Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Mamber and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and our story
Speaker 1: is going to start with the highest value art heist
Speaker 1: in history. So that's a pretty good place, right It's
Speaker 1: also a story about mustaches, and from there it's going
Speaker 1: to take us all the way back to turn of
Speaker 1: the century Boston with a socialite art collector who loves
Speaker 1: boxing in the House of Worth and baseball, and she
Speaker 1: ends up building one of the most beautiful art collections
Speaker 1: in the country. So we have a lot to talk about,
Speaker 1: something for everyone today. So we're going to set our scene,
Speaker 1: which is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's this quiet,
Speaker 1: tucked away Venetian palace on the Fenway in Boston, and
Speaker 1: it's March eighteenth, as St. Patrick's Day. Revelers are coming
Speaker 1: back on their way home, and at one a m
Speaker 1: the museum's buzzer sounds. The guards look out to see
Speaker 1: what looks like two Boston policemen outside wearing almost comically
Speaker 1: large mustaches. Uh, we kind of thought of the hot
Speaker 1: cops here from arrested Development, but the policemen say they
Speaker 1: need to check out a reported disturbance, so the guards
Speaker 1: let them in, but minutes later they're cuffed bound in
Speaker 1: duct tape, and after shutting off the video cameras, the
Speaker 1: thieves head up to the museum's Dutch room and their
Speaker 1: first target is an early self portrait by Rembrandt, but
Speaker 1: it's a heavy panel in this heavy gilt frame and
Speaker 1: it won't come out, so they just leave that one
Speaker 1: on the floor. The canvas Rembrands are a little easier
Speaker 1: to deal with, though the thieves slash them out of
Speaker 1: their frames, which it's almost worse than the book of
Speaker 1: Kel's being written in I think, and run off with
Speaker 1: Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and
Speaker 1: a Lady and Gentleman in Black, two rem Brands there
Speaker 1: Gone now, And next is Vermier's The Concert, which they
Speaker 1: take from an easel, and then a govert Flink, and
Speaker 1: then they move on with these big works, and they
Speaker 1: take another Rembrandt, a little tiny etching about the size
Speaker 1: of a postage stamp, and a bronze Chinese beaker, before
Speaker 1: passing by all these other amazing works about a Celia
Speaker 1: raphael A Frangelico, before taking five drawings by Digga, and
Speaker 1: all of this happens under the John Singer Sergeant portrait
Speaker 1: of the museum's founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sarah said,
Speaker 1: in a movie, you would have to film it with
Speaker 1: her eyes and the portrait she's watching the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and then her ghost would come and haunt them or something.
Speaker 1: Um they try to take a flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard,
Speaker 1: but they can't get it either, so they end up
Speaker 1: just taking the little bronze finial of an eagle at
Speaker 1: the top. And the final thing they take is a
Speaker 1: min A oil, which is kind of awesome, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you look it up. It's a guy writing in
Speaker 1: this enormous top hat. And they don't touch Titian's Europa,
Speaker 1: even though it's the most valuable thing in the museum.
Speaker 1: So they spend ninety minutes inside this whole time, and
Speaker 1: they tell the guards, you'll be hearing from us in
Speaker 1: about a year. But now it's twenty years later. There've
Speaker 1: been offers of immunity, a five million dollar reward, and
Speaker 1: all of this art, which is valued at two hundred
Speaker 1: million to five hundred million dollars, is just gone So
Speaker 1: how did so much priceless art, these old Masters, high
Speaker 1: Renaissance paintings, famous American works, a really extensive Asian collection,
Speaker 1: How did they all end up in this beautiful, tiny
Speaker 1: Venetian mansion with a lush enclosed courtyard, fountains and statue
Speaker 1: are You should look it up online. It's really gorgeous.
Speaker 1: That's because for nearly forty years Boston had a really
Speaker 1: great collector, the socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner. And Isabella's Stewart
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen forty in New York City, and
Speaker 1: her father was a wealthy merchant, and her family even
Speaker 1: claimed descent from the oil Storks, but that's kind of
Speaker 1: a dubious claim. That's just one of those things that
Speaker 1: people say. Who wouldn't like to be related to American Scots? Right?
Speaker 1: She was educated in private schools in New York and Paris,
Speaker 1: and she befriended Julia Gardner abroad. She eventually married her
Speaker 1: friend's older brother, John L. Gardner, known as Jack, in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty and they moved to Beacon Street in Boston together.
