Landscape with Obelisk

For most of its life this small landscape passed as a Rembrandt, and it hung under his name in a Boston museum until the 1980s, when close study of the brushwork and the signature reassigned it to his pupil Govert Flinck, who had painted it in 1638. That correction came only a few years before the night that made it famous. On the 18th of March, 1990, two men dressed as police talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and left with 13 works, this one among them. The thieves seem to have grabbed it believing it was a Rembrandt. It has never been recovered, and the museum still hangs the empty frame in the place where it belongs.