The Tantalizing Tales of 8 Stolen—and Recovered

Even if you don’t follow the fine art world, you’re probably familiar with The Scream, Edvard Munch’s slightly horrifying work that he first released in 1893. He’d go on to release three other versions. But what you probably don’t know is that M&Ms were used to get the composition back when it was stolen.

It’s estimated as little as 1.5 percent of stolen art is ever found. Below, we’re taking a look at some very famous and very valuable paintings that were taken but subsequently recovered, as adapted from the above episode of The List Show on YouTube.

The Scream
The Schoolmistress
The Parsonage Garden
Woman-Ochre
Saint Jerome Writing
Landscape of Italian Character
Child With a Soap Bubble
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The Scream

On February 12, 1994, the same day as the opening ceremonies for the Lillehammer Winter Olympics were underway, two men entered the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, and made off with The Scream. At the time, the painting was valued at a staggering $55 million. The thieves were brazen, leaving a handwritten note behind that said, “Thanks for the bad security!” Indeed, there was one security guard on duty, but he simply ignored the sound of the alarm.

Norwegian police worked with Scotland Yard, who dispatched two officers to work as undercover art experts, including art crimes detective Charles Hill. They managed to make contact with a go-between who knew the thieves. Enticed by a reward, the thieves revealed themselves as well as the location of the art.

But in 2004, it happened again. A different version of the painting done by Munch in 1910 and displayed at the Munch Museum in Oslo was stolen by armed thieves. They also managed to swipe another Munch original titled Madonna. While some of the criminals were convicted in 2006, the art remained missing. At that point, candy company Mars offered up a reward of 2 million dark chocolate M&Ms as part of a promotional stunt—that’s about 40,000 bags. Just days later, a convicted criminal tipped police off to the painting’s whereabouts.H still demanded the M&Ms, but it seems Mars donated the cash value of the chocolates to the museum instead.

Each time, The Scream, or Screams, were recovered fairly soon after. But some paintings can disappear for decades.

The Schoolmistress

The Schoolmistress is a 1784 painting by John Opie that depicts a schoolteacher with her students. In the 1930s, a physician named Earl Wood bought it while visiting Europe, paying $7500. Wood used it to decorate his dining room in Newark, New Jersey, where it hung until 1969. That’s when three men robbed Wood’s home and swiped the piece. Six years later, a man named Gerald Festa testified that he was one of the three robbers who stole the painting at the behest of an allegedly crooked local politician named Anthony Imperiale. The councilman had been told by Wood’s housekeeper that the art was valuable. At least, that was according to Festa. Contemporary reports emphasized there was no direct evidence linking Imperiale to the crime since Festa was relaying information second hand and, anyway, the statute of limitations had run out so there wasn’t much point investigating the claim. For his part, Imperiale denied the accusations.

But the painting wasn’t actually located until 2020, when it was found among the effects of a deceased man’s estate in Utah. According to the FBI, in 1989 the man had bought a house in Florida that had previously belonged to a person with links to organized crime. Included in the sale was the painting, which he took with him when he moved to Utah with zero hint anybody knew what they had.An art appraiser informed the accounting firm hired to liquidate the estate about the painting and its value. The estate, in turn, went to the FBI, who had a record of the art’s tumultuous history. It was returned to Dr. Wood’s 96-year-old son, Francis, in 2024.

The Parsonage Garden

In 1884, Vincent van Gogh painted The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, a lovely portrait of a man glancing back at the viewer as he walks through a green field. In March 2020, it was taken from the Singer Laren Museum just outside of Amsterdam. Weirdly, or maybe intentionally, it was stolen on van Gogh’s birthday, March 30 (the museum was closed because of Covid protocols).

The Netherlands happens to be the home of Arthur Brand, a famous art recovery specialist who has assisted in the return of over 200 pieces. Just a few months after the theft, Brand received photos of the painting next to a current newspaper, as though the thieves wanted to demonstrate it hadn’t been destroyed. That’s a common fate for stolen art when thieves realize it can’t be easily sold. Brand believed the photos were being circulated in the criminal underworld to gauge interest, and one of his sources leaked them.