Speaker 1: But her entry into the art world was partly brought
Speaker 1: on by a personal tragedy. Uh their son, John Gardner,
Speaker 1: the third known as Jackie, died when he was two
Speaker 1: years old of pneumonia, and she falls into a deep
Speaker 1: depression and she gets really sick, and her doctor recommends
Speaker 1: that jack take her traveling, and so they go to
Speaker 1: Scandinavia and Russia and Vienna and Paris, and by the
Speaker 1: time she comes back, she's feeling a lot better. And
Speaker 1: they've also started to pick up little, you know, pretty
Speaker 1: things along the course of their travels and bringing them
Speaker 1: back to their Beacon Hill home. And they don't have
Speaker 1: any more children, although they do raise their three or
Speaker 1: and nephews, and they travel even more extensively after that,
Speaker 1: the Middle East, Central Europe, Asia, all around the United States,
Speaker 1: although perhaps unsurprisingly considering the museum's design, their favorite spot
Speaker 1: was Venice, where they stayed at the Palazzo Barbara. And
Speaker 1: Isabella is a very social woman too, so don't think
Speaker 1: of just her and her husband off on these private
Speaker 1: travels all the time. The museum's archives actually have seven
Speaker 1: thousand letters from one thousand correspondents, so she's a busy lady.
Speaker 1: She's really social, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily popular
Speaker 1: with the Boston Brahmin's she's different. She's got all this traveling.
Speaker 1: She's mingling with American ex pats like Henry James, Singer Sargeant,
Speaker 1: James McNeil, Whistler, and she's generally very extravagant, spending thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars on these paintings, Charles Worth clothing and jewels.
Speaker 1: So she's an outsider. Yeah, she's never totally accepted by
Speaker 1: that society, but she's so amazing and she cuts her
Speaker 1: own profile in it. You know, who wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: hang out with her? I know, she's really great, but
Speaker 1: one critic wrote that she was the most dashing of
Speaker 1: fashion's local signis shirts. Who can order the whole symphony
Speaker 1: orchestra to her house for a private musical, So there
Speaker 1: you do. And her tastes were really broad. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just that she was interested in art. She was also
Speaker 1: really into the Red Sox and boxing and hockey, Harvard football,
Speaker 1: and horse races. So she had But it doesn't take
Speaker 1: long for her to get up, you know, beyond picking
Speaker 1: up pretty little souvenirs on her travels, and get into
Speaker 1: really serious art collecting. And she does this by the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen nineties and starts hanging up all her paintings
Speaker 1: at her Beacon Hill house, leading the extras on chair.
Speaker 1: So I can imagine, just like, oh gosh, where am
Speaker 1: I going to even put this Rembrandt? I just thought.
Speaker 1: She has an advisor to Bernard Brenson, who does a
Speaker 1: lot of her buying, and she has also befriended some
Speaker 1: influence people in the Eastern art world, like Oka Cora Cucuzo,
Speaker 1: who's famous for writing the Book of Tea and helping
Speaker 1: to preserve Japanese artistic styles. Today there's a copy of
Speaker 1: the book at the museum. Yeah. Her first major old
Speaker 1: Master purchase comes in eighteen ninety two, and it's of
Speaker 1: Vermeer the Concert. It's eventually stolen in the heist, and
Speaker 1: it costs her just over six thousand dollars. And this
Speaker 1: is kind of weird to think of now you I
Speaker 1: don't know, I guess you imagine old Masters paintings always
Speaker 1: being expensive and in high demand, but that's not really
Speaker 1: the case. In eighteen nine two, this was a pretty
Speaker 1: progressive purchase, and she heads off a trend a few
Speaker 1: years later. American buyers think American industrialists with lots of
Speaker 1: money or snatching up all the Old Master paintings they can, right.
Speaker 1: And you you told me something cool from a book
Speaker 1: you were reading about grain and painting. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a book by Cynthia Saltzman called Old Master's New World.
Speaker 1: I think I kind of want to read it now.
Speaker 1: But she said that a lot of this rush on
Speaker 1: European art, and specifically Old Masters works that were being
Speaker 1: held in England came because the English started importing American grain,
Speaker 1: and consequently their prices fell and their land value fell.
Speaker 1: And you have all these old lords who aren't making
Speaker 1: rent anymore, the pinch. Yeah. And meanwhile their inheritance taxes
Speaker 1: are going up, their property taxes are going up, and
Speaker 1: they're more willing to sell off the old Rembrandt they
Speaker 1: have in the manner. And meanwhile, of course we have
Speaker 1: our American tycoons getting fabulously rich but also wanting to
Speaker 1: cultivate culture. It might remind you of our Hearst podcast
Speaker 1: very much. Hearst. And because Americans are building all these
Speaker 1: new big museums, they need art to fill them up with.
