newspaper Dagbladet); the BBC-4 documentary cited above; and a second BBC documentary on The Scream case, entitled “The Theft of the Century,” produced by Keith Alexander in 1996.
The minister of culture who found it “hard to imagine that such evil things” as the theft of The Scream could take place was Asa Kleveland. She was interviewed in “The Theft of the Century.”
Chapter 2: Easy Pickings
The figures on stolen art in the Museum of the Missing come from the database of the Art Loss Register and were current as of May 2003.
Steven Keller remarked that many museum guards “couldn’t get jobs flipping burgers.” See “Busted,” Art & Auction, March 2004.
The Louvre’s security shortcomings were detailed in a report by the French national audit office, the Cour des Comptes, in February 2002.
Chapter 6: The Rescue Artist
Jon Dooley, CEO of Invaluable Ltd., likened Charley Hill to “a man fishing with a rod.” Dooley was quoted in an article headlined “Lost and Found” in the Financial Times, September 27, 2002.
Charley Hill’s remark that statistics on art crime are “completely made up” appeared in Anthony Haden- Guest’s “Catch Me If You Can,” Art Review, March 2003.
Michael Kelly was quoted in an article by Robert Vare. See “True to His Words,” Atlantic, April 2004.
Chapter 7: Screenwriters
The best account of the frenzy in the art world in the late 1980s is Cynthia Saltzman’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998).
Chapter 9: The General
The indispensable work on Cahill and the basis for all later accounts of his career, including this one, is Paul Williams’s The General (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1995). Cahill’s career was dramatized in a film also called The General, directed by John Boorman.
James Donovan told of surviving a car bomb in the London Sunday Mirror, August 8, 1999.
In his book Jan Vermeer (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), Lawrence Gowing remarked that “everything of Vermeer is in the Beit Letter. “
The information about Vermeer’s widow selling Lady Writing a Letter to settle a debt with her baker—and the information that the debt, 617 florins, corresponded to roughly $80—was provided by the research staff at the National Gallery of Ireland.
The brief sketch of Vermeer’s life is based on Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer (New York: Henry Holt, 2001) and Norbert Schneider’s Vermeer: The Complete Paintings (Cologne: Taschen, 2000). Robert Hughes noted that Vermeer left no written accounts of his life or his art; see “Shadows and Light,” Time, May 7, 2001. Bailey discussed the identity of Vermeer’s models on pp. 115- 116.
Paul Johnson remarked on Vermeer’s long fall from favor; see Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 379).
Thore paid 500 francs, roughly $2,000 in today’s money, for Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. He paid roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars for Woman with a Pearl Necklace and roughly $8,000 for Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. See Frances Suzman Jowell, “Vermeer and Thore-Burger: Recoveries of Reputation” in Gaskell and Jonker, eds., Studies in the History of Art, vol. 55 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998, pp. 35- 58). The conversions from nineteenth-century prices to present-day dollars were provided by the Musee de la Monnaie de Paris.
Laura Cumming made the point that, in the days before museums and mass reproductions, artists might disappear from view; see her fine essay, “Only Here for the Vermeer,” in the Observer, May 27, 2001.
Sir Alfred Beit’s remark that “no amount of money” could compensate him for the loss of his paintings appeared in the New York Times on May 1, 1974, in an article headlined “Insurance Was Low on 19 Works of Art Stolen in Ireland.”
Paul Williams discussed Martin Cahill’s belief that he could sell stolen paintings to unscrupulous art collectors for “millions, countless millions” on a British television documentary called “The Fine Art of Crime” (Fulcrum Productions, 1998).
Chapter 11: Encounter in Antwerp
Rebecca West called the once-fashionable novelist Michael Arlen “every other inch a gentleman,” according to Victoria Glendinning’s biography of West. (The comment is sometimes attributed to Alexander Woollcott.)
Chapter 12: Munch
My account of Munch’s life and The Scream is based on J. P. Hodin’s Edvard Munch (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), Poul Erik TOjner’s Munch in His Own Words (New York: Prestel, 2003), Reinhold Heller’s The Scream (New York: Viking, 1973), Mara-Helen Wood’s Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992), Monica Bohm-Duchen’s The Private Life of a Masterpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), and Stanley Steinberg and Joseph Weiss’s “The Art of Edvard Munch and Its Function in his Mental Life,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, 1954. The psychoanalytic speculation in Steinberg and Weiss is far-fetched (“the swirling red landscape may represent Munch’s dying mother”), but the compilation of biographical facts is useful.
My remark comparing Freud and Munch is a variant on an observation by Christopher Hume, who called Munch “the great liberator of the tormented Self” and wrote that “if Freud was its cartographer, Munch was the illustrator.” See “Munch Kitsch Makes a Fearful Image Safe,” Toronto Star, March 1, 1997.
Simon Winchester’s superb Krakatoa (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) is by far the best account of the volcano’s eruption and its ramifications (including the story of the Pough-keepsie firemen, as well as countless others). The link with The Scream is perhaps the only Krakatoa connection that eluded Winchester.
Chapter 17: Russborough House Redux
The best account of Rose Dugdale’s career, and the theft of the Kenwood Vermeer in particular, was written by Luke Jennings. See “Every Picture Tells a Story,” London Evening Standard, December 28, 1999.
Chapter 18: Money Is Honey