In 2021, a man identified only as Nils M was arrested for the theft based on DNA evidence left at the scene, but he did not disclose the painting’s whereabouts. Nor did a man known as Peter Roy K, who authorities believed ordered Nils M to steal the painting so he could use it as leverage to get a better sentence for an unrelated offense.

Brand was able to establish contact with someone who he claimed was not involved with the theft but was able to hand the painting off to Brand in 2023. The two met at Brand’s apartment, where Brand took possession of the van Gogh, then estimated to be worth up to $6.4 million. The art was wrapped in a pillowcase as well as an IKEA shopping bag. Brand was also surprised to see the pillowcase had blood stains, which the man said was from cutting his hand.

Art experts said the painting was somewhat damaged due to poor storage conditions over the years, but was in good shape overall.

Woman-Ochre

Willem de Kooning painted the abstract Woman-Ochre in 1954 and 1955. By 1985, it was hanging inside the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. Just as the museum was opening its doors on November 29 of that year, a couple followed an employee inside. The man went upstairs, while the woman stayed behind to chat with a security guard. Was she just being social? Not quite. She was distracting the guard. Once the guard headed upstairs, she discovered Woman-Ochre was missing. The couple had left only the frame behind.

Police had no viable leads. Museum employees described both as wearing glasses, and said the man had a mustache, though it’s possible all of it was part of a disguise. The painting, which was now worth an estimated $160 million, didn’t surface until 2017, when the home of the late Jerry and Rita Alter was being cleaned out in Cliff, New Mexico. Inside was Woman-Ochre hanging in the couple’s bedroom, though no one knew its sordid history. The painting was bought by a local antiques dealer, who was then informed by a customer that it was a lot more valuable than he might have thought.

The dealer, David Van Auker, did some research and discovered that it had been stolen from the University of Arizona. He called the school and the FBI. Once the painting was confirmed to be the same one stolen in 1985, it was delivered to the Getty Center for restoration.

In the years following its disappearance, no one had taken great care of it. There was new varnish across the paint. There was damage from when the thieves cut it out of the museum frame, and someone had stapled it to a new wooden frame. Archivists at Getty spent years addressing the damage before returning it to the University of Arizona.

But how did it wind up with the Alters? The couple wasn’t exactly known for their crime sprees. Both worked in public education. Jerry died in 2012 and Rita in 2017, so they can’t be questioned. The FBI has never made an official statement about any possible culpability. But there might be a clue in a short story by Jerry in which a woman and her granddaughter visit a museum and steal a rare emerald.

Saint Jerome Writing

Caravaggio was one of the great old masters and also a killer—he fled to Naples and then to Malta in the early 1600s after killing a man. While in Malta, he created Saint Jerome Writing, a depiction of the titular saint translating the Bible. Centuries later, in December 1984, when the painting was displayed in St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Malta, three thieves walked in and swiped it.

The plan was to sell it. But when that didn’t work out, the thieves contacted Father Marius Zerafa, then the director of museums for Malta and offered a ransom. This was done via messenger, of course, with a prerecorded tape and a Polaroid photo as proof they had the painting.

But authorities weren’t interested. And what’s worse, Father Zerafa believed the local police might be corrupt. The thieves, growing impatient, began sending Father Zerafa pieces of the canvas, like a kidnap victim’s body parts. The father strung them along, promising he was trying to get money. But what he was actually doing was getting a friend of his to set up a wiretap on his telephone so he could trace their calls. The calls were coming from a shoe factory. Finally, Father Zerafa arranged for them to come get their money. It was, of course, a trap. By this time, Father Zerafa knew the cops weren’t involved and told them of the scheme.

