May 5, 2010 • 19 mins
From cat burglars to immoral, obsessed collectors, we've all heard stories of notorious art thieves. But in terms of loot, which of history's outrageous art heists was the most successful? Listen in and learn more in this podcast.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Mamber and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our story
is going to start with the highest value art heist
(00:20):
in history. So that's a pretty good place, right It's
also a story about mustaches, and from there it's going
to take us all the way back to turn of
the century Boston with a socialite art collector who loves
boxing in the House of Worth and baseball, and she
ends up building one of the most beautiful art collections
in the country. So we have a lot to talk about,
(00:42):
something for everyone today. So we're going to set our scene,
which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's this quiet,
tucked away Venetian palace on the Fenway in Boston, and
it's March eighteenth, as St. Patrick's Day. Revelers are coming
back on their way home, and at one a m
(01:04):
the museum's buzzer sounds. The guards look out to see
what looks like two Boston policemen outside wearing almost comically
large mustaches. Uh, we kind of thought of the hot
cops here from arrested Development, but the policemen say they
need to check out a reported disturbance, so the guards
let them in, but minutes later they're cuffed bound in
(01:26):
duct tape, and after shutting off the video cameras, the
thieves head up to the museum's Dutch room and their
first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt, but
it's a heavy panel in this heavy gilt frame and
it won't come out, so they just leave that one
on the floor. The canvas Rembrands are a little easier
to deal with, though the thieves slash them out of
(01:46):
their frames, which it's almost worse than the book of
Kel's being written in I think, and run off with
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and
a Lady and Gentleman in Black, two rem Brands there
Gone now, And next is Vermier's The Concert, which they
take from an easel, and then a govert Flink, and
(02:07):
then they move on with these big works, and they
take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size
of a postage stamp, and a bronze Chinese beaker, before
passing by all these other amazing works about a Celia
raphael A Frangelico, before taking five drawings by Digga, and
all of this happens under the John Singer Sergeant portrait
(02:28):
of the museum's founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sarah said,
in a movie, you would have to film it with
her eyes and the portrait she's watching the whole thing,
and then her ghost would come and haunt them or something.
Um they try to take a flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard,
but they can't get it either, so they end up
just taking the little bronze finial of an eagle at
(02:48):
the top. And the final thing they take is a
min A oil, which is kind of awesome, by the way,
if you look it up. It's a guy writing in
this enormous top hat. And they don't touch Titian's Europa,
even though it's the most valuable thing in the museum.
So they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time, and
they tell the guards, you'll be hearing from us in
(03:10):
about a year. But now it's twenty years later. There've
been offers of immunity, a five million dollar reward, and
all of this art, which is valued at two hundred
million to five hundred million dollars, is just gone So
how did so much priceless art, these old Masters, high
Renaissance paintings, famous American works, a really extensive Asian collection,
(03:34):
How did they all end up in this beautiful, tiny
Venetian mansion with a lush enclosed courtyard, fountains and statue
are You should look it up online. It's really gorgeous.
That's because for nearly forty years Boston had a really
great collector, the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. And Isabella's Stewart
was born in eighteen forty in New York City, and
(03:55):
her father was a wealthy merchant, and her family even
claimed descent from the oil Storks, but that's kind of
a dubious claim. That's just one of those things that
people say. Who wouldn't like to be related to American Scots? Right?
She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris,
and she befriended Julia Gardner abroad. She eventually married her
(04:16):
friend's older brother, John L. Gardner, known as Jack, in
eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street in Boston together.
But her entry into the art world was partly brought
on by a personal tragedy. Uh their son, John Gardner,
the third known as Jackie, died when he was two
years old of pneumonia, and she falls into a deep
depression and she gets really sick, and her doctor recommends
(04:39):
that jack take her traveling, and so they go to
Scandinavia and Russia and Vienna and Paris, and by the
time she comes back, she's feeling a lot better. And
they've also started to pick up little, you know, pretty
things along the course of their travels and bringing them
back to their Beacon Hill home. And they don't have
any more children, although they do raise their three or
(05:00):
and nephews, and they travel even more extensively after that,
the Middle East, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States,
although perhaps unsurprisingly considering the museum's design, their favorite spot
was Venice, where they stayed at the Palazzo Barbara. And
Isabella is a very social woman too, so don't think
of just her and her husband off on these private
(05:20):
travels all the time. The museum's archives actually have seven
thousand letters from one thousand correspondents, so she's a busy lady.
