A 17th-century drawing by Rembrandt has been snatched from a private art display at a California luxury hotel while a curator was momentarily distracted.
The theft of the $250,000 sketch from the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the upmarket seaside community of Marina del Rey took place at around 10:30pm on Saturday night while the curator’s attention was distracted for a few minutes.
“When the curator turned back to the Rembrandt, it was gone,” Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said. It was not clear whether the person talking to the curator was connected to the theft, though Whitmore said at least two people was involved.
The sketch, called The Judgment, was completed around 1655 and is signed on the back by the Dutch master. Rembrandt von Rijn is widely regarded as one of the finest painters in European art history and his work has become a common target for thieves.
“Rembrandt is a name that criminals know or should know,” said Chris Marinello, the executive director of the London-based Art Loss Register, an international database of stolen artworks. “When they come across one, they see dollar signs.”
Marinello said the theft was most likely an opportunistic crime and not carried out on the orders of a mysterious criminal with a private art collection, as is often depicted in movies.
“Hollywood would love us to believe there are paintings being ordered stolen,” he said. “We have yet to find that.”
Artworks tend to surface either very quickly after they are stolen or else disappear into the underworld where they are traded between criminals at a fraction of their value for drugs and other illicit materials, Marinello said.
The sketch was being displayed on an easel or wooden stand and was apparently not fastened down, Whitmore said.
He described the theft as well-executed, “but not executed well enough to get away with”, adding that investigators had several strong leads and that detectives were looking at video surveillance from the hotel.
A sketch artist was putting together a suspect composite drawing based on witness accounts. It will be released at the end of the week.
The Rembrandt drawing was part of an exhibit at the hotel sponsored by the Linearis Institute based in the San Francisco Bay area community of Hercules.The stolen sketch was drawn with a quill pen and depicts what appears to be a court scene with a man prostrating himself before a judge.
Marinello said the artist thieves most commonly target is Pablo Picasso because of the volume of the Spanish painter’s work and his name recognition.
In July, a thief walked into a San Francisco gallery and snatched a Picasso sketch valued at more than $200,000. The arrest of the suspect ultimately led police to a trove of other stolen artworks in a New Jersey apartment.
In 1990, two criminals posing as police officers robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum during the St Patrick’s Day parade in Boston. Marinello said the stolen works, which included Rembrandt’s only seascape, had a combined worth of as much as $500,000. The paintings are still missing.
Anthony Amore, chief investigator at the museum and co-author of the book Stealing Rembrandts, told the Los Angeles Times there have been 81 documented thefts of the artist’s work in the past 100 years
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