The Guitar Player

On a February night in 1974, someone climbed the wall at Kenwood House on the edge of London's Hampstead Heath, smashed a barred window with a sledgehammer, and lifted this Vermeer off the wall, gone before the alarm even sounded. What followed was not a normal art theft. The thieves cut a strip from the canvas, sent it to The Times, and demanded that two IRA prisoners, the sisters Marion and Dolours Price, be moved to a jail in Northern Ireland, threatening to burn the painting on St Patrick's night. It survived. Police found it that May propped against a gravestone in a City churchyard, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Vermeer painted it around 1672, near the end of his life, a young woman turning away from her guitar to smile at something outside the frame.