Poppy Field near Vétheuil

On a February afternoon in 2008, three men in ski masks walked into a private museum in Zurich, held the staff at gunpoint, and left with four paintings, this one among them. It was one of the largest art robberies Europe had seen. The Monet did not stay gone for long: police found it a few days later in a car in the parking lot of a psychiatric hospital nearby, its protective glass still unbroken. Monet had painted it back in 1879 near Vetheuil, the village northwest of Paris where he was then living, scattering the red of wild poppies across a summer field. For a canvas that once hung quietly in a collector's villa, it has had a surprisingly eventful life. The poppies are just flecks of red, laid on fast.