She's really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular
with the Boston Brahmin's she's different. She's got all this traveling.
She's mingling with American ex pats like Henry James, Singer Sargeant,
(05:42):
James McNeil, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant, spending thousands
of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth clothing and jewels.
So she's an outsider. Yeah, she's never totally accepted by
that society, but she's so amazing and she cuts her
own profile in it. You know, who wouldn't want to
hang out with her? I know, she's really great, but
(06:04):
one critic wrote that she was the most dashing of
fashion's local signis shirts. Who can order the whole symphony
orchestra to her house for a private musical, So there
you do. And her tastes were really broad. It wasn't
just that she was interested in art. She was also
really into the Red Sox and boxing and hockey, Harvard football,
and horse races. So she had But it doesn't take
(06:30):
long for her to get up, you know, beyond picking
up pretty little souvenirs on her travels, and get into
really serious art collecting. And she does this by the
mid eighteen nineties and starts hanging up all her paintings
at her Beacon Hill house, leading the extras on chair.
So I can imagine, just like, oh gosh, where am
I going to even put this Rembrandt? I just thought.
(06:53):
She has an advisor to Bernard Brenson, who does a
lot of her buying, and she has also befriended some
influence people in the Eastern art world, like Oka Cora Cucuzo,
who's famous for writing the Book of Tea and helping
to preserve Japanese artistic styles. Today there's a copy of
the book at the museum. Yeah. Her first major old
Master purchase comes in eighteen ninety two, and it's of
(07:16):
Vermeer the Concert. It's eventually stolen in the heist, and
it costs her just over six thousand dollars. And this
is kind of weird to think of now you I
don't know, I guess you imagine old Masters paintings always
being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really
the case. In eighteen nine two, this was a pretty
progressive purchase, and she heads off a trend a few
(07:40):
years later. American buyers think American industrialists with lots of
money or snatching up all the Old Master paintings they can, right.
And you you told me something cool from a book
you were reading about grain and painting. Yeah, it was
a book by Cynthia Saltzman called Old Master's New World.
I think I kind of want to read it now.
But she said that a lot of this rush on
(08:03):
European art, and specifically Old Masters works that were being
held in England came because the English started importing American grain,
and consequently their prices fell and their land value fell.
And you have all these old lords who aren't making
rent anymore, the pinch. Yeah. And meanwhile their inheritance taxes
(08:25):
are going up, their property taxes are going up, and
they're more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt they
have in the manner. And meanwhile, of course we have
our American tycoons getting fabulously rich but also wanting to
cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst podcast
very much. Hearst. And because Americans are building all these
(08:46):
new big museums, they need art to fill them up with.
And this in turn influences generations of American artists who
are able to go and see these great works from
old Masters from the Italian Renaissance and not have to
go all the way to Europe to to see a
painting gardeners not just about the old masters, though. She's
(09:07):
not your your average art collector. She wrote to Barns
in a nineteen hundred you know, or rather you don't
know that I adore Giotto and really don't adore Rembrandt.
I only like him, And he wrote back, I am
not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's like
any vulgar millionaire. And Sarah's a big Giotto fan. A
This is another point in Isabella's favor um. Her love
(09:30):
for Italian Renaissance art makes her by Botticelli's Death of
Lucretia for fifteen thousand dollars, and that's actually the first
uh Botcelli to come to the United States. And she
likes contemporary art. We've already mentioned. She's friends with Singer
Sergeant and whistler um. And she sees herself not just
as a woman decorating her home and kind of fitting
(09:53):
into that um Victorian standard of I don't know Victorian
real for women, but more like a Renaissance patron of
the arts, kind of like Lauren. Yeah, it was more
specifically Isabella Dusty, who we mentioned in our Catherine Medici
podcast recently, and in eighteen eighty six, her friend Henry
(10:15):
James takes her to Singer Sergeant's London studio to see
Madam X, which is of course a very famous and
very lovely painting, and he does a head on, full
body painting of her in front of a Venetian brocade,
which James describes as a Byzantine madonna with a halo,
and Sergeant displays it as a woman and enigma. It
(10:35):
really does look like a halo. The brocade's pattern is
directly behind her head. It's pretty cool. But after Gardner's
husband died in eighteen ninety eight, her collecting took a
different turn and she started to build a museum and
she wanted to make her private space, you know, her
Beacon Hill home with paintings leaning on chairs, into a
(10:56):
public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works
of art, and she helps with the design, with the construction.
