The Rescue Artist

The next book deals with art crime again, but this time with art forgery rather than art theft. The book tells a true story, with a cast ranging from Johannes Vermeer to Hermann Goering. The story begins in Holland in the 1600s, skips ahead to the French Riviera in the 1930s and Occupied Holland in the 1940s, and culminates in a trial for treason in a Dutch courtroom lined with forged—or are they authentic?—Vermeers.

Read on

Author’s Picks: Best Heist Films, Best Art Crime Books

The Three Best Heist Films

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1999)

Everything about it is wrong—thieves don’t act like Pierce Brosnan, insurance agents don’t look like Rene Russo, and museums don’t seal themselves off like automated fortresses. But it’s fun.

“If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention [The Thomas Crown Affair.]”

If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention this movie. Then stand back. The good guys detest it because it glamorizes the thieves, but the baddies hate it too. Their problem with the film is wounded vanity—tuxedo-clad, art-loving Pierce Brosnan strikes them as a bit effete.

THE GENERAL (1998)

This brilliant, grim film tells the story of Martin Cahill, the Dublin gangster who pulled off what was at the time the biggest art theft ever. Cahill’s criminal career was so hectic that director John Boorman makes quick work of the art heist, but this portrayal of the brutal Cahill shows what a real art thief is like.

One brief scene is an inside joke. The real-life Cahill once broke into Boorman’s house and stole a gold record the director had been awarded for the score of Deliverance. In the course of a burglary in The General, Cahill grabs a gold LP from the wall and then throws it away in disgust when he realizes that it isn’t real gold.

DR.NO (1962)

Well, “best” is pushing it. The first James Bond movie is hard to sit through. But it’s worth seeing for two historic reasons: first, a young Sean Connery; second, Dr. No’s stolen Goya, which helped plant in every crook’s mind the fantasy that if he steals a masterpiece a crooked tycoon will surely want it.

Goya’s portrait of Wellington is now back in the National Gallery in London, where it belongs. The austere label next to the painting omits any mention of the screen credit.

Sean Connery’s more recent heist movie, Entrapment, is less painful though no more plausible.

The Three Best Art Crime Books

THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ADAM WORTH, MASTER THIEF by Ben Macintyre

This nonfiction account of one of the greatest Victorian criminals provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous. Or at least Adam Worth was. Charley Hill, a stickler for historical accuracy, always felt compelled to interrupt his diatribes about the thuggishness of art thieves to hail the elegant Mr. Worth as the lone counterexample.

“[The Napoleon of Crime] provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous.”

THE DAY THEY STOLE THE MONA LISA by Seymour Reit

On an August day in 1911 a workman named Vincenzo Perugia walked out of the Louvre with the world’s most famous painting tucked inside his coat. Reit crafts an elaborate story around that simple starting point. The reader will gulp it down with a delight marred only slightly by a single nagging question—is this a true story or a legend?

THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR by Iain Pears

An art historian by training and the author of that acclaimed doorstop of a book An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears has also written half a dozen less earnest novels that he calls “art history mysteries.” This may be the best.

Several years ago, after a career spent dreaming up art crimes, Pears nearly walked into a real one. On New Year’s Eve 1999 he and a houseful of guests had gathered to ring in the new millennium. Shortly before midnight the baby began to howl. Pears dutifully grabbed baby and stroller and ventured outdoors in the hope that a change of scene would prove soothing. At that moment a thief broke into Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum—only a few blocks from where Pears stood rocking the baby—and ran off into the night with a $4.8 million Cezanne.

THE RESCUE ARTIST. Copyright © 2005 by Edward Dolnick.

^*Yet another Vermeer, The Astronomer, was confiscated by the Nazis for the personal collection of Adolf Hitler. The painting had belonged to a member of the Rothschild family. Today it hangs in the Louvre.

^†Cellini made the saltcellar for King Francis I of France, in 1543. In his swashbuckling autobiography, the Florentine goldsmith tells of the king’s reaction to a wax model of the proposed sculpture (and to Cellini himself). “This is a hundred times more divine a thing than I had ever dreamed of,” the monarch stammers. “What a miracle of a man!”

The king asks Cellini to name his price, Cellini does so (1000 gold crowns), and the royal treasurer hands over the money. Four robbers brandishing swords attack Cellini on his way home, but he holds them off singlehandedly, displaying such “skill in using the sword,” he tells us, that the cowed thieves take him for a soldier.

^*For clarity’s sake, I will refer to Hill by his real name throughout. The alternative—switching back and forth between “Hill” and “Roberts” depending on whether the speaker knows Hill’s true identity—is appealing in theory but unpalatable in print.

^*A pseudonym

^*The story linking Krakatoa and Munch’s evening stroll appeared in an article called “When the Sky Ran Red” in Sky & Telescope magazine in February 2004. The authors were physicists Don Olson and Russell Doescher and English professor Marilynn Olson, who also found the exact spot where Munch stood trembling against the rail. The newspaper stories cited in the text above were quoted in their essay.

^*A pseudonym

^*A pseudonym

^*A pseudonym

^*He had arranged to paint the cobbler’s wife. “Every time I thought the picture was finished and saw myself wearing the shoes,” Renoir lamented, “along came the aunt, the daughter, or even the old servant