Speaker 1: And this in turn influences generations of American artists who
Speaker 1: are able to go and see these great works from
Speaker 1: old Masters from the Italian Renaissance and not have to
Speaker 1: go all the way to Europe to to see a
Speaker 1: painting gardeners not just about the old masters, though. She's
Speaker 1: not your your average art collector. She wrote to Barns
Speaker 1: in a nineteen hundred you know, or rather you don't
Speaker 1: know that I adore Giotto and really don't adore Rembrandt.
Speaker 1: I only like him, And he wrote back, I am
Speaker 1: not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandt's like
Speaker 1: any vulgar millionaire. And Sarah's a big Giotto fan. A
Speaker 1: This is another point in Isabella's favor um. Her love
Speaker 1: for Italian Renaissance art makes her by Botticelli's Death of
Speaker 1: Lucretia for fifteen thousand dollars, and that's actually the first
Speaker 1: uh Botcelli to come to the United States. And she
Speaker 1: likes contemporary art. We've already mentioned. She's friends with Singer
Speaker 1: Sergeant and whistler um. And she sees herself not just
Speaker 1: as a woman decorating her home and kind of fitting
Speaker 1: into that um Victorian standard of I don't know Victorian
Speaker 1: real for women, but more like a Renaissance patron of
Speaker 1: the arts, kind of like Lauren. Yeah, it was more
Speaker 1: specifically Isabella Dusty, who we mentioned in our Catherine Medici
Speaker 1: podcast recently, and in eighteen eighty six, her friend Henry
Speaker 1: James takes her to Singer Sergeant's London studio to see
Speaker 1: Madam X, which is of course a very famous and
Speaker 1: very lovely painting, and he does a head on, full
Speaker 1: body painting of her in front of a Venetian brocade,
Speaker 1: which James describes as a Byzantine madonna with a halo,
Speaker 1: and Sergeant displays it as a woman and enigma. It
Speaker 1: really does look like a halo. The brocade's pattern is
Speaker 1: directly behind her head. It's pretty cool. But after Gardner's
Speaker 1: husband died in eighteen ninety eight, her collecting took a
Speaker 1: different turn and she started to build a museum and
Speaker 1: she wanted to make her private space, you know, her
Speaker 1: Beacon Hill home with paintings leaning on chairs, into a
Speaker 1: public space where everybody could come and appreciate her works
Speaker 1: of art, and she helps with the design, with the construction.
Speaker 1: She takes a very active role in the building at
Speaker 1: this museum and it kind of reminded us of the
Speaker 1: Hearst Castle because it has this mix of styles. You
Speaker 1: walk into one room that's decorated in a certain way,
Speaker 1: and then into another that's completely different. And all of
Speaker 1: this faces in on a gorgeous courtyard with windows and
Speaker 1: balconies that honestly look like they'd be in a capulate.
Speaker 1: Juliet's going to lean out one of the balconies at
Speaker 1: any second. And the museum opens to the public in
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, and she has a phoenix above the
Speaker 1: door along with a coat of arms, and I guess
Speaker 1: her own personal motto, which is simul plesier, which I
Speaker 1: don't know. I like that. It's a pretty bold statement
Speaker 1: to make at the at the gate of your museums.
Speaker 1: And she slows down on the collecting later in her
Speaker 1: life to try to leave the museum with a nice endowment.
Speaker 1: When she died in nineteen four, after a series of jokes,
Speaker 1: she'd saved up a million dollars for the museum, with
Speaker 1: enough left over for charitable donations for the prevention of
Speaker 1: cruelty to children and to animals. And the museum is
Speaker 1: given to Boston as a public institution with a catch.
Speaker 1: Nothing can be changed, rearranged, added, or removed, although in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine a Massachusetts court did decide that there
Speaker 1: could be an addition made by Renzo Piano, who did
Speaker 1: the High Museum addition here in Atlanta. So the short
Speaker 1: story is, if you go to the Gardener Museum today,
Speaker 1: it's going to look exactly like Isabella Stuart Gardener intended
Speaker 1: it to look. It's it's her house, it's her museum,
Speaker 1: except that, of course the nineteen nine thieves weren't so
Speaker 1: kind as to follow her wishes. So when you enter
Speaker 1: the Dutch room there are gaping frames where masterpieces should be.
Speaker 1: So that brings us back to our heist and the
Speaker 1: question where our gardeners missing masterpieces and there's a good
Speaker 1: chance that they've actually been destroyed by now. When Sarah
Speaker 1: was explaining this to me, she said that sometimes art
Speaker 1: was too hot to unload, which I love because apparently
Speaker 1: she has a secret life. Makes me sound like a
Speaker 1: hot I don't know about um, but they're probably part
Speaker 1: of the dark, shadowy art black market, where art is
Speaker 1: often used as collateral instead of cash for drugs and guns,
Speaker 1: which I had no idea that art would be collateral.
