledge of what happens to bronze objects in the aftermath of these kinds of things. But the eagle was not gone for good, huh no? In the 1850s, the Imperial Eagle makes yet another comeback with the rise of the Second Empire, which somewhat confusingly was led by Napoleon III, who was the nephew of Napoleon I. During the heights of the Second Empire, there was a young American girl living in Paris. Her name was Isabella Stuart. She was there to attend finishing school that would essentially prepare her for her future life as a well-to-do socialite, wife, and hopefully mother. Isabella's time in Paris was profoundly impactful on the young woman, and while there, she developed what would become a lifelong interest in French culture, literature, art, and history, and she would return again and again to the French capital throughout the rest of her long life. Through her collecting habits, it is clear that Mrs. Gardner developed a fascination for a number of historical figures, but few more so than Napoleon. Over the course of decades, she amassed quite the collection of Napoleonic memorabilia, including the flag of the 1st Regiment of Grenadiers of Foot and its accompanying finial, which Mrs. Gardner bought in 1880 from a New York art dealer for about $300. That makes the finial the first of the 13 stolen works that ever entered Mrs. Gardner's collection. The Napoleonic flag and its finial had pride of place in the Gardner's home on Beacon Street. Sadly, that home does not exist anymore, which is a real bummer, but we do have photographs showing the interior, and you can see that the flag stood directly beside the fireplace in the entryway of the home, right at the base of the main staircase. I always really enjoy finding those kinds of photographs. It just makes these things sort of come alive and make sense in a different way that they might not have before. I was interested to see, though, that even in their home, the flag was framed as it now is in the gallery where it remains. Now I understand the rationale behind that choice, but a flat, structured flag will never strike me as normal. It reminds me of the posters you have at Spencer's that you can flick through. But you know, the Eagle Finial is definitely cool. About two decades after acquiring the flag and finial, Mrs. Gardner moved house. She moved from Beacon Street to uh what is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She decided to place the flag in the shorts gallery. That put it just feet away from the Digga drawings about which I spoke earlier. There's not a whole lot of information about the Short Gallery and what happened there during the heist. Most of the attention is naturally on the Dutch room and how things went down in there. But in the Netflix documentary, This is a Robbery, they do show photos that I have never seen anywhere else of the aftermath of the theft in the shorts gallery. One of the gentlemen who speaks as a kind of talking head in this documentary states that it was in the short gallery that the thieves started to rush. Something evidenced by the fact that they attempted to take the flag. They stood on the lower part of the drawing cabinet to reach it and took precious time to undo several of the screws in the frame before giving up on that and instead taking the finial. If I understand correctly, which I believe the finial screwed directly onto the pole, which would make it a lot easier to just, you know, twist off. To this day, you can see the bit at the top of the frame where the finial should be, where it should be screwed on. But that is essentially the only sign that this was ever there to begin with. As with all things related to the Gardener Heist, it is a mystery as to why the thieves took the finial. It seems like one of the more likely like trophy or souvenir type grabs than something that would have been on a shopping list of sorts. But if it's a souvenir, why try to take the flag? What is also strange is the fact that the museum has excluded the eagle finial from the $10 million reward for information leading to the return of the Gardener works. There is instead a separate $100,000 reward for the return of the finial. This is strange for two reasons. So the first is obvious, it separates the eagelfinial from the group. Why are they doing that? The second is that the reward, the $100,000, is likely significantly more money than the finial is worth. Of course, worth is a malleable concept, but just a few months ago in June of 2025, an original 1804 Gilt Eagle went up for sale through Sudbys, which estimated the work would go for between 30 and 50,000 euro. The 1804 bronze eagle is a premium example of this type of object, making it much more valuable than the eagles produced in later batches. So the estimate for a prime example of this finial is half the reward being offered for the return of the Gardner finial, which was almost certainly part of those later batches. I have no idea why this is the case. If I had to guess, and it is a guess, I would gander that there is some kind of information that the FBI and the museum have that has led them to privilege the eagle finial as something that should be set apart and that they want to draw attention to. In that respect, I put the eagle in the same category as the Rembrandt self-portrait, the small etching, as well as the coup, which I'll talk about shortly. The finial, the coup, and the Rembrandt self-portrait are all objects that could reasonably be sold to individuals without any idea that they are stolen goods. The Gardner's head of security, Anthony Amore, has asserted that there are certain marks or something, something, on the finial that would help the museum discern between an egofinial and the egofinial. This is Lindsay jumping on during editing. Cracked my microphone out for