The theft of some highly valuable jewels from the Louvre Museum in Paris joins many other thefts that have occurred in art galleries and art centers around the world, although the works of art that are most often stolen are, mainly, paintings. It is also not usual for the thieves’ target to be a museum of the Louvre’s caliber, with strong security measures, which, last Sunday, failed dismally.
We now review other jewels, manuscripts and works of art stolen in the past.
On August 21, 1911, an employee of the Louvre Museum stole the painting from ‘The Mona Lisa‘, a theft that would be discovered the next day and about which Apollinaire oa Picasso. Two years later, through an art dealer, the thief, the Italian Vincenzo Peruggiaa former Louvre worker who wanted to return the work to his country, would be arrested and the painting returned.
On March 18, 1990, a total of 11 masterpieces valued at 100 million euros, including several Rembrandt, Degas, Manet y Vermeerwere stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston.
Two armed robbers stole 20 paintings from Van Gogh in it Museo Van Gogh from Amsterdam, including ‘The Sunflowers‘ and they managed to escape, although they abandoned the loot in an abandoned car, from where they were recovered half an hour later.
In 1999, Nikolái Zavadski and his wife, Larisa, an official of the Hermitage from Russia, stole 226 pieces from the museum (icons, enamels and jewelry, works by artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries), valued at half a million dollars, which were detected in 2005 when the museum took inventory. Zadvadski was sentenced in 2007 to five years and to pay $280,000 to the museum.
On September 19, 2000, Claude Monet’s canvas was stolenThe Powle of the Pullle‘, valued at five million dollars, of National Museum of Art in Poznan (Poland), where there were no surveillance cameras. In 2010, Polish police recovered the painting, hidden in a house in Olkusz, Poland, and arrested a 47-year-old man suspected of the theft, who was sentenced to three years in prison.
On August 22, 2004, two masked men sneaked into the Museo Munch of Oslo and, at gunpoint, seized the paintings ‘The scream‘ y ‘The Madonna‘, which would be recovered two years later.
In this century there have been half a dozen notorious robberies in Spain. In August 2001, 17 paintings were stolen from the businesswoman’s home. Esther Koplowitz in Madrid, including ‘El Columpio’ and ‘The Fall of the Donkey’, by Goya, which were returned thanks to the Police between 2001 and 2002. In August 2007, 16 prints were stolen from the National Library, including two world maps from the incunabula edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Cosmography’, which were recovered in Argentina and returned to Madrid. In July 2011, an electrician from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela who had been fired took the Calixtino Codex. And five works of Francis Bacon valued at more than 25 million euros were stolen in June 2015 from the Madrid home of José Capelopartner and heir of the Irish painter. Finally, on October 15, 2025, the disappearance of the privately owned painting ‘Still Life with Guitar’ (1919) by Picasso, which left Madrid to be exhibited in Granada, but did not arrive, was announced.
In it Hotel Carlton in Cannes Jewelry valued at $136 million was stolen in July 2013. The thief or thieves made off with 72 pieces, most of them jewels and precious stones, belonging to the Laviev jewelry store, which exhibited them in the ‘Extraordinary diamonds’ exhibition in a room at the hotel. In 2021, some rosary beads that belonged to Mary Stuartqueen of Scotland between 1542 and 1567, were stolen from the arundel castlelocated in the county of West Sussex, in the south of England, along with other valuable objects.
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