Speaker 1: But according to Alexander Smith, who worked with the Art
Speaker 1: Loss Register, it keeps this huge, long record of all
Speaker 1: the hundreds of thousands of artworks that are missing stolen um.
Speaker 1: She She says that with tighter banking regulations, it has
Speaker 1: become difficult for people to put big chunks of money
Speaker 1: in financial institutions without getting noticed. So now thieves go
Speaker 1: out and steal a painting. So it's easy cash, I guess.
Speaker 1: But we want to make it clear that most thefts
Speaker 1: aren't as glamorous as say the two thousand two fist
Speaker 1: in Paraguay where thieves dug an eighty foot tunnel, or
Speaker 1: our gardener heist with the false mustaches now the Thomas
Speaker 1: Crown affair. According to a Smithsonian article by Robert Pool,
Speaker 1: it's usually just someone with inside access who lifts a
Speaker 1: stored work and walks off, because of course most museums
Speaker 1: don't have their whole collection out. A lot of stories.
Speaker 1: Imagine a print that's in a museum spacement and nobody
Speaker 1: thinks anyone will notice. Since the gardener heist is ostensibly
Speaker 1: the highest profile job in the world, there have been
Speaker 1: tons of leads, tips, and bizarro theories, some of which
Speaker 1: will tell you. One is that the i ra A
Speaker 1: staged it to use as a bargaining chip for jailed members.
Speaker 1: And this is another thing. If you think of of
Speaker 1: UM artworks being used as cash, they can also sometimes
Speaker 1: be used as get out of jail free cards because
Speaker 1: there's the immunity. Yeah, because authorities will want to get
Speaker 1: the artworks back so desperately. There they'll offer in unity
Speaker 1: to anybody involved. Another idea is that it was planned
Speaker 1: out by a musician who had performed with Roy Orbison
Speaker 1: before he was nabbed for another stuff. Another is that
Speaker 1: the artworks are hidden in Ireland's West Country, which is
Speaker 1: a theory. This is very strange. It's a theory developed
Speaker 1: in part because so many of the stolen goods were
Speaker 1: kind of horsey in theme, like the dig oust gushes
Speaker 1: are all equestrian subjects, and since the Irish love horses
Speaker 1: so much, maybe maybe there's a connection UM. Some also
Speaker 1: have said that it was taken as security by Boston
Speaker 1: crime boss James Whitey Boulger with the help of compromised
Speaker 1: FBI agents. But Sarah, you know a little bit more
Speaker 1: about that one than I do. Well, Boulger in the
Speaker 1: local FBI office did work together. They worked together to
Speaker 1: brain down an Italian crime family, which consequently was also
Speaker 1: Bulger's main competitor in Boston, but it leads to him
Speaker 1: buying off some of his BI handlers and an FBI supervisor,
Speaker 1: John Connolly, and Boulger is actually still one of the
Speaker 1: FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, and he's been charged with racketeering, conspiracy,
Speaker 1: narcotics distribution, and nineteen counts of murder. So people think
Speaker 1: he's the only guy in Boston at the time who
Speaker 1: would have been able to get those paintings out of
Speaker 1: the country since he had this FBI connection. And our
Speaker 1: latest word comes from April two thousand ten and the
Speaker 1: Boston Globe, and that's that the FBI was hot on
Speaker 1: the trail of the art, which this time was being
Speaker 1: held by a Corsican gang. Um, But that bureaucratic infighting
Speaker 1: and an inability for the FBI to work with their
Speaker 1: French counterparts blew the whole thing up. So in conclusion,
Speaker 1: the art is still missing. Um. We hope that it's
Speaker 1: being well cared for and that someday it will find
Speaker 1: its way back to its lovely home in Boston. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of neat stuff to see at the museum
Speaker 1: and now carries much better theft insurance and UH a
Speaker 1: much more intense security system than it used to. And
Speaker 1: another side note, if your name is Isabella, you can
Speaker 1: go to the museum for free. We might need to
Speaker 1: change our names and go visit. And we have a quote,
Speaker 1: our final quote from Barrenson on Gardner, which I will
Speaker 1: let you read, Sarah, since you love her so much,
Speaker 1: and that is she lives at a rate in intensity
Speaker 1: and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale,
Speaker 1: thin and shadowy. And that's the final word on Isabella
Speaker 1: Stewart Gardner. And that brings us to listener mail. This
Speaker 1: is a special edition of real mail, this time from
Speaker 1: Jill in Minneapolis, and she sent us a pretty funny
Speaker 1: postcard that just says hello everyone on the front. But
Speaker 1: she sent it in honor of National Card and Letter
Speaker 1: Writing Month and suggested we do a podcast on the
Speaker 1: Pony Express or the USPS. So what do y'all think?
Speaker 1: Do you like those ideas? You should let us know
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