The 'Takeaway Rembrandt': How One Painting Became Art Crime's Most Wanted

At just 29.9 by 24.9 centimeters, Rembrandt's *Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III* is barely larger than a hardback book. Yet this modest oil-on-oak panel has earned a distinction that no artwork should aspire to: according to Guinness World Records, it is the most frequently stolen painting in history.

The work depicts Jacob de Gheyn III, a 17th-century Utrecht engraver, rendered in Rembrandt's characteristic brown and amber tones. Its diminutive size—which has earned it the nickname the "takeaway Rembrandt"—made it an irresistible target for art thieves. Between 1966 and 1986, the painting disappeared from London's Dulwich Picture Gallery not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. Each recovery was as improbable as the theft itself.

The First Vanishing

The painting's criminal career began in 1966 when it was stolen for the first time. Over the next two decades, Dulwich Picture Gallery—a historic institution founded in 1814 in south London—would become intimately familiar with loss and recovery. The gallery's curators could not have anticipated that their modest Rembrandt would become the subject of repeated, almost clockwork heists.

The pattern intensified in the 1980s. In August 1981, thieves struck again. This time, their success was short-lived: on September 3, police arrested four men in a taxi, and the painting was swiftly recovered. The brazenness of the theft—and the speed of its resolution—seemed almost comedic, yet it underscored a darker reality: this work was a target unlike any other.

A European Escape

In 1983, the theft took a more dramatic turn. Burglars scaled a ladder, smashed through a skylight, and removed the painting directly from its display. This time, recovery did not come quickly. Months passed. Then, on October 8, 1986, the painting was discovered on a luggage shelf at Münster train station in Germany—suggesting the thieves had attempted to smuggle it out of Britain entirely.

But the most peculiar recoveries would follow. In separate incidents, the work turned up beneath a bench in Streatham churchyard and wedged against the back of a bicycle. These discoveries painted a picture of increasingly desperate thieves, unable to profit from their prize, abandoning it in whatever locations they could access. The painting had become a hot potato—valuable enough to steal, but impossible to sell or safely transport.

The Broader Context

The Rembrandt thefts were not isolated in the world of art crime. The most valuable single theft in history occurred in 1990 when thieves dressed as police officers entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and removed 13 artworks worth an estimated $500 million, including Rembrandt's *Storm on the Sea of Galilee*. Those paintings remain missing. Yet the Gardner Museum theft, while more audacious in scope, has never yielded the recovery rate of the Danish-held Dulwich case.

What distinguishes the Jacob de Gheyn portrait is not the sophistication of its thefts, but their frequency and the painting's strange magnetic pull on criminals. Its portability made it uniquely vulnerable; its fame made it worthless on the black market; its recovery, in most cases, was inevitable.

Security and Legacy

Today, *Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III* hangs in Dulwich Picture Gallery under enhanced security measures. The painting has transcended its identity as mere masterpiece to become a documented case study in art crime itself. Museum professionals, law enforcement agencies, and criminologists reference it when discussing theft prevention and the psychology of art thieves.

The work's checkered history serves as a reminder that a painting's vulnerability is not always proportional to its value. Sometimes, the greatest risk to a masterpiece is not its worth, but its size.