Police arrested two of the men and retrieved the painting. It was only then that the father learned the thieves were planning to kidnap and hold him for ransom after the transaction. Fortunately, their plan didn’t come off, and Father Zerafa lived until the age of 93.

Landscape of Italian Character

Paintings can disappear for decades. But it’s unusual for a painting to go missing for nearly a century and then pop back up again.

Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer painted Landscape of Italian Character back in the early 1700s. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, many items of the Bavarian State Paintings Collection were put into storage, but this particular Landscape seems to have disappeared and has been reported missing since 1945.

In 2022, someone approached Art Recovery International, a stolen art recovery firm, saying that they were in possession of the piece. According to the Associated Press, this person, who did not wish to be publicly identified, claimed their uncle had brought it back following World War II. Of course, that doesn’t mean this uncle stole it, but it’s also not known where or who he got it from. It’s likely an American soldier took it as a kind of war trophy or bought it as a souvenir from the real thief.

Landscape of Italian Character was returned to Germany, where it joined another Lauterer painting. Displayed together, they form a panoramic view of Italian country life. While this completed Lauterer’s picture, we’ll probably always have an incomplete portrait of how the painting was stolen.

Child With a Soap Bubble

If you’re going to steal, go big. Go Rembrandt. At least, that was the idea one thief had back in 1999, when a Rembrandt titled Child With a Soap Bubble was taken from a museum in southern France. And, yes, it depicts a kid having fun with a soap bubble.

The painting, estimated at the time to be worth over three million dollars, was recovered in 2014 in Nice from some low-level criminals on an anonymous tip. Soon after, a man claiming to be the original thief arrived at the police station with a rather bizarre story. The man said that ever since he was a child something in the painting called to him; that obsession grew until he found himself as an adult working as an alarm technician. On Bastille Day-eve in 1999 he went to the museum, locked himself in a cabinet, and waited until the coast was clear. Because he was an alarms specialist, he knew how much time he had to make it across the room. Alarms were triggered when he took it off the wall, but because of all the Bastille Day happenings, there was a lot of outside noise and no one paid much attention.

As the man told it, the painting then ruined his life. He moved multiple times because he felt the painting was in danger, stopped working, and could never tell anyone

Eventually the guilt got to be too much. When he ran into a childhood friend who had “connection,” he revealed everything and offered to return it in exchange for an insurance reward. He handed over the painting to two random people he thought were insurance agents, got a check that he never cashed, and then soon after heard that the people he gave it to were actually criminals who had been arrested when getting ready to sell it. The purported thief then went down to the police station to make a confession that he was the thief—complete with polaroids he had taken of himself with the painting—and was ready to go to jail. Except the statute of limitations for the theft had passed. Some French reports claim the government attempted to nail him on other crimes related to the case, but he died less than two years later and before any decision was made.

But that’s not quite the end of it. Child With a Soap Bubble has long been a source of controversy by Rembrandt experts, some of whom believe the painting wasn’t actually the work of the master.

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Here’s another painting that was stolen not once but twice. Venetian artist Titian composed this biblical depiction around 1508. After passing through a lot of hands over the years, it was seized by Napoleon’s troops while they were in Vienna in 1809 and returned only after he suffered defeat.

It eventually found its way to the home of the Marquess of Bath in England, where it stayed through 1995, at which point thieves took it from his residence in Wiltshire, England. A reward of $150,000 was offered, which proved tempting to somebody. Whether a ransom or a finder’s fee, the money was wired to somebody in 2002 who led the investigator to a bus stop where it was found in a brown paper wrapper. In 2024, it went to auction at Christie’s, where it fetched an incredible $22 million.

Oddly enough, the private investigator who retrieved the painting at the bus stop was Charles Hill—the same Charles Hill who once posed as an art dealer to help recapture The Scream in 1994. With respect to Father Zerafa, Hill might be the true patron saint of stolen art.

The Tantalizing Tales of 8 Stolen—and Recovered—Works of Art