8 Famous Artworks That Were Lost — and Found Again

On the morning of August 21, 1911, a Louvre handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia lifted Leonardo’s little portrait off its pegs, slipped it out of its frame, and walked it out of the building under his coat. For more than two years the most recognizable painting in the world simply wasn’t anywhere. The scandal was enormous — crowds came to the Louvre just to stare at the blank space on the wall — and, oddly, the theft is a big part of why she’s so famous today.

Peruggia had kept her the whole time in a trunk with a false bottom in his cramped Paris apartment. His undoing came in 1913, when he tried to sell her to a dealer in Florence and was arrested in his hotel room. The painting went home to the Louvre, where you’ll find her now behind bulletproof glass, and Peruggia served barely more than a year.

Edvard Munch’s howling figure has had a rough life. On February 12, 1994 — the very morning the Winter Olympics opened in Norway — thieves propped a ladder against the National Gallery in Oslo, smashed a window, and were gone in under a minute, leaving behind a note that thanked the staff for the poor security. Norwegian police worked an undercover sting with a British investigator and had it back, undamaged, by that May.

Then it happened again. In 2004 masked men walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight and took a different version of The Scream, along with his Madonna, at gunpoint. That one took longer — two years — before police recovered both in 2006. They’d been knocked about, with a corner banged and a hole in the Madonna, but the museum’s conservators nursed them back.

This is the strange one. Gustav Klimt’s shimmering Portrait of a Lady disappeared from a gallery in Piacenza, Italy, in February 1997, and for more than twenty years it was one of the most wanted missing paintings on earth. Nobody could say where it had gone.

The answer, it turned out, was almost nowhere. In December 2019, gardeners clearing ivy off the gallery’s outer wall found a small metal door, and behind it, tucked into a cavity in the very building it was taken from, sat the Klimt in a bag. Experts confirmed it was the real thing, in remarkably good shape. How it got there, and why, is a story the thieves have only partly told.

In December 2002, two men climbed onto the roof of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, broke in through a window, and left minutes later with two early works, including the wind-whipped seascape View of the Sea at Scheveningen. Then the trail went cold for fourteen years.

The paintings finally resurfaced in 2016, far from any gallery — in a house near Naples, seized by Italian anti-mafia police during a crackdown on a Camorra drug clan. They’d lost their frames and picked up a little damage, but they were whole, and after some careful restoration they went back on view where they belonged.

In August 2003, a few men joined a public tour of Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland, hung back from the group, overpowered the guard, and carried Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder out to a waiting car, ditching the frame near the castle wall. For a painting valued in the tens of millions, it made a startlingly casual exit.

It stayed missing for four years before being recovered in Glasgow in 2007. When conservators finally got their hands on it, they braced for the worst — and found no damage at all. These days you can see it on loan at the Scottish National Gallery.

Rembrandt’s small Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III hangs in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, and it holds a record no painting wants: the most frequently stolen artwork in the world. Thieves made off with it in 1966, then again in 1973, 1981, and 1983 — which is how it earned the nickname the “Takeaway Rembrandt.”

Each time, it came back. Once it was found at a train station in Germany; another time police caught the thieves in a taxi with the painting still on them. It’s a modest picture, easy to carry under an arm, and that portability is exactly what kept tempting people — and exactly why it kept coming home.

This one barely qualifies as lost at all, but it’s too good to leave out. In April 1991, two armed robbers slipped into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and walked out with twenty paintings — among them a version of the beloved Sunflowers — in what was, for a few minutes, one of the biggest art thefts since the war.

Then it all fell apart for them. About thirty-five minutes later, police found every single canvas in an abandoned getaway car across the city. A handful of the paintings had been torn in the scramble and needed repair, but not one was lost. Four men, including two of the museum’s own guards, were later convicted.

In February 2008, three masked men walked into a private museum in Zurich near closing time and took four Impressionist masterpieces — a Cézanne, a Degas, a Van Gogh, and Claude Monet’s Poppy Field at Vétheuil — worth well over a hundred million dollars. It was one of the largest art heists Europe had ever seen.

The Monet didn’t stay gone long. Just over a week later, it and the Van Gogh were discovered in a car parked at a nearby hospital, still under the glass they’d been displayed behind, in good condition. The other two took years longer to find their way back, but every one of the four was eventually recovered.