a little, a little update, which is that as of October 30th, 2025, the Egopinial is now the second object that has had its commentary updated in recent days. So it joins Shay Torney in that. So maybe they are updating the entries one by one, you never know. But the commentary now specifies quote, there is a separate $100,000 reward for information leading to the return of the finial. While the Gardner Museum's piece has distinct markings, eagle finials are numerous, and someone may unknowingly have the museum's finial in their possession. End quote. Fair enough, you've got, you know, an active thing going. I get it. I think I'm just so starved for new information when it comes to the Gardener Heist that even these little crumbs of website updates are exciting to me. Again, let's not get, you know, our gene shorts in too much of a twist, because they might just be updating the website entries. That is entirely possible, either because they finally have people to work on it, or maybe selectively in the aftermath of the Louvre heist. But still, I'm going to choose to see it as a hopeful sign. Because why not? As for the Eagle Finial, I'm going to leave you with some semi-delirious wisdom. Because you know what I always say? When life gives you inexplicably shaped thunderbolts, you take those wonky thunderbolts, you get your battle chihuahua, grab your four-pound Eagle Finial, and go make some frickin' lightning. The bronze vase was heavy in the woman's palm. She marveled at its weight and caressed the fine patterns covering its stem, as if she might absorb the geometric lines into her own age-wizened fingertips. She could not help but feel like she was holding time in the palm of her hand. After all, it was the oldest thing that she had ever purchased, so old that the world had long forgotten those who had carved its twin from clay and created the mold from which the coup would be reborn through the marriage of empty space and molten metal. The woman had always liked the idea of rebirth. Why else would she have chosen a phoenix as her emblem, that mythic beast of lore that emerged from the ashes of its own making? The woman had done the same so many times before, but she doubted that she would do so again. At least not in the way that she always had. She ran her fingertips over the nodules that emerged from the patterns on the vase's stem. The raised bumps were said to symbolize the eyes of another mythic beast, the ones the ancient Chinese called the Tao Tie. It was said to be one of four monsters of the world, a creature so gluttonous that it would eat men whole. It was a common motif on these ancient bronzes, one symbolizing the insatiable appetites of deceased souls. The woman knew appetite, the kind that went beyond the body to the soul within. She had dedicated much of her life and her fortune to the pursuit of beautiful things, building a collection that even she might never have imagined so many years before. When she looked into the raised nodules of the Taoti's eyes, the woman saw not a face, but an invitation to gaze upon the past, not just of long fallen dynasties, but also her own. She had once walked the great walls of China, witnessed the ruins of the old summer palace in Beijing, beheld the Temple of the Five Immortals in Guangzhou. The memories felt like yesterday, even as they seemed to belong to another lifetime. She had never visited the province of Hubei, where the bronze vase had allegedly been found at the bottom of an ancient well. It had been a rare find. Most other bronzes of this nature were found in graves. The woman liked to think that it had been waiting for her, even if others before her had owned it first. The remnants of her travels, small curios and curiosities procured long before she aspired to more, infused the spaces of the museum that she had built, outfitted, and organized herself. The one she demanded would remain untouched after her death. She knew that would be coming soon. Even as she had recently told an acquaintance that she would live to be 150. Once the prospect of more time would have excited her, but not now. Not when her failing body could barely move, and she depended entirely on the help of loyal staff to maintain her dignity and comfort. It was something the bronze vase would never understand, even if it could. The thing was ever steady, ever solid, the slow creep of a patina turning the surface more beautiful with each passing year. The flames of her candle glinted dully off the raised nodules of the Taotier's eyes. For a moment, the woman imagined that the abstracted creature was alive and hungry. The woman's lips curled into the closest thing they could make to a smile these days. Swallow her whole? She'd like to see it try. Unlike her favorite haunts of Venice and Paris, she would never return to the ports at Shanghai, the Forbidden City of Beijing, the Temple of Angkor Watts, or the bustling streets of Yogi Akarta. Even though she never went back, the trip had a profound effect on her. She was particularly fascinated by Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. But it wasn't until decades later that she started to actively collect Asian art, much of which she displayed in the so-called Chinese room of the newly opened Fenway Court, the museum we now know as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As you might have gathered from the context clues and it being America in the early 1900s, these so-called Chinese rooms were not reserved for the display of Chinese art, but rather featured art from all over Asia and the Middle East. All I can say is that while Mrs. Gardner was ahead of her time in many ways, in others she was very much a woman of her time. Mrs. Gardner really started to develop her collection of Chinese art, like actually Chinese art, not just