The AGNSW van Mieris theft: what a daylight heist still teaches
Seventeen years on, a small 17th-century Dutch painting is still missing from a Sydney gallery wall, and nobody has ever been charged. That’s the plain, uncomfortable fact sitting behind the 2007 theft of Frans van Mieris’s A Cavalier from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It happened during opening hours, in a room full […]
What the Abbey Museum break-in reveals about display case theft
I’m not a financial adviser and this isn’t insurance advice, but you can’t write about a museum theft without insurance coming up eventually, so let’s get that out of the way early. Right, on to the actual incident. A display case was smashed at the Abbey Museum of Art and History in Caboolture in 2026. […]
Why a fine art insurance broker is worth finding early
I’m not a financial adviser and this isn’t insurance advice – I run a security company, not a brokerage. But I’ve sat in enough post-loss meetings over the past decade to notice a pattern: the collectors with the calmest claims process are almost always the ones who found a broker who actually knows fine art […]
What actually happens if you never revalue your collection
I sat in a sitting room off Domain Road in South Yarra a few months back, looking at a small Fred Williams the owner bought in 1998 and hadn’t had valued since. She wanted to know, quite reasonably, whether the insurer would simply refuse to pay if something happened to it. That question comes up […]
The Insurance Gap Nobody Checks Until It’s Too Late
Quick disclosure before I start, because it matters for everything that follows: I’m not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice about your specific policy. I write about risk and the collectibles market, and after eight years doing that, the single most common thing I hear from collectors is some version of “I assumed […]