The 1971 Theft of The Love Letter

In the autumn of 1971 Vermeer's The Love Letter left Amsterdam for a few weeks. The small late canvas, a maid handing a letter to a startled mistress who looks up from her cittern, had belonged to the Rijksmuseum since 1893. It travelled south as one of the loans to Rembrandt en zijn tijd (Rembrandt and His Time), a large survey of Dutch seventeenth-century painting at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where it hung as catalogue number 112.¹

The exhibition opened on 23 September. That same evening the painting was taken off the wall, and it would be missing for a little over two weeks.

The thief was a twenty-one-year-old hotel waiter from the Belgian Limburg named Mario Pierre Roymans. By the accounts reconstructed afterward, he remained inside the building until it closed and emptied, then lifted The Love Letter from the wall and carried it to a window he had chosen as his way out.²

The framed picture would not pass through the window. Rather than abandon it, Roymans cut the canvas from its stretcher. The Rijksmuseum conservator Esther van Duijn describes what happened next plainly: the thief "roughly cut the painting on canvas from its stretcher, folded it once and tucked it in his trousers." A picture that had survived three centuries was now a loose, once-folded sheet of paint carried against a man's body.

The theft was discovered the next morning: an empty frame, a bare stretcher, and a ragged margin of canvas where the picture had been. No one had seen the intruder leave, and there was, at first, no ransom note and no name.

When word did come, it made clear that this was not an ordinary theft for profit. Roymans wanted nothing for himself.

Roymans made contact through anonymous letters and the Belgian press, and the ransom he set out was not for himself. He demanded that 200 million Belgian francs be given to the refugees of East Pakistan, where war and famine had driven millions across the border into India that year.³

The camps along the Indian border held some of the roughly ten million people displaced by the conflict that would end the year as the independent state of Bangladesh, a crisis then reaching European audiences through news coverage. Roymans framed the theft as a hostage-taking on the refugees' behalf: the painting for the money, the money for the starving.

The ransom was never raised. Roymans was arrested in early October, and the painting, which he had kept in a pillowcase in his hotel room, was recovered about two weeks after it had been taken and returned to the Rijksmuseum on 8 October 1971.⁴

It had been out of its frame, folded and hidden, for a fortnight. What came back was unmistakably Vermeer's picture, and unmistakably a damaged one.

Cutting a painting from its stretcher does its worst harm at the edges, where the blade runs, and folding a stiff, three-hundred-year-old paint film cracks and lifts it along the crease. Both had happened here. The later RKD study Counting Vermeer records that the canvas was "brutally cut out of its frame," with paint loss running along its edges, damage still plainly visible in the painting's X-radiograph as gaps where the original paint is simply gone.⁵

The losses were concentrated along the cuts and the fold rather than in the faces and hands at the heart of the picture, which is much of why recovery was possible at all. Still, the Rijksmuseum now held a national treasure with bare canvas showing through it, and had to decide what to do about that.

The museum's director, Arthur van Schendel, did not simply hand the picture to a restorer. He convened an international advisory committee of conservators, museum directors and scientists to guide the treatment, a degree of oversight commensurate with the painting's standing.⁶

The committee first had to settle a question that was not obvious. Some voices, among them artists and art historians, argued that the painting should be left unrepaired, kept as a document of what had been done to it. Others proposed a visible, honest kind of retouching, a neutral tone in the losses or the fine hatching known as tratteggio, so that the repairs would read as repairs. In the end the committee chose the opposite course: the picture should be made whole again as invisibly as possible, so that a viewer would see Vermeer's interior and not its wounds.

The work fell to Luitsen Kuiper, who had become the Rijksmuseum's chief restorer in 1970. He gave the canvas a new wax-resin lining, a supporting layer fused to the back to hold the torn and folded fabric flat and stable, and then filled and retouched the losses so that they disappeared into the surrounding paint. The treatment took close to a year. In 1972 the restored Love Letter went back on view, accompanied by an issue of the Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum given over to what had been damaged and how it had been mended.

The ransom was never paid, and no famine-relief campaign of the kind Roymans had demanded was launched. He was arrested, tried in Brussels, and imprisoned. What his two weeks produced instead was a badly cut Vermeer and, in exchange, close to a year of conservation to undo the cutting.

The Love Letter hangs today in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour. It was not the only Vermeer pulled from a wall in these years; within three years two more would be stolen, in Britain and in Ireland.

The Heist of The Guitar Player

The Heist of The Concert

The Love Letter

1667–1670