miscellaneous Asia, in the second decade of the 1900s. Her trusted art consultant, Bernard Baronson, even wrote to her, quote, promise to save all of your money, and let me make you as fine a Chinese collection as you have of Italian, end quote. And boy oh boy, did she make a good go of exactly that. To name but very few, Mrs. Gardner collected life-sized wooden bodhisattvas, so like think of Buddhas, intricately carved furniture, painted scrolls, tomb figurines carved from serpentine, enamel salt shakers, painted folding fans, and as of 1922, an ancient Chinese bronze vase known as a coup, or alternatively, a goo. I'm going to call it a coup, if not for the simple fact that it's easier for me to say and sounds better when paired with the concert. The concert to the goo doesn't really have the same ring to it. Mrs. Gardner purchased the coup in late 1922, making it among the last objects that she added to her collection before her death in 1924. She paid a pretty penny for it, or should I say pennies. She paid at least $17,500 for the thing. If we take that $17,500 and beep boop it into my very accurate and dependable Google Inflation converter, that would amount to something like $300,000 by today's standards. In what is one of her more fascinating curatorial choices, Mrs. Gardner displayed the coup in the Dutch room rather than one of the problematically named Chinese rooms. She juxtaposed it with a full-length portrait by Francisco de Zuberan, who is also not Dutch and is in fact like the Spanish Caravaggio. The decision to put the coup in front of the Zuberan portrait is a rather inspired one, and it's one of the many examples of Mrs. Gardner deliberately putting unlike things in conversation with one another. In fact, if I were still teaching art history, which I'm not, if I were, I would make an assignment asking students to assess that particular curatorial choice. I think the answers would range from incredible to very disappointing. But hey, that's life. The coup is about 10.5 inches tall. The upper portion is simple, unadorned bronze that flares out like the horn of a trumpet. The base is also flared, though more gently, making it a very simple profile. What is not simple are the intricate geometric patterns that cover the stem and base. They are so fine that you would be forgiven for thinking they were etched into the bronze with some kind of pointy tool. They weren't, but I'll get to that in a minute. The fine lines are punctuated by the occasional raised bump. The coup was likely made around the 12th century, so the year 1100. But not Common Era. Oh no, no, no, no. We are talking BCE, before Common Era. That's right. The coup is over 3,000 years old, making it the oldest object in the Gardner collection, and by far the oldest object stolen during the heist, by about 2,500 years. Nothing to sneeze at. That also makes the coup one of the oldest things I have ever talked about on the pod, second only to King Tut's tomb, which is only about 200 years older than the coup. The next oldest topic I covered was the Terracotta army, also from China, but the coup outdates that by about 900 years. That's all a lot of words to say the coup is really old. So old that we don't just not know about it itself as an individual object, but we also have a limited grasp on Chinese bronzes overall and how they were used in ancient times. And yes, I did say bronzes, because the coup is just one of the many, many bronzes produced during the Chinese Bronze Age, which spanned roughly from 2000 BCE to about 770 BCE. That spans the reigns of two Chinese dynasties, more or less, the Shang Dynasty and the Zhou Dynasty. The Gardner coup dates to the Shang dynasty, which was arguably the greatest dynasty to produce bronzes. When I say bronzes, I am referring to a variety of vessels made of bronze that can often be divided by type. Now this is a poor comparison, but think about how your average person could probably differentiate between a teacup and a dinner plate and a gravy boat. These are all types of vessels that we used. Chinese bronzes fall into similarly broad categories, but unlike normal dishware, at least to us, these vessels were not intended for everyday use. They were instead a category of grave goods, ones that we believe were used to make ritual offerings to the dead, and upon one's death were buried with their owners. I say we believe because this is one of those instances of an object being so old that it's hard to know what it was used for, or I suppose what they were used for, because this is a massive group of objects. We assume that these were used predominantly in ritual and burial situations, because the vast majority of them were found in tomb environments. The Gardner coup, interestingly, was not found in a tomb. It was instead allegedly pulled out of a well in the province of Hubei. At least that's what the catalogue said when Mrs. Gardner bought it. I have a lot of complex feelings about the desecration of tombs that people thousands of years ago so lovingly outfitted, but selfishly, I'm very glad that so many bronzes survived as a result of being accessories to the dead for thousands of years. That is because Chinese bronzes are some of my favorite things to seek out in museums, which is crazy because I used to wholesale avoid those galleries because Chinese bronzes sounded really, really boring. These, though, are not boring at all. I have seen Chinese bronzes that literally made me catch my breath because of how unexpectedly incredible they are. And that doesn't happen to me very often. I don't often do the whole like thing. That is not me. One of the things that makes these bronzes so incredible is the patterns on them. Those patterns are often very geometrical and almost look like a maze of some kind. At first, these patterns