She takes a very active role in the building at
this museum and it kind of reminded us of the
Hearst Castle because it has this mix of styles. You
walk into one room that's decorated in a certain way,
and then into another that's completely different. And all of
(11:20):
this faces in on a gorgeous courtyard with windows and
balconies that honestly look like they'd be in a capulate.
Juliet's going to lean out one of the balconies at
any second. And the museum opens to the public in
nineteen o three, and she has a phoenix above the
door along with a coat of arms, and I guess
her own personal motto, which is simul plesier, which I
(11:44):
don't know. I like that. It's a pretty bold statement
to make at the at the gate of your museums.
And she slows down on the collecting later in her
life to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment.
When she died in nineteen four, after a series of jokes,
she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum, with
enough left over for charitable donations for the prevention of
(12:06):
cruelty to children and to animals. And the museum is
given to Boston as a public institution with a catch.
Nothing can be changed, rearranged, added, or removed, although in
two thousand nine a Massachusetts court did decide that there
could be an addition made by Renzo Piano, who did
the High Museum addition here in Atlanta. So the short
(12:29):
story is, if you go to the Gardener Museum today,
it's going to look exactly like Isabella Stuart Gardener intended
it to look. It's it's her house, it's her museum,
except that, of course the nineteen nine thieves weren't so
kind as to follow her wishes. So when you enter
the Dutch room there are gaping frames where masterpieces should be.
(12:52):
So that brings us back to our heist and the
question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good
chance that they've actually been destroyed by now. When Sarah
was explaining this to me, she said that sometimes art
was too hot to unload, which I love because apparently
she has a secret life. Makes me sound like a
hot I don't know about um, but they're probably part
(13:15):
of the dark, shadowy art black market, where art is
often used as collateral instead of cash for drugs and guns,
which I had no idea that art would be collateral.
But according to Alexander Smith, who worked with the Art
Loss Register, it keeps this huge, long record of all
the hundreds of thousands of artworks that are missing stolen um.
(13:39):
She She says that with tighter banking regulations, it has
become difficult for people to put big chunks of money
in financial institutions without getting noticed. So now thieves go
out and steal a painting. So it's easy cash, I guess.
But we want to make it clear that most thefts
aren't as glamorous as say the two thousand two fist
(14:00):
in Paraguay where thieves dug an eighty foot tunnel, or
our gardener heist with the false mustaches now the Thomas
Crown affair. According to a Smithsonian article by Robert Pool,
it's usually just someone with inside access who lifts a
stored work and walks off, because of course most museums
don't have their whole collection out. A lot of stories.
(14:21):
Imagine a print that's in a museum spacement and nobody
thinks anyone will notice. Since the gardener heist is ostensibly
the highest profile job in the world, there have been
tons of leads, tips, and bizarro theories, some of which
will tell you. One is that the i ra A
staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members.
