On March 18, 1990, 13 priceless artworks were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, marking the largest art heist in history. Thirty five years later, during my first museum visit on Jan. 6, 2025, I stared at the empty frames where the paintings used to be. The stolen art is worth over $500 million and, to this day, has never been found. The Gardner Museum is still offering a $10 million reward for information leading directly to the safe recovery of the art.

On the night of the heist, two men dressed as police officers asked to be let into the employee entrance of the museum. They said they were responding to a disturbance. The security guard on duty, Richard Abath, broke protocol and let them in. Shortly after, the two men tied Abath and a second guard up in the basement while they robbed The Gardner Museum.

The most notable works stolen were Rembrandt van Rijn’s only known seascape “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and Johannes Vermeer’s “The Concert.” Other stolen works include Rembrandt’s “A Lady and a Gentleman in Black” and sketch titled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Edgar Degas” “Three Mounted Jockeys,” “Procession on a Road near Florence,” “Leaving the Paddock” and two of his “Study for the Programme;” Édouard Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s eagle finial, a Chinese Gu and Govaert Flinck’s “Landscape with an Obelisk.”

Six pieces were taken from the Dutch Room of the museum and six from the Short Gallery. One piece, “Chez Tortoni,” was taken from the Blue Room, the frame of which was left on the security guard’s chair. The thieves cut all the paintings from their frames. “To even leave remnants of the painting(s) behind was savage,” Kelly Horan, deputy editor of the Boston Globe, told CNN. “In my mind, it’s sort of like slashing someone’s throat.”

A lot is peculiar about this heist. One of the most perplexing details is the fact that the thieves spent 81 minutes in the museum before leaving with the art. This begs the question of whether or not the theft was an inside job. Did they know whether or not the police would arrive? Why were they confident enough to spend over an hour in the museum? What’s more, the thieves left behind the most expensive piece in the museum, Titian’s “The Rape of Europa,” but opted to steal a stamp-sized sketch of Rembrandt in addition to his larger pieces.

Even more strange is that while the museum was equipped with motion detectors, not a single one went off in the Blue Room where “Chez Tortoni” was stolen, returning to the question of an inside job.

In 2013, the FBI announced that it had identified the art thieves, but refrained from publicly identifying them. The robbers belonged to a criminal organization based in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, authorities said. “The focus of the investigation for many years was: Who did this heist? And we have through the great investigative work identified who did this heist, and both those individuals are deceased,” Peter Kowenhoven, the FBI’s assistant special agent based in Boston, told the Associated Press. “So now the focus of the investigation is the recovery of the art.”

In 1997, The Gardner Museum increased its $1 million reward to $5 million. And in 2017, it doubled the reward to $10 million, which currently stands.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, the founder of the museum, was incredibly passionate about her extensive collection and about bringing art to the public. After personally arranging acquired artworks in the galleries, she opened the museum in 1903 and stated in her will that nothing should be changed; art should be neither acquired nor sold from the collection. What a coincidence that the largest art heist happened in a museum whose curator wanted nothing in it to change. Today, the frames of the stolen paintings still hang on the walls for all to see.

Thirty five years later, the Gardner art heist remains a fascinating piece of modern Boston history. There is seemingly so much and so little information available regarding the whereabouts of the artworks. With an ongoing investigation and a lofty award, what does the next chapter for the Gardner Museum look like? And what discoveries will be made?

Medha Mankekar can be reached at [email protected].