If you visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London, you will find a quiet 17th-century oil portrait of an engraver named Jacob de Gheyn III. It measures just 29.9 by 24.9 centimeters (barely larger than a standard sheet of printer paper). Yet this unassuming panel holds the official Guinness World Record as the most stolen painting in history.
Between 1966 and 1983, thieves walked away with the portrait four separate times. The museum staff eventually gave it a dry nickname: the "Takeaway Rembrandt."
Why was a 1632 Rembrandt painted so small?
In 1632, a 26-year-old Rembrandt van Rijn was building his reputation in Amsterdam, decades before painting large masterpieces like The Night Watch. Two close friends, Jacob de Gheyn III (an engraver and Utrecht canon) and Maurits Huygens (a government official), approached him with an unusual request. They wanted matching individual vertical portrait prints painted on panels cut from the exact same oak tree.
The pair struck a sentimental pact: whichever friend died first would leave his portrait to the survivor. That way, the two paintings would stay together forever. When De Gheyn died in 1641, he honored the agreement and willed his portrait to Huygens, who recorded the sentimental reunion on the back of the panel.
Because the portraits were designed for private domestic rooms rather than grand council halls, Rembrandt painted them on small, portable wooden panels.
How did thieves manage to steal it four times?
That modest size became an open invitation for art thieves three centuries later. Slipping a 10-by-12-inch wooden panel under a heavy winter coat turned out to be surprisingly straightforward before modern museum security and framed art displays.
- 1966: Thieves broke into Dulwich Picture Gallery through a small maintenance door and made off with eight masterworks. The Rembrandt was recovered in a nearby bush within days.
- 1973: A visitor simply grabbed the panel off the gallery wall, walked into the afternoon air, and pedaled away on a bicycle with the painting stashed in his front basket. Police caught up with him shortly after.
- 1981: Two men entered the gallery around noon. One distracted an attendant by asking long, detailed questions about a children's quiz sheet while his partner lifted the canvas. Police later found it sitting beneath a park bench in a graveyard in Streatham.
- 1983: In the most dramatic break-in, thieves smashed through a gallery skylight using a crowbar, grabbed the portrait, and escaped before guards arrived. It remained missing for three years.
Where was the painting finally recovered?
In 1986, German police and British military investigators traced the missing Rembrandt to a left-luggage rack at a British army garrison train station in Münster, West Germany. The thieves realized the artwork was far too famous to sell on the black market, so they abandoned it on a luggage shelf.
Remarkably, throughout all four heists, the 1632 oak panel survived without any permanent physical damage. Today, the painting is back on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery under reinforced security glass, infrared motion sensors, and round-the-clock monitoring, safe at last after two decades of wild travels. For lovers of classic Dutch masters and stretched canvas prints, the story remains one of art history's most eccentric survival tales.
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