(14:43):
And this is another thing. If you think of of
UM artworks being used as cash, they can also sometimes
be used as get out of jail free cards because
there's the immunity. Yeah, because authorities will want to get
the artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer in unity
to anybody involved. Another idea is that it was planned
(15:04):
out by a musician who had performed with Roy Orbison
before he was nabbed for another stuff. Another is that
the artworks are hidden in Ireland's West Country, which is
a theory. This is very strange. It's a theory developed
in part because so many of the stolen goods were
kind of horsey in theme, like the dig oust gushes
(15:25):
are all equestrian subjects, and since the Irish love horses
so much, maybe maybe there's a connection UM. Some also
have said that it was taken as security by Boston
crime boss James Whitey Boulger with the help of compromised
FBI agents. But Sarah, you know a little bit more
about that one than I do. Well, Boulger in the
(15:47):
local FBI office did work together. They worked together to
brain down an Italian crime family, which consequently was also
Bulger's main competitor in Boston, but it leads to him
buying off some of his BI handlers and an FBI supervisor,
John Connolly, and Boulger is actually still one of the
FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy,
(16:11):
narcotics distribution, and nineteen counts of murder. So people think
he's the only guy in Boston at the time who
would have been able to get those paintings out of
the country since he had this FBI connection. And our
latest word comes from April two thousand ten and the
Boston Globe, and that's that the FBI was hot on
the trail of the art, which this time was being
(16:33):
held by a Corsican gang. Um, But that bureaucratic infighting
and an inability for the FBI to work with their
French counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion,
the art is still missing. Um. We hope that it's
being well cared for and that someday it will find
its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile,
(16:56):
there's plenty of neat stuff to see at the museum
and now carries much better theft insurance and UH a
much more intense security system than it used to. And
another side note, if your name is Isabella, you can
go to the museum for free. We might need to
change our names and go visit. And we have a quote,
our final quote from Barrenson on Gardner, which I will
(17:19):
let you read, Sarah, since you love her so much,
and that is she lives at a rate in intensity
and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale,
thin and shadowy. And that's the final word on Isabella
Stewart Gardner. And that brings us to listener mail. This
is a special edition of real mail, this time from
(17:42):
Jill in Minneapolis, and she sent us a pretty funny
postcard that just says hello everyone on the front. But
she sent it in honor of National Card and Letter
Writing Month and suggested we do a podcast on the
Pony Express or the USPS. So what do y'all think?
Do you like those ideas? You should let us know
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. And
(18:04):
we also have an unorthodox listener mail. I got a
text from my old boss from my bartending days, Chris,
who said that he and his little son Finn were
big fans of the podcast, so a shout out to
Chris and Finn, and if you'd like to follow us
on Twitter, you can find us at mist in History.
We also have a Facebook fan page that we update
(18:26):
fairly frequently, and we have an article recommendation for you today,
five impressive artists, which you can find if you search
on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History glass blocked on
the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Mamber and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our story
is going to start with the highest value art heist
(00:20):
in history. So that's a pretty good place, right It's
also a story about mustaches, and from there it's going
to take us all the way back to turn of
the century Boston with a socialite art collector who loves
boxing in the House of Worth and baseball, and she
ends up building one of the most beautiful art collections
in the country. So we have a lot to talk about,
(00:42):
something for everyone today. So we're going to set our scene,
which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's this quiet,
tucked away Venetian palace on the Fenway in Boston, and
it's March eighteenth, as St. Patrick's Day. Revelers are coming
back on their way home, and at one a m
(01:04):
the museum's buzzer sounds. The guards look out to see
what looks like two Boston policemen outside wearing almost comically
large mustaches. Uh, we kind of thought of the hot
cops here from arrested Development, but the policemen say they
need to check out a reported disturbance, so the guards
let them in, but minutes later they're cuffed bound in
(01:26):
duct tape, and after shutting off the video cameras, the
thieves head up to the museum's Dutch room and their
first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt, but
it's a heavy panel in this heavy gilt frame and
it won't come out, so they just leave that one
on the floor. The canvas Rembrands are a little easier
to deal with, though the thieves slash them out of
(01:46):
their frames, which it's almost worse than the book of
Kel's being written in I think, and run off with
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and
a Lady and Gentleman in Black, two rem Brands there
Gone now, And next is Vermier's The Concert, which they
take from an easel, and then a govert Flink, and
(02:07):
then they move on with these big works, and they
take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size
of a postage stamp, and a bronze Chinese beaker, before
passing by all these other amazing works about a Celia
raphael A Frangelico, before taking five drawings by Digga, and
all of this happens under the John Singer Sergeant portrait
(02:28):
of the museum's founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sarah said,
in a movie, you would have to film it with
her eyes and the portrait she's watching the whole thing,
and then her ghost would come and haunt them or something.
