The story
On 13 December 1978 a small panel vanished from the municipal museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the old royal town west of Paris. It was The Conjurer, a street magician doing the cups-and-balls trick while a spectator leans in, entranced, and a man behind him quietly lifts his purse. The panel was recovered in February 1979. It repeats a composition by Hieronymus Bosch, the Netherlandish painter, and was made in his circle. Of the roughly 15 known versions, it is counted the finest.
Since the theft it comes out only for special exhibitions, so most visitors meet the museum through everything else. The collection began in 1848, when the local notable Louis-Alexandre Ducastel and the watercolourist Eugène Bunout urged townspeople to give works to the city, and in 1872 Ducastel's own collection arrived by bequest. A second pillar came in 1968, when the garden designer André Vera gave works and the whole studio archive of his brother, the painter Paul Vera. Today the Musée Ducastel-Vera holds some 9,000 pieces and shows them in rotation, with painters tied to the town such as François Bonvin and Maurice Denis, and a selection hangs in the entrance hall of the town hall.
