Almost fifty-three years ago, an oil on canvas painting by Eugène Delacroix, Lionne et Lion dans Leur Antre, also known as Lioness and Lion in a Cave, was stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada, along with a number of other paintings and objects, in the largest art theft in Canadian history. That theft has become known as the “Skylight Caper.”
As with the theft of Cézanne’s Paysage d’Auvers-sur-Oise from the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, England in 2000, the thieves gained access to the museum through a skylight.
A Little History About Where The Theft Happened
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (“MMFA”) was established in 1860 as the Art Association of Montreal to “encourage an appreciation of the fine arts amongst the people of the city.” It was the first art museum in Canada, and its Art Gallery, the first building in Canada to be constructed specifically for an art collection, opened in 1879 on Montreal’s Phillips Square. In 1912, the Art Gallery was relocated to a new building on Sherbrooke Street, a building known today as the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion.
The museum was renamed the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1950 and, since that time, has added a concert hall, an art and education studio, and four more pavilions. The latest pavilion, known as the Pavilion for Peace, houses more than 700 works of international art, from Old Masters to modern art. More than 2500 diverse works reside in the other pavilions.
The MMFA’S Quebec and Canadian art collection, numbering nearly 500 works from the colonial era to the 1970’s, is displayed in the Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion. One floor of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion is dedicated to the MMFA’s extensive Inuit art collection, with the goal of making “Inuit artistic and cultural heritage more accessible to all audiences.” Found in the Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion are the ten galleries for the Arts of One World, with more than 1200 objects from every continent and dating from the 4th century B.C. to the present.
How the Theft Happened
A little after midnight on Monday, September 4, 1972, during Labor Day weekend, a man climbed a tree on the west side of the MMFA’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion (the museum’s only pavilion at that time) and lowered a ladder that was being used to repair the roof to two accomplices waiting on the ground. The three thieves, wearing ski masks and carrying a sawed-off shotgun and revolver, then accessed the museum through a skylight in the pavilion, sliding down a nylon rope into the second floor of the museum. Because of the roof repairs being made at that time, the alarm for the skylight was deactivated.
While the thieves were in the midst of their work, they were encountered by a museum guard. The thieves fired a shotgun blast, which alerted two other guards on duty. The thieves then tied up the three guards and put them in a lecture hall in the museum. One thief remained with the guards and the other two thieves continued collecting items, including paintings, figurines, jewelry and other objects. According to the guards’ later statements, the three thieves were men, two of whom spoke French and one of whom spoke English.
The thieves attempted to put together a pulley system to take the stolen objects out of the museum through the skylight and onto the roof. They abandoned that effort eventually and instead started taking their loot to the museum loading dock so it could be loaded in a museum van. One of the thieves, however, triggered an alarm when leaving through a side entrance.
As a result, the thieves fled on foot with 18 small paintings and 39 other objects, mostly jewelry and figurines, including an 18th century gold watch that had belonged to the wife of Jacques Vigier, the first elected mayor of Montreal. In addition to the Delacroix, the stolen paintings, worth approximately $5,000,000 USD at the time, included:
- Landscape with Cottages by Rembrandt van Rijn
- Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle, attributed at that time to Jan Brueghel the Elder
- Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle, by Jan Brueghel the Elder
- La Rêveuse à la Fontaine and Jeune Femme Accoudée sur le Bras Gauche by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
- Landscape with Rocks and Stream by Gustave Courbet
- Head by Honoré Daumier
- The Sorceresse by Virgilio Díaz de la Peña
- Portrait of Brigadier General Sir Thomas Fletcher by Thomas Gaisborough
- Vanitas Still Life with Books, a Globe a Skull, a Violin and a Fan and Still Life with Fish by Jan Davidszoon de Heem
- La Baratteuse and Portrait of Madame Millet by Jean-François Millet
- Landscape with Cottages by Rembrandt van Rijn
- Portrait of a Lady and Portrait of a Man by François-André Vincent
Interestingly it appears that the thieves, most likely feeling rushed and panicked after the door alarm was set off, took only small paintings that they were able to easily and quickly carry away on foot. Left behind were larger paintings by such masters as El Greco, Goya, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Renoir. Also, immediate international interest in the theft may have been somewhat subdued by the horrific news of the Israeli hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics on Tuesday morning, September 5.
