There are so many unusual, interesting, and new things you can find – if you just look around a little bit. And libraries are all about mysteries! So, we are looking at a real-life small mystery each week and bringing some library resources to help add some clarity and some thought.

If you have Netflix, you may be watching the short series “This Is A Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist“; and even if you do not subscribe you may have heard about this series.

The story is simple; the resolution is unfortunately impossible. From Netflix: “In 1990, two men dressed as cops con their way into a Boston museum and steal a fortune in art. Take a deep dive into this daring and notorious crime.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a very impressive woman. She had tons of money, and she did what she wanted to with it. What she wanted was to was to collect art – and so she did. Traveling with her husband, and without him after he died, she crisscrossed Europe buying art. These included paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Botticelli, and many more artists. Later she had to send agents to auctions, so she could successfully bid against museums from around the world to get the art she wanted.

After her husband passed away, she decided to build a house in an area of Boston not many people lived yet, and she was going to not only make it a fashionable area but also to create a museum for her art. This is the current museum. She filled it with her paintings and sculptures. She built rooms to be available for concerts. And the entire building was built around the center courtyard with a beautiful garden, filled with all kinds of plants and flowers.

(Small inserted note: my last job was right across the street from this museum, and my office window looked directly out on the building. It is one of the few things I miss about the job! If you are ever in Boston, it is a lovely little place, and they have a great cafe with expensive, but tasty!, lunch and desserts.)

One of the interesting things about this museum is that nothing can be moved or changed. When Isabella made her will, she knew she had organized the museum/her home to be exactly the way she wanted it. So her will was firm that the foundation running her museum could not move anything. Nothing. (They had to spend years in court to have an addition built onto the back of the building!)

Cut to the night of March 18, 1990. Two men broke into the museum, which really was not too tough to do – way too many art museums have had terrible security, resulting in art thefts happening all over the world. They tied up the security guards (music students at a local college), and then wandered the museum for nearly an hour and a half. They cut paintings out of the frames, leaving the frames still anchored to the walls. Paintings from Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and Manet were taken, along with others and a couple of small pieces of sculptural art. The art was valued at over $500 million.

Today, it is over 20 years since the art has officially been seen. There are rumors of it being used as drug trade collateral, used in IRA funding, taken by the mafia, destroyed in floods, and more. The smaller pieces may be hanging on the walls of people’s homes. They may be rolled up in a basement, forgotten, with the paint flaked off and destroyed. They may have been commissioned by a shadowy underground art lover, and are being admired in a secret lair on a mysterious island.

Nobody knows where any of this went. There is a $10 million reward for the art, and the statute of limitations on the theft has ended. So, if you happen to know where any of these pieces went, feel free to stroll over to the nearest FBI office to let them know and collect your cash!

And while it is not likely the museum staff and visitors will ever forget the loss of this amazing art – they really do not have a choice. Remember Isabella’s will? The one that said nothing, and she meant NOTHING, could be altered? The museum has been diligent in that – so the empty frames, where the paintings where cut from, are still hanging on the walls. It’s incredibly sad, and a constant reminder of the loss.

Do you have any theories? Join in the hunt!

And, of course, you can incorporate this mystery into your library!

• Put out a display of books about the artists whose paintings have been stolen
• Encourage students/patrons to look at biographies of the artists
• Host a painting program, where you talk about the different styles of painters and let everyone do some painting of their own
• Set up a display and a program on true crime, looking at books and podcasts
• Have students/patrons write a story about what happened to the art after the theft
• Create a program about Isabella Stewart Gardener, and other interesting people who collected art
• Set up an indoor gardening project. In the spring, the cafe at the Gardner museum serves food with edible flowers grown in the courtyard garden. So consider making some of your work edible too!