might appear to be purely decorative, visually delightful, but perhaps nothing else. That, however, is not the case. These patterns are chalk a block full of different motifs that carried certain meanings or connotations. One of the most popular motifs that appear in Chinese bronze work is the Tao Tie, which was a mythological creature of ancient China. If you're not used to looking at Chinese bronzes, the Tao Tie might at first be very hard to spot. The key is to look for any semblance of eyeballs. On the Gardner coup, for instance, there are these raised circles on the stem. Those are the tautier's eyeballs. Once you find two eyeballs, you can usually make out some semblance of a mask-like face. Sometimes it's very obvious, while other times it is not. But if those nodules are there, it typically means that a tautier is there as well. This, again, had some kind of ritualistic significance, though we can only really hypothesize as to what it was. I've seen arguments that it might be a protective presence or a frightening one. But one thing is for sure. The tautier is said to eat men whole. Though there does seem to be a bit of a question as to who is being eaten, slash swallowed whole, though I suppose those two things are pretty similar. Is it you? Is it your enemy? The answer seems to vary by circumstance. But what I will say is that eating men whole, eating people whole, we are equal opportunity people eaters here, it's a pretty cool party trick. Bronze casters were able to achieve that level of detail using a technique called piece mold casting. And that is exactly how the Gardner coup would have been made. The idea, which I am massively oversimplifying, but go with it, is that you would first make the object from clay, including all of the super delicate pattern work that appears in the final bronzes. Clay is a very malleable medium, so it's really good for this kind of work. Once you have the finished object in clay, you let it dry before packing it in more clay. You make a kind of brick around it, which is ultimately what becomes the mold. The process is called piece mold casting because the craftsman cuts this mold into pieces in order to extract the clay model within. Once that's gone, they're left with a multi-piece mold that they can fit back together, leaving a void in the shape of whatever object they're, you know, currently making at its center. You fill that up with molten bronze, it gets in all of the nooks and the crannies, and you let it cool. When you remove the mold, what you have is the bronze object, which has taken on all of the properties and all of the detail that you had invested in that original clay model. And bada bing, bada boom, you have an incredible, highly detailed, exquisite bronze work. The visual effect of these very intricately designed Chinese bronzes is made all of the more dramatic by the patina that forms on the bronze, which if you're fancy, you might refer to as a patina. A patina, because I am from the Midwest in Wisconsin, so that's just how I say it. A patina is a thin layer that forms on the surface of the bronze due to a slow but significant chemical reaction that occurs when the bronze is exposed to oxygen, also known as oxidation. That oxidation can radically alter the appearance of a bronze, specifically its color, for lack of a better word. There are bronzes out there that are straight up pastel malachite green because of the way the metal has patinad. Interestingly, the Gardner coup did not have much of a patina. Obviously, I've never seen it, we don't have it, it's been missing since before I was born. But from photographs of it, I was always struck by the fact that it looked so new. And I was very surprised by that because this coup allegedly spent like a thousand years at the bottom of a well. It's not supposed to look this good. According to a New York Times article from late March of 1990, right after the heist, the coup's patina or lack thereof is the result of it being stripped at some point in the late 19th or early 20th century, effectively returning the coup, in theory anyway, to its original appearance. Two things here. Number one, I had absolutely no idea that that was possible. Number two, why? Why would you do that? Oh my god. The patina is the best part. But, and this is a pretty big but, because again, why? But that was a very popular move for collectors to do around that time. And while I understand the rationale, I also think it's a damn shame. Because some of the most stunning Chinese bronzes are the ones with the heavier patinas. We're talking bronze that has turned, like I said earlier, pastel green over the years. I don't know what 35 years might do with regards to bronze developing a patina. I'm sure that it depends on the environment in which it's being kept, but that will be one of the many interesting things that I will look for if and when the coup is returned. I am fascinated to see what it would look like now versus what it did in the 90s or 80s, I suppose. The coup is one of the two objects stolen from the gardener that is very likely to still exist. I mean, for heaven's sake, it survived for 3,000 years and allegedly spent much of that time submerged in a well. It is a hearty object. One that, when the thieves took it, they literally had to pry it off of a table onto which it was anchored with screws and other sort of specially engineered mechanisms. I don't quite understand what this whole setup was like, but I would assume that enforcing the coup from the table to which it is anchored, it probably left some marks on the bronze. Which leads nicely into my last point about the coup, which is that along with the Eagle Finial, the Gardner coup is probably one of the stolen objects that is least likely to be recognized. Not only because something like the