View of Auvers-sur-Oise

Cezanne painted this quiet cluster of houses at Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where in the 1870s he worked close to the older painter Camille Pissarro, learning to build a landscape out of small, deliberate touches rather than smooth finish. For a century it hung safely, eventually the only Cezanne in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. Then on the night of 31 December 1999, while the city watched millennium fireworks, someone climbed scaffolding, dropped through a skylight on a rope, set off a smoke canister, and lifted this one canvas off the wall. It has not been seen since, and still sits on the list of the world's most-wanted stolen paintings.