셰 토르토니

This small Manet of a man in a top hat writing at a cafe table has not been seen in public since March 1990. On the night of the 18th two men dressed as police talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the guards, and over 81 minutes cut and carried off 13 works, this one among them. It is still the largest unsolved art theft on record. Under the terms of Isabella Gardner's will nothing in the museum may be rearranged, so the empty frames of the missing paintings still hang on the walls. Chez Tortoni was named for a fashionable boulevard cafe of Manet's Paris, the sort of place where he watched his well-dressed Parisians write and idle over coffee.