Um they try to take a flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard,
but they can't get it either, so they end up
just taking the little bronze finial of an eagle at
(02:48):
the top. And the final thing they take is a
min A oil, which is kind of awesome, by the way,
if you look it up. It's a guy writing in
this enormous top hat. And they don't touch Titian's Europa,
even though it's the most valuable thing in the museum.
So they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time, and
they tell the guards, you'll be hearing from us in
(03:10):
about a year. But now it's twenty years later. There've
been offers of immunity, a five million dollar reward, and
all of this art, which is valued at two hundred
million to five hundred million dollars, is just gone So
how did so much priceless art, these old Masters, high
Renaissance paintings, famous American works, a really extensive Asian collection,
(03:34):
How did they all end up in this beautiful, tiny
Venetian mansion with a lush enclosed courtyard, fountains and statue
are You should look it up online. It's really gorgeous.
That's because for nearly forty years Boston had a really
great collector, the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. And Isabella's Stewart
was born in eighteen forty in New York City, and
(03:55):
her father was a wealthy merchant, and her family even
claimed descent from the oil Storks, but that's kind of
a dubious claim. That's just one of those things that
people say. Who wouldn't like to be related to American Scots? Right?
She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris,
and she befriended Julia Gardner abroad. She eventually married her
(04:16):
friend's older brother, John L. Gardner, known as Jack, in
eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street in Boston together.
But her entry into the art world was partly brought
on by a personal tragedy. Uh their son, John Gardner,
the third known as Jackie, died when he was two
years old of pneumonia, and she falls into a deep
depression and she gets really sick, and her doctor recommends
(04:39):
that jack take her traveling, and so they go to
Scandinavia and Russia and Vienna and Paris, and by the
time she comes back, she's feeling a lot better. And
they've also started to pick up little, you know, pretty
things along the course of their travels and bringing them
back to their Beacon Hill home. And they don't have
any more children, although they do raise their three or
(05:00):
and nephews, and they travel even more extensively after that,
the Middle East, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States,
although perhaps unsurprisingly considering the museum's design, their favorite spot
was Venice, where they stayed at the Palazzo Barbara. And
Isabella is a very social woman too, so don't think
of just her and her husband off on these private
(05:20):
travels all the time. The museum's archives actually have seven
thousand letters from one thousand correspondents, so she's a busy lady.
She's really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular
with the Boston Brahmin's she's different. She's got all this traveling.
She's mingling with American ex pats like Henry James, Singer Sargeant,
(05:42):
James McNeil, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant, spending thousands
of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth clothing and jewels.
So she's an outsider. Yeah, she's never totally accepted by
that society, but she's so amazing and she cuts her
own profile in it. You know, who wouldn't want to
hang out with her? I know, she's really great, but
(06:04):
one critic wrote that she was the most dashing of
fashion's local signis shirts. Who can order the whole symphony
orchestra to her house for a private musical, So there
you do. And her tastes were really broad. It wasn't
just that she was interested in art. She was also
really into the Red Sox and boxing and hockey, Harvard football,
and horse races. So she had But it doesn't take
(06:30):
long for her to get up, you know, beyond picking
up pretty little souvenirs on her travels, and get into
really serious art collecting. And she does this by the
mid eighteen nineties and starts hanging up all her paintings
at her Beacon Hill house, leading the extras on chair.
So I can imagine, just like, oh gosh, where am
I going to even put this Rembrandt? I just thought.
(06:53):
She has an advisor to Bernard Brenson, who does a
lot of her buying, and she has also befriended some
influence people in the Eastern art world, like Oka Cora Cucuzo,
who's famous for writing the Book of Tea and helping
to preserve Japanese artistic styles. Today there's a copy of
the book at the museum. Yeah. Her first major old
Master purchase comes in eighteen ninety two, and it's of
(07:16):
Vermeer the Concert. It's eventually stolen in the heist, and
it costs her just over six thousand dollars. And this
is kind of weird to think of now you I
don't know, I guess you imagine old Masters paintings always
being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really
the case. In eighteen nine two, this was a pretty
progressive purchase, and she heads off a trend a few
(07:40):
years later. American buyers think American industrialists with lots of
money or snatching up all the Old Master paintings they can, right.
