Famous Stolen and Missing Artworks and Where They Are Now

Recovered in 1913. Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre worker who had helped build the painting's glass case, took it on August 21, 1911; the painter Louis Béroud first reported it missing the next day. Peruggia kept it hidden in his Paris lodgings for about two years, then took it to Florence and was caught trying to sell it to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi. It was back in the Louvre on January 4, 1914, and Peruggia was jailed for one year and 15 days. The theft matters beyond its happy ending: worldwide coverage of the loss and return is what made the portrait a household image.

Still missing, and now believed destroyed. This panel of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece was stolen from St Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent on the night of April 10, 1934. The Bishop of Ghent then received a ransom demand for one million Belgian francs, and the sender returned one of the panel's two parts as a show of good faith. Arsène Goedertier, the presumed thief, told his lawyer on his deathbed that he was the only one who knew where it was hidden, and the secret went with him. Since 1945 a copy by the restorer Jef Van der Veken has filled the gap, so the altarpiece looks complete to most visitors.

Still missing since 1945. The Czartoryski family rescued Raphael's portrait from their museum in 1939 and hid it at Sieniawa, where the Gestapo, working for Hans Frank, Hitler's governor of occupied Poland, found it. Frank displayed looted paintings in his Kraków residence, and the portrait was last seen there in January 1945. After the war it was among 844 objects missing from storage. Polish officials have said for years that they believe it survived the war, but its location remains unknown, and Poland still lists it among its most important wartime losses.

Lost since 1945; a reconstruction stands in its place. The amber-panelled chamber in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, near St Petersburg, was taken apart by German soldiers of Army Group North within 36 hours in 1941 and reached Königsberg that October. The trail goes cold there. A Soviet report concluded it was destroyed in April 1945, yet its fate has never been settled. The best-known fragment to resurface is an Italian stone mosaic found in Germany in 1997 with the family of a soldier who said he helped pack the room. What visitors see today is a reconstruction by Russian craftsmen, paid for partly by German donations and inaugurated in 2003.

Recovered in 1965. Goya's portrait was stolen from the National Gallery in London in 1961, 19 days after it went on display. Four years later Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle man campaigning for free television licenses for pensioners, contacted a newspaper, and the painting came back through a baggage check office at Birmingham New Street station. At trial he was found not guilty of stealing the painting but guilty of stealing the frame, which had not been returned; the theft itself is now credited to his son, John. It is the rare case with a light side: the James Bond film Dr. No referred to it, and the theft and trial were later dramatized in The Duke.

Recovered after each of its four thefts. Rembrandt's portrait is small, only about 30 by 25 centimeters, and that is part of why it has been stolen from the Dulwich Picture Gallery four times since 1966, the most recorded of any painting. It has earned the nickname the takeaway Rembrandt. Its recoveries read like a list of unlikely hiding places: with four men arrested in a taxi, in a luggage rack in Münster, under a bench in a Streatham graveyard and on the back of a bicycle.

Still missing since 1969. Caravaggio's altarpiece was taken from its oratory in Palermo by two thieves on the night of October 17 to 18, 1969, and it has not been seen publicly since. In 2005 the FBI put it on its list of the Top Ten Art Crimes. Investigators think it may still be hidden somewhere in Sicily, though that remains a working theory rather than a finding. Since December 12, 2015 a replica has hung on the altar, which at least lets visitors see the composition where it was meant to be seen.

Still missing after its second theft, in 2010. Van Gogh's still life was first stolen from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo on June 4, 1977 and recovered ten years later in Kuwait. In August 2010 it was taken from the same museum again. Within hours Egyptian officials announced that it had been found, then had to admit the announcement was wrong. Valued at an estimated US$55 million, it remains missing, so the one museum has now lost the same painting twice.

Recovered in 2017. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, Willem de Kooning's 1955 painting was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, apparently carried out under a visitor's coat. The museum had no security cameras and no fingerprints were found. More than 30 years later a New Mexico antiques dealer bought the contents of a house for $2,000 and found it hanging in the main bedroom of two former New York schoolteachers, Jerry and Rita Alter. He took it back to the museum. Circumstantial evidence points to the Alters, but the FBI has never confirmed their involvement. The Getty Conservation Institute finished restoring it in 2022.

Still missing since 1990. Vermeer's painting was one of 13 works taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in the early hours of March 18, 1990, after guards admitted two men posing as police officers. The robbery lasted 81 minutes, and the thieves removed this canvas from its frame rather than cutting it. It is thought to be the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world. The museum offers a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the works, and the case remains unsolved.

Still missing since 1990. Rembrandt's only seascape, painted in 1633, was cut from its frame during the Gardner Museum theft of March 18, 1990, as was his A Lady and Gentleman in Black. Investigators' estimate for the 13 works taken that night had risen to $500 million by 2000. The Gardner keeps the empty frames hanging, both in homage to the missing works and as placeholders for their return, and the gaps on the walls make the scale of the loss plainer than any account of it.

The 1893 painted version, stolen in 1994, and the 1910 tempera version, stolen in 2004; both recovered. Munch made more than one Scream, and two different versions have been stolen. On February 12, 1994, the day the Lillehammer Winter Olympics opened, two men broke into the National Gallery in Oslo, took the 1893 version and left a note reading "Thanks for the poor security". It was recovered undamaged on May 7, 1994. On August 22, 2004, masked gunmen took the Munch Museum's 1910 version in daylight, together with his Madonna. Police announced the recovery of both on August 31, 2006, The Scream with moisture damage to the lower left corner.

