The Rescue Artist

nationwide search for the thieves. On the day after the ransom letter was delivered, a policeman checking hotels and rental properties for suspicious characters peeked through the window of a small, isolated cottage near the sea, in Glandore, 200 miles from Dublin. Three oil paintings caught his eye. (These turned out to be Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, Goya’s Portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate, and Velasquez’s Maid in Kitchen with Christ and Disciples Outside Window—the best of the 19 stolen works.) Rose Dugdale had rented the cottage two days before the theft. The other paintings were still in the trunk of her car. All were unhurt.

Dugdale was arrested. Only a few days later, the police in London received an anonymous phone tip bringing welcome news. They raced to St. Bartholomew’s Church. In the graveyard, leaning against a headstone, inside an old newspaper tied up with a piece of string, they found Vermeer’s Guitar Player.

Dugdale was never charged with stealing The Guitar Player, though the police assume that she was responsible. In June 1974, a month after she was found with the Russborough House paintings, she was put on trial in Dublin. She pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

In 1986, Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House. In this second theft, in contrast with the Dugdale one, the Beits were away. Cahill’s gang made off with eighteen paintings. In June 2001, the thieves were back. This was the third robbery overall, and the first in daylight. In a stolen Mitsubishi jeep, three thieves roared up the steps to Russborough House, rammed the front doors, and raced inside. Three minutes later they raced out again with Bellotto’s View of Florence and (for the third time) Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli. The thieves sped away in a second stolen car. The two paintings together were worth ?2.3 million.

The theft was bold but hardly polished. The thieves poured a can of gasoline over the jeep and tried, unsuccessfully, to set it on fire, and the police found a pair of used gloves inside. During their getaway, the thieves tried to hijack a car at gunpoint (to throw off police pursuit), but the driver refused to hand over his keys.

It happened again in 2002, a fourth attack on the same target, this one at dawn on a September morning. Just four days before, police acting on a tip had found the two paintings that had been stolen from Russborough House the year before. A month before that, they had recovered a Rubens portrait stolen from Russborough House in 1986. The point of the latest theft was presumably to remind the police that, despite their recent successes, it was the crooks who had the upper hand.

This time thieves stole five paintings, worth a total of $76 million. The two best were by Rubens. His Portrait of a Dominican Monk had been stolen before, by Martin Cahill. This latest theft differed only in details from its predecessor of the year before. Rather than crash through the front doors, the thieves drove up to Russborough House from the back. Armed with a makeshift battering ram, they blasted through the steel shutters that blocked a ground-floor window, took what they wanted, and raced off at 100 miles an hour. The lone guard on duty in the sprawling house, a caretaker in his seventies, stood no chance.

“They do it,” says Charley Hill, “because they’re flipping the bird to the Irish state and the police.” So far, nearly all the stolen paintings have come back. All Rose Dugdale’s paintings were found with her. All but two of Cahill’s haul have turned up. The two paintings stolen in 2001 and the five stolen in 2002 have all been found, by police following up on tips.

But the thieves have the advantage, and they know it. When the mood strikes, they’ll hit again.

18

Money Is Honey

If the Russborough House thefts have a moral, it is that the lure of big money is only one of the reasons that thieves steal big-time art. But none of the other reasons—the notoriety, the thrill, the thieves’ urge to flaunt their contempt for the patrons and collectors of art—would ever come into play if great paintings did not command stunning prices.

The giant numbers skew everything. “The first thing you have to understand about the art world,” Charley Hill likes to say, “is that, with a very few exceptions, including me, everyone’s a crook.” This is, in part, a joke. In small part.

Hill lives in a black-and-white universe, and he contemptuously dismisses the commonplace view that the world is composed largely of honest, hardworking folk. Whether in politics or history or society at large, he sees a swarm of crooks and con men and cheaters and backstabbers and hypocrites, with, here and there, a hero.

For a man with Hill’s preconceptions, art is the perfect field. Revolving around hugely desirable, one-of-a-kind objects whose value is in large measure a matter of opinion, the art world’s upper tiers are a natural home for vanity, envy, and greed. Moreover, the art market is a virtually unregulated, anything-goes bazaar. In short, it is a stage for the human comedy in its most rambunctious and delectable form. “I live in a world of bollocks and bullshit,” Hill says. His lament would carry more weight if he did not so plainly revel in what he professes to regret.

In Hill’s jaundiced view, Ulving and Johnsen were merely the latest unsavory characters he’d run across in a field beset by scoundrels and renegades. Many of the top-end players all but acknowledge that no one is quite as high-minded as he seems. They are more likely to quote than to fret about the old joke that the art trade is made up of “shady people peddling bright colors.” To protest in indignation would be to proclaim oneself a novice and a rube, close cousin to the playgoer who rushed onstage to wrest a knife from the villain.

“One knows perfectly well that it has been rubbish all the time,” remarked Peter Wilson, for more than twenty years the chairman of Sotheby’s. “When I go and advise someone to sell their picture because now is the moment to sell it, and they’re going to make more money than they’d ever dreamt of, and there’s never going to be another moment like this, I know that I’m giving them the wrong advice. I should be telling them to keep their picture, because isn’t that what we are telling our buyers—that now is the ideal moment to invest, and that they should all be buying?”

The rich have always collected art, but the money frenzy that now surrounds great paintings is something new. Even the highest prices from past centuries, when translated into today’s dollars, fall far short of modern records. One key reason, the critic and art historian Robert Hughes points out, is that the idea of art as an investment scarcely existed before the twentieth century. “One bought paintings for pleasure, for status, for commemoration, or to cover a hole in the ancestral ceiling,” Hughes remarks. “But one did not buy them in the expectation that they would make one richer.”

Today that expectation—or, at any rate, that hope—is central. But if art is also business, it is a singularly strange business. Fashion and chance play central roles. A year before his death, van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother thanking him for his latest loan and boldly claiming, “I dare swear to you that my sunflowers are worth 500 francs,” which would be perhaps $500 in today’s dollars. No buyer agreed. In 1987, in a frantic auction at Christie’s, a bidder acting on behalf of Japan’s Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance purchased van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $39.9 million.

Everything can hinge on a name. Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents sold in 2002 for $76.7 million, at this writing the fourth highest price ever paid for a painting. For over two centuries, the Massacre was thought to be the work not of Rubens but of one of his followers. The family that inherited it in 1923 disliked it so—it depicts infants torn from their weeping mothers and slammed against the ground—that they tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it. Finally they lent it to an Austrian monastery, where it hung for decades in a dim corridor, ignored. Only in 2002, when the eighty-nine-year-old owner tried once again to find a buyer, was the painting properly identified. In the monastery, the painting hung in such darkness that the Sotheby’s specialist who attributed it to Rubens had to wield a flashlight.

When the simple equations of supply and demand run head-on into the complexities wrought by human psychology, they emerge from the collision bent and twisted. High prices in the art world, for instance, may serve not as a deterrent but a lure. Record-setting prices, one New York dealer explained, work “like a magnet.” For buyers, high prices confirm the value of the objects they are chasing. For sellers, high prices draw new objects to