And you you told me something cool from a book
you were reading about grain and painting. Yeah, it was
a book by Cynthia Saltzman called Old Master's New World.
I think I kind of want to read it now.
But she said that a lot of this rush on
(08:03):
European art, and specifically Old Masters works that were being
held in England came because the English started importing American grain,
and consequently their prices fell and their land value fell.
And you have all these old lords who aren't making
rent anymore, the pinch. Yeah. And meanwhile their inheritance taxes
(08:25):
are going up, their property taxes are going up, and
they're more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt they
have in the manner. And meanwhile, of course we have
our American tycoons getting fabulously rich but also wanting to
cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst podcast
very much. Hearst. And because Americans are building all these
(08:46):
new big museums, they need art to fill them up with.
And this in turn influences generations of American artists who
are able to go and see these great works from
old Masters from the Italian Renaissance and not have to
go all the way to Europe to to see a
painting gardeners not just about the old masters, though. She's
(09:07):
not your your average art collector. She wrote to Barns
in a nineteen hundred you know, or rather you don't
know that I adore Giotto and really don't adore Rembrandt.
I only like him, And he wrote back, I am
not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's like
any vulgar millionaire. And Sarah's a big Giotto fan. A
This is another point in Isabella's favor um. Her love
(09:30):
for Italian Renaissance art makes her by Botticelli's Death of
Lucretia for fifteen thousand dollars, and that's actually the first
uh Botcelli to come to the United States. And she
likes contemporary art. We've already mentioned. She's friends with Singer
Sergeant and whistler um. And she sees herself not just
as a woman decorating her home and kind of fitting
(09:53):
into that um Victorian standard of I don't know Victorian
real for women, but more like a Renaissance patron of
the arts, kind of like Lauren. Yeah, it was more
specifically Isabella Dusty, who we mentioned in our Catherine Medici
podcast recently, and in eighteen eighty six, her friend Henry
(10:15):
James takes her to Singer Sergeant's London studio to see
Madam X, which is of course a very famous and
very lovely painting, and he does a head on, full
body painting of her in front of a Venetian brocade,
which James describes as a Byzantine madonna with a halo,
and Sergeant displays it as a woman and enigma. It
(10:35):
really does look like a halo. The brocade's pattern is
directly behind her head. It's pretty cool. But after Gardner's
husband died in eighteen ninety eight, her collecting took a
different turn and she started to build a museum and
she wanted to make her private space, you know, her
Beacon Hill home with paintings leaning on chairs, into a
(10:56):
public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works
of art, and she helps with the design, with the construction.
She takes a very active role in the building at
this museum and it kind of reminded us of the
Hearst Castle because it has this mix of styles. You
walk into one room that's decorated in a certain way,
and then into another that's completely different. And all of
(11:20):
this faces in on a gorgeous courtyard with windows and
balconies that honestly look like they'd be in a capulate.
Juliet's going to lean out one of the balconies at
any second. And the museum opens to the public in
nineteen o three, and she has a phoenix above the
door along with a coat of arms, and I guess
her own personal motto, which is simul plesier, which I
(11:44):
don't know. I like that. It's a pretty bold statement
to make at the at the gate of your museums.
And she slows down on the collecting later in her
life to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment.
When she died in nineteen four, after a series of jokes,
she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum, with
enough left over for charitable donations for the prevention of
(12:06):
cruelty to children and to animals. And the museum is
given to Boston as a public institution with a catch.
Nothing can be changed, rearranged, added, or removed, although in
two thousand nine a Massachusetts court did decide that there
could be an addition made by Renzo Piano, who did
the High Museum addition here in Atlanta. So the short
(12:29):
story is, if you go to the Gardener Museum today,
it's going to look exactly like Isabella Stuart Gardener intended
it to look. It's it's her house, it's her museum,
except that, of course the nineteen nine thieves weren't so
kind as to follow her wishes. So when you enter
the Dutch room there are gaping frames where masterpieces should be.
(12:52):
So that brings us back to our heist and the
question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good
chance that they've actually been destroyed by now. When Sarah
was explaining this to me, she said that sometimes art
was too hot to unload, which I love because apparently
she has a secret life. Makes me sound like a
hot I don't know about um, but they're probably part
(13:15):
of the dark, shadowy art black market, where art is
often used as collateral instead of cash for drugs and guns,
which I had no idea that art would be collateral.
