A Lady and Gentleman in Black

This double portrait of a well-dressed Dutch couple was painted by Rembrandt in 1633, when he was a rising young star in Amsterdam. Its modern story is stranger than its subject. Early on the morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the guards, and over the next hour cut 13 works from their frames, this Rembrandt among them. Nothing has ever been recovered. Under the terms of Isabella Gardner's will the museum cannot rearrange its rooms, so the empty frame still hangs where the painting was. Scholars once doubted it was Rembrandt's own hand, but the experts who catalogue his work put it back to him in 2015.