Art: And Now

3 minute read
TIME

The theft was so brazen that Agatha Christie herself would most likely have dismissed it as too farfetched even for Hercule Poirot to solve. For one thing, the Goya portrait of the first Duke of Wellington was just about the most-talked-about painting in Britain. It had made big headlines earlier in the summer, when U.S. Oilman Charles B. Wrightsman bought it for a whopping $392,000 from the Duke and Duchess of Leeds. Indignant cries went up about national treasures leaving the country, and a private foundation and Her Majesty’s government raised $392,000 to buy the painting back for London’s National Gallery. It had hung since then in conspicuous splendor on a red tapestry screen at the top of the main stairway. From there one night last week it vanished some time between 7:40 o’clock, when a guard last saw it in place, and 10:05, when another discovered that it was gone.

Contagious Theft. So sensational a theft would be enough to give any museum director the jitters, but it was only the latest of a series of baffling thefts. In the last 19 months there have been six major art robberies on the French Riviera alone. Across the Atlantic, Pittsburgh Collector G. David Thompson’s offer to pay $100,000 for the return of ten paintings by Picasso, Dufy, Miró and Léger still stands. Art robbery has proved more contagious even than hijacking planes.

But it is one thing to break into an understaffed little museum on the Riviera, and quite another to take on the great National Gallery of London. Whoever pulled the job—presumably one of the more than 5,000 people who streamed through the gallery during the day—obviously knew exactly what to do. It just so happened that because the staff had been moving some pictures around that night, the gallery’s elaborate electronic alarm system was not turned on until late. In the men’s room, police found marks on a radiator under a window. The thief could have climbed out that window and down a workman’s ladder that had been left in the courtyard, then over a 12-ft. wall and out onto Orange Street, which is all but deserted in the evening.

Historical Prank? Why did he go to so much trouble? The Goya was too well known to be sold. It was not insured (no national treasures are), and Her Majesty’s government could hardly be expected to pay ransom—the most logical motive for most of the other robberies. At week’s end, Scotland Yard was leaning to the theory that it was the work of some ingenious prankster with a highly dramatic sense of history. After all, the theft took place just 50 years to the day after a superpatriotic Italian workman named Vincenzo Perugia repatriated the Mono, Lisa for a time by sneaking it out of the Louvre.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com