But according to Alexander Smith, who worked with the Art
Loss Register, it keeps this huge, long record of all
the hundreds of thousands of artworks that are missing stolen um.
(13:39):
She She says that with tighter banking regulations, it has
become difficult for people to put big chunks of money
in financial institutions without getting noticed. So now thieves go
out and steal a painting. So it's easy cash, I guess.
But we want to make it clear that most thefts
aren't as glamorous as say the two thousand two fist
(14:00):
in Paraguay where thieves dug an eighty foot tunnel, or
our gardener heist with the false mustaches now the Thomas
Crown affair. According to a Smithsonian article by Robert Pool,
it's usually just someone with inside access who lifts a
stored work and walks off, because of course most museums
don't have their whole collection out. A lot of stories.
(14:21):
Imagine a print that's in a museum spacement and nobody
thinks anyone will notice. Since the gardener heist is ostensibly
the highest profile job in the world, there have been
tons of leads, tips, and bizarro theories, some of which
will tell you. One is that the i ra A
staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members.
(14:43):
And this is another thing. If you think of of
UM artworks being used as cash, they can also sometimes
be used as get out of jail free cards because
there's the immunity. Yeah, because authorities will want to get
the artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer in unity
to anybody involved. Another idea is that it was planned
(15:04):
out by a musician who had performed with Roy Orbison
before he was nabbed for another stuff. Another is that
the artworks are hidden in Ireland's West Country, which is
a theory. This is very strange. It's a theory developed
in part because so many of the stolen goods were
kind of horsey in theme, like the dig oust gushes
(15:25):
are all equestrian subjects, and since the Irish love horses
so much, maybe maybe there's a connection UM. Some also
have said that it was taken as security by Boston
crime boss James Whitey Boulger with the help of compromised
FBI agents. But Sarah, you know a little bit more
about that one than I do. Well, Boulger in the
(15:47):
local FBI office did work together. They worked together to
brain down an Italian crime family, which consequently was also
Bulger's main competitor in Boston, but it leads to him
buying off some of his BI handlers and an FBI supervisor,
John Connolly, and Boulger is actually still one of the
FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy,
(16:11):
narcotics distribution, and nineteen counts of murder. So people think
he's the only guy in Boston at the time who
would have been able to get those paintings out of
the country since he had this FBI connection. And our
latest word comes from April two thousand ten and the
Boston Globe, and that's that the FBI was hot on
the trail of the art, which this time was being
(16:33):
held by a Corsican gang. Um, But that bureaucratic infighting
and an inability for the FBI to work with their
French counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion,
the art is still missing. Um. We hope that it's
being well cared for and that someday it will find
its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile,
(16:56):
there's plenty of neat stuff to see at the museum
and now carries much better theft insurance and UH a
much more intense security system than it used to. And
another side note, if your name is Isabella, you can
go to the museum for free. We might need to
change our names and go visit. And we have a quote,
our final quote from Barrenson on Gardner, which I will
(17:19):
let you read, Sarah, since you love her so much,
and that is she lives at a rate in intensity
and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale,
thin and shadowy. And that's the final word on Isabella
Stewart Gardner. And that brings us to listener mail. This
is a special edition of real mail, this time from
(17:42):
Jill in Minneapolis, and she sent us a pretty funny
postcard that just says hello everyone on the front. But
she sent it in honor of National Card and Letter
Writing Month and suggested we do a podcast on the
Pony Express or the USPS. So what do y'all think?
Do you like those ideas? You should let us know
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. And
(18:04):
we also have an unorthodox listener mail. I got a
text from my old boss from my bartending days, Chris,
who said that he and his little son Finn were
big fans of the podcast, so a shout out to
Chris and Finn, and if you'd like to follow us
on Twitter, you can find us at mist in History.
We also have a Facebook fan page that we update
(18:26):
fairly frequently, and we have an article recommendation for you today,
five impressive artists, which you can find if you search
on our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History glass blocked on
the how stuff works dot com home page
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com