Recovered in 2019. Klimt's portrait was believed stolen from the Galleria Ricci Oddi in Piacenza on February 22, 1997, shortly before a planned exhibition. Nearly 23 years later, in December 2019, gardeners clearing ivy found a bag in a recess in the gallery's own exterior wall, and the following month the painting inside was confirmed as the missing work. How it got there is unknown, and the case was closed unsolved. The canvas holds a second mystery: X-rays in 1996 showed that Klimt had painted it over his lost Portrait of a Young Lady.

Recovered in 2016; also known as View of the Sea at Scheveningen. Van Gogh's early beach scene was stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on December 7, 2002, together with his Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen. Both were found by Italian police in January 2016, under the kitchen floor of a villa near Naples associated with the Camorra, though the recovery was not announced until that September. After restoration it went back on display in March 2017. Grains of wind-blown sand that Van Gogh could not scrape off the wet paint are still in it.

Recovered in 2006. Benvenuto Cellini's salt cellar, completed in 1543 for Francis I of France, is his only surviving gold sculpture. On May 11, 2003 it was stolen from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was covered in scaffolding for building work at the time. It was recovered on January 21, 2006, buried in a lead box in a forest near the town of Zwettl. The thief, Robert Mang, was later sentenced to four years in prison.

The Buccleuch Madonna, stolen in 2003 and recovered in 2007. Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder survives in more than one painted version, and this is the one owned by the Buccleuch family. Two thieves posing as tourists took it from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland in 2003. It resurfaced in October 2007, when police from four agencies raided a lawyer's office in Glasgow during a meeting of five people. Since 2009 it has been on loan to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where it remains on display.

Recovered in 2012; the Bührle version, now shown at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Cézanne painted the Italian boy in the red vest four times, and this is the version that belonged to the Foundation E.G. Bührle in Zurich. On February 10, 2008 it was one of four paintings taken from the foundation, along with works by Degas, Monet and Van Gogh. Two of them turned up in a car near a hospital eight days later, but the Cézanne, the museum's most valuable painting, stayed missing for four years. Serbian police announced its recovery in April 2012. The Bührle collection now hangs at the Kunsthaus Zürich on long-term loan.

Still missing since 2010. Picasso's Cubist still life of 1911 was one of five paintings, with works by Matisse, Modigliani, Braque and Léger, valued together at €109 million, taken from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on May 20, 2010. The burglar, Vjeran Tomic, was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined €200,000. An accomplice claimed he panicked during an unrelated search of his home in 2011 and threw the canvases away, a story the prosecutor did not believe. None of the five has been found.

Still missing since 2012, and possibly burned. Shortly after 3 in the morning on October 16, 2012, thieves took seven paintings from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, all lent by the Triton Foundation: two of Monet's London bridges, Picasso's Tête d'Arlequin and works by Gauguin, Matisse, Meijer de Haan and Lucian Freud. The alarms went off, but no guards were on duty that night and the thieves were gone before police arrived. A Bucharest court jailed the ringleader, Radu Dogaru, in November 2013. His mother first said she had burned the paintings in her stove, then withdrew the statement; burned paint remains were found, but nobody has shown they came from these works. None of the seven has been recovered.

The Blenheim Palace installation, stolen in 2019 and presumed lost. Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture is a fully working toilet made from 103 kg of 18-carat solid gold, and that is exactly what doomed it. It was stolen from Blenheim Palace on September 14, 2019, and the authorities believe the thieves broke it up or melted it down to sell the gold. Convictions followed in 2025, but unlike a canvas, an artwork whose value lies partly in its metal can vanish for good within days of a theft.

Mostly recovered; an epaulette set with the Saxon White diamond and Queen Amalie Auguste's large breast bow are still missing. Before dawn on November 25, 2019, a fire on the nearby Augustus Bridge cut power to streetlights and alarms, and thieves cut through iron bars on a window into the Jewel Room of the Green Vault in Dresden Castle, smashing display cases with an axe. The royal jewelry taken was valued at about €113 million. In December 2022, after talks with the defendants' lawyers, Berlin authorities seized 31 items and returned them. On May 16, 2023 a Dresden court convicted five members of the Remmo family. The museum reopened in August 2024 with most, but not all, of the stolen items back on display.

Recovered in 2023; back with the Groninger Museum. Van Gogh painted this garden at his parents' home in Nuenen in 1884, and it belongs to the Groninger Museum, which had lent it to the Singer Laren museum near Amsterdam. On March 30, 2020, his birthday, with Singer Laren shut by the pandemic, a thief smashed through its glass doors with a sledgehammer at about 3:15 in the morning and was gone before police arrived. A man was later jailed for eight years for this theft and another. In September 2023 the art detective Arthur Brand, working with Dutch police, persuaded a man with no part in the theft to hand it back. It came back scratched, and after restoration the Groninger Museum put it on show again in March 2026.

Still missing, apart from the crown the thieves dropped. On October 19, 2025, thieves disguised as workmen cut their way into the Louvre with industrial disc cutters and left with eight pieces of Napoleonic-era jewelry, among them Empress Eugénie's large corsage bow brooch and her pearl tiara, valued at about €88 million. As they escaped they dropped a ninth piece, Eugénie's crown, which was badly deformed but kept all 56 of its emeralds and all but 10 of its 1,354 diamonds; the museum says it will be restored without reconstruction. A year after the theft the four main suspects were in jail awaiting trial, while the jewels were still listed as missing in Interpol's database of stolen artworks.