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. […]
The Weeping Woman theft: what NGV’s 1986 case still teaches
Four screws. Thats roughly what was left on the picture rail at the National Gallery of Victoria on the morning of 2 August 1986, once someone noticed Pablo Picasso’s The Weeping Woman was no longer hanging where it should have been. No smashed glass, no forced door, no dramatic struggle. Someone had simply unscrewed the […]