Foiled, £100m Rembrandt heist at suburban gallery
Raiders lifted masterpieces off wall but left one in the shrubbery
A BURGLAR snatched paintings by Rembrandt worth up to £100million from a historic art gallery.
But he abandoned the two 17th century masterpieces after being challenged by police as he escaped.
The intruder struck just before midnight on Wednesday at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London. As he grabbed the two works from a major exhibition of 35 paintings, drawings and etchings by the Dutch master, he set off an alarm.
The gallery has been a frequent target for thieves and the intruder may not have known that a security system had been installed specifically to protect the Rembrandt exhibition. Police arrived in minutes and the man was challenged by an officer in the grounds.
However he managed to get away after spraying the officer in the face with an unknown substance. By the time the PC recovered, the intruder had fled.
Officers who searched the gallery grounds found both paintings, one of which had been hidden in shrubbery. Yesterday the gallery, which remained closed, said it was assessing whether the works had been damaged as a result of being taken and then dumped on muddy ground in wet weather.
The gallery said the theft was detected by its ‘robust security systems’ and thanked its security staff and ‘the swift response of the Metropolitan Police.’
Last night maintenance staff were seen using ladders and torches to assess the roof, leading to speculation that the thief may have entered that way. More than a dozen police and forensics officers could be seen combing damp undergrowth for evidence.
The gallery refused to say which paintings had been taken. But sources said the pair were among the most significant by Rembrandt, some of whose works have been valued at up to £50million. There was speculation that one target was his 1645 masterpiece Girl At A Window.
Other works in the exhibition include Christ And St Mary Magdalen At The Tomb (1638), lent by the Royal Collection, and A Woman Bathing In A Stream (1654), from the National Gallery. Museums to have loaned Rembrandts for the show include the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Berlin’s Gemaldegalerie.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery, founded in 1811, was the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. It also houses Portrait Of Jacob De Gheyn III, known as the ‘takeaway Rembrandt’. The 1632 work is worth £3.5 million and has been taken four times, the most recorded for any painting.
In 1981, a gang coolly walked out with it but it was retrieved when police stopped four men in a taxi.
In 1983, a burglar smashed a skylight and descended into the gallery, using a crowbar to remove the painting from the wall. Three years later it was discovered in a left-luggage rack in West Germany. It was also once recovered from under a bench in a graveyard in Streatham, south London.
‘Robust security systems’