By all accounts, the biggest art heist in Canadian history should’ve been even bigger. Just past midnight on September 4, 1972—fifty years ago, this month—a man in a ski mask and climbing spurs accessed the roof of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts by scaling a nearby tree. He then extended a ladder to two similarly masked robbers below. From atop the building, the trio entered the gallery by rappelling with rope through a broken skylight. Once inside, they bound and gagged the security guards at gunpoint and began ransacking the building—cracking frames, shattering vitrines—with the apparent intention of stealing everything of value. The plan, it appears, was to descend and ascend, grinch-like, through the ceiling, during what likely would have been an all-night operation.
But thirty minutes into the break-in, one of the men tripped an alarm, forcing the gang to hustle out the side door with whatever they could carry: thirty-nine items, mainly jewellery and figurines, and eighteen canvasses, including paintings attributed to Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Thomas Gainsborough, and Peter Paul Rubens. The most valuable piece the men took was Landscape with Cottages, a work of dark pastoralism credited to Rembrandt, master of the Dutch Golden Age. The museum initially reported that the entire haul was worth $2 million.