A few days after the theft, a man contacted the MMFA giving the direction that someone from the museum should go to a nearby payphone. A man then called that payphone and instructed a museum staff member to pick up a discarded cigarette pack on the ground. Inside that pack was a pendant, one of the pieces of jewelry stolen on September 4.
Contact concerning the stolen items continued. At the end of October that same year, the museum received an envelope containing photographs of the stolen paintings and demanding a $500,000 ransom, later lowered to $250,000. In negotiations for the return of the stolen art, the director of the MMFA suggested that one of the stolen paintings should be returned as a sign of good faith. That suggestion was accepted and the Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle, an oil painting on a 7 by 10 inch copper plate, was selected for return. In a bizarre twist, however, after its recovery, the painting was determined to be misattributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder. It is instead a copy by one of his students. Efforts to recover the remaining stolen works continued through the summer of 1973, but nothing else has ever been returned to the museum.
The MMFA theft was not the only art theft in the Montreal area that week. A few days earlier, in Oka, Quebec, less than 40 miles from Montreal, three armed and hooded men, two of whom were French-speaking and one of whom was English-speaking, tied up a gardener and stole approximately $50,000 USD worth of paintings from the home of Agnes Meldrum, scaling a steep bluff and using a motorboat on the Lake of Two Mountains to escape. Despite the similarities in circumstances, law enforcement officials never concluded that the two art thefts that week were connected.
Nor was this the first theft of a Rembrandt work from the MMFA. In October of 1964, a small Rembrandt drawing, The Death of Jacob, which was worth between $20,000 and $30,000 USD, was stolen from the museum. At that time, it was hanging next to the now-missing Rembrandt. That drawing was recovered in Florida several years later.
To date, no information has been uncovered about the location of the Delacroix painting or the other stolen artwork, or about the identity of the thieves.
How to Identify This Missing Piece of History
The oil painting, Lionne et Lion dans Leur Antre, was created by Eugène Delacroix in 1856, and measures 39 centimeters high by 46 centimeters wide. The lioness is in the foreground facing the viewer, while the lion is seen in profile deeper in the cave.
Why This Missing Piece of History is Important
Eugène Delacroix, regarded as the leader of the French Romantic School, was one of the most influential painters of the 19th century.
Delacroix emphasized emotion, exoticism, color and movement, rather than careful modelling and classical themes used by his contemporaries. Many of his paintings were large-scale dramatic and energetic scenes based on contemporary history, such as his well-known 28 July: Liberty Leading the People. Other works, including the missing Lionne et Lion dans leur Antre and a series of lion hunt paintings, demonstrate the Romanticism love of the wild and untamed. Many of those works were based on sketches that Delacroix made of lions and other animals while visiting the zoo at Paris’ Jardin des Plantes.
The poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, in The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix, described Delacroix as “a volcanic crater artistically concealed behind bouquets of flowers” and as someone who was “passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing it in the most visible way.”
Delacroix was a great influence on later Impressionist and Symbolist artists, as demonstrated by Pierre-August Renoir’s Jewish Wedding in Morocco (after Delacroix), Vincent van Gogh’s Pieta (after Delacroix), Paul Cézanne’s Apotheosis of Delacroix and Medea, After Delacroix, Henri Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix,and Pablo Picasso’s The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix. In Picasso’s words, almost 100 years after Delacroix’s death: “That bastard, he’s really good.”
What to Do if You Know Where This Missing Piece of History Is
If you recognize Delacroix’s painting Lionne et Lion dans leur Antre or any of the other listed paintings stolen from the MMFA, have any information about any of them, or know any of their whereabouts, please call us at 1-202-240-2355 or send us an email at contact@arguscpc.com.