Concerts and the Storm on the Sea of Galilee are hogging all the attention, but also because there are many coups out in the world that probably look quite a bit like the Gardner Coup. I am sure that there are identifying features that the museum and the FBI know about. But your average person, even someone who's seen all of the documentaries and listened to all of the podcasts, someone who has even studied Chinese bronze casting, might not clock that whatever they're looking at isn't just a coup, but the coup. Awareness, education, and curiosity on behalf of the public have solved many a mystery before, and they will solve more in the future. I hope, and maybe even a little part of me believes, which is rare, I'm not an optimist. I hope and maybe believe that the Gardner Heist is one of those mysteries. That leads me to you, dear listener. Yeah, you. I call upon you to do as the Tautier does. Keep those eyes open and that jaw unlocked, because you never know what you might see. And worse comes to worst, you will be forever ready to swallow your enemies whole. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of the most haunted museums in the world. But it's not your typical haunting, that strange sense of something unseen being present. No. The Gardener is instead haunted by an absence, one that is completely and utterly visible in the form of empty frames and bare tables. So many have equated the theft of the Gardner works to a bereavement, a loss of something so precious that it's hard to comprehend, much less put into words. Part of what makes bereavements hurt so much is the slippage, the fading of particulars despite knowing that they existed, the passing of time dulling the details that make moments and things and people so special. It happens to us all. We forget the exact sound of a loved one's voice, the taste of special holiday dishes, the velvety softness of a beloved Labrador's ears. The same is true of the Gardner works. Even those who remember the stolen works, who saw them daily for years, must now be in a phase of forgetting, not about the objects themselves, but their particulars. The precise way that Vermeer's the concert seemed to glow from within, the breath-stealing precision of Rembrandt's etched lines, the slow creep of a patina back into the bronze surface of the coup. But the loss of the Gardner works is not a true bereavement, because every single day brings the possibility of a new lead or even a return. How many of us would trade all of the masterpieces in the world for the mere possibility that a loved one might walk through the door, as pristine and alive as they are in the photos we keep on the fridge and the videos we re-watch on our phones? We can never get back lost loved ones, but we can recover things, so many of which were designed in spirit, if not material, to long outlive their makers. At least two of the Gardner works are almost certain to remain, if not more. The Eagle might once again reflect the light of the short gallery, just as the coup might stand sentinel in the Dutch Room. I hope that they are not the only ones, that we one day might be able to appreciate Rembrandt's rendering of sea spray, or the ice cream flavored haze of Manet's Shea Tortoni, the push and pull of silence and song that pervades Vermeer's The Concert, and the progression of Dugas' art through five drawings. That we might inspect altered signatures and screws. Scrutinize the surface of paintings, knowing what they hide in the layers beneath. Until then, we continue to hope and to search and to learn in the anticipation that sooner or later what is lost might be found. If not for our benefit and enjoyment, then for that of future generations. Ones that someday might not even realize that anything was ever missing at all. That is all I have for you today on the 13 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. I hope it was worth the wait. I will, of course, have sources and images related to the episode on the podcast website, stuff about thingspodcast.com. Though I will probably need a few days after posting this episode to get all of that set and ready. There's too many sources to even start naming here, and your girl is tired. So I'm going to wrap this up quick. If you liked this episode, and I hope that you did, please consider leaving a rating or a review wherever you listen. If you've already done that and maybe you want to show a different kind of gratitude, you can now contribute directly to the maintenance and production of the podcast by sending as little as $1 my way on Buy Me a Coffee. The link to do so will be in the description. I don't expect anyone to do that, but I do deeply appreciate anyone who is able and willing to do so. The usual thanks, of course, go out to hooksounds.com, freemusicarchive.org, and the personal website of musician Kevin McLeod, who provides hundreds, if not thousands, of tracks for royalty-free use. I am a big fan. I will list individual credits in the episode description. I'm hoping to be back in a couple of weeks with a mini sode with just a little bit more to share about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the heist, at least kind of. But I am moving out of state, no less, so I have absolutely no idea how feasible that might be. But I will be back. Don't worry, I always come back. Until then, I thank you so much for listening. I know this episode was really long, and so if you're listening to my voice still, I very much appreciate you and thank you for staying. My voice is just one big vocal fry, but I will nevertheless remind you to look at something beautiful today. And finally, I will simply say a la prossima Michi. Which for those who don't know means until next time, friends. We'll get a little ASMR in here, ready. That's my Coke Zero. Goodbye.