By Ulrich Boser
One museum, thieves, and the Boston underworld—the tale in the back of the misplaced Gardner masterpieces and the artwork detective who swore to get them again
Shortly after hour of darkness on March 18, 1990, males broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and devoted the biggest paintings heist in historical past. They stole a dozen masterpieces, together with one Vermeer, 3 Rembrandts, and 5 Degas. yet after millions of leads, hundreds of thousands of interviews, and a $5-million gift, now not a unmarried portray has been recovered. worthy a complete of $500 million, the lacking masterpieces became the Holy Grail of the paintings international and one of many nation's so much outstanding unsolved mysteries.
Art detective Harold Smith labored at the robbery for years, and after his demise, reporter Ulrich Boser inherited his case records. touring deep into the artwork underworld, Boser explores Smith's unfinished leads and is derived throughout a notable forged of characters, together with the bright rock 'n' roll paintings thief; the golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse; the lethal mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; and the Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who stipulated in her will that not anything may still ever be replaced in her museum, a provision so heavily that the empty frames of the stolen works nonetheless grasp at the partitions. Boser finally cracks one of many greatest mysteries of the case and uncovers the identities of the boys who robbed the museum approximately twenty years in the past. A story of artwork and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling because the stolen masterpieces themselves.
This riveting, splendidly vibrant account takes you into the underworld of obsessed paintings detectives, con males, and thieves, tantalizing leads and useless ends. --Jonathan Harr, writer of The misplaced portray
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Additional info for The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Example text
She visited the construction site every day and frequently battled with workmen over minor details, once climbing a ladder to show the plasterers how to redo the salmon-colored Th e C o n c e r t - 53 stucco so that it recalled the sun-dappled walls of Venice. “Never do anything you are not ordered to,” she barked. She often changed her mind: she had the façade altered, the foundation bricks moved, the main staircase put up and then taken down. But her willful efforts paid off. After walking through a narrow entrance, visitors step into a tall, airy courtyard steeped in sparkling light and flashes of color.
As a young woman, she read Shakespeare and practiced landscape painting. In her thirties, she studied Latin at Harvard with Professor Charles Norton and worked to establish the Boston Symphony Orchestra. With her snappy wit and eager mind, she became close friends with some of the most revered artists and intellectuals of her time, novelist Henry James, painter James Whistler, the writer Henry Adams. John Singer Sargent painted Gardner dozens of times over the course of her life, including a tragically beautiful watercolor just months before her death.
But her willful efforts paid off. After walking through a narrow entrance, visitors step into a tall, airy courtyard steeped in sparkling light and flashes of color. Italianate arches, ornate balustrades, lion stylobates surround the space; the garden overflows with greenery, jasmine trees, white azaleas, freesia, cineraria, orchids. The graceful, atmospheric space is one of the architectural gems of Boston, often cited as one of the most romantically beautiful places in the city. After the building was finished, Gardner spent another year installing her collection.