On May 7, 1974, a
stolen Johannes Vermeer painting, The
Guitar Player [1672], was recovered at a cemetery in London after a
dramatic disappearance.
The
Guitar Player constituted
one of the best achievements by Vermeer and had been stolen from Kenwood
House museum on February 23, 1974. The thief had smashed through the shutters
and steel-barred ground floor window of the museum with a sledgehammer, grabbed
the painting off the wall and, despite a ten-foot wall that had to be scaled,
escaped even before an alarm sounded at the police station. Telephone lines had
been cut to slow down any pursuit.
The painting was
too famous to be sold on the open market, so the Scotland Yard anticipated the
thief already had a buyer in mind or would soon follow-up with a ransom note.
The anonymous ransom messages began pouring in. One demanded two members of the
Irish Republican Army be moved from a British prison (where they were serving life sentences) to an Irish prison. Next, a
man called to demand $1.1 million worth of food be distributed on the
Caribbean island of Grenada or else the painting would be destroyed. Grenada
had received its independence from Britain only a month earlier.
Television
reporters soon began announcing the robbery; however, the image of the painting
was not actually shown, but rather only described to TV viewers, as the company
that held the rights to the color slide had demanded a £10 royalty for each use
of the image. Both the BBC and ITV decided to save their money.
Only the frame
was initially discovered – all thanks to clairvoyant assistance from a Romany
Gypsy, Nella Jones. Nella claimed her mind suddenly focused on the whereabouts
of the frame, a half mile from the Kenwood House, while she had been ironing
clothes. She sketched her vision and took it to the Scotland Yard. Having no
other leads, they followed her tip and found broken glass and a damaged frame,
but no painting. Nella spent the following 20 years working
for the Scotland Yard, helping them ensnare murderers and other serious
offenders. Her book
may be purchased on Amazon.
The London Times received
an envelope containing a strip of canvas cut from the back edge of the picture
about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide with a note, typed on thin
blue paper that read: because the "capitalist society values its treasures
more than humanity…we carry out our lunacy to the utmost extent [-] the
painting will be burnt on St Patrick's night."
After another
anonymous tip, the police successfully raced to recover The Guitar Player in a cemetery in Saint Bartholomew's in
London's financial district. A spokesman of Scotland Yard said that "the
painting was propped up against a gravestone, wrapped in newspaper and tied
with a string." Although the painting showed signs of dampness, it was
otherwise undamaged.
No one was ever
charged.
