Wouldn’t it be fascinating if one of the greatest museum heists of all time was somehow associated with one of the most sordid crime rings in recent history? And wouldn’t it be great if you could get a piece of the $10 million reward? That was the prospect presented by a video by Instagrammer Emily Kaplan (whose handle is @newsnotnoise and whose slogan is “Truth > Agenda”), in which she says that two artworks stolen decades ago from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum show up in a tax estate document released by the U.S. Justice Department as part of the millions of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I think I just solved the biggest art heist in the world using the Epstein files,” says Kaplan, apparently not one who is given to understatement (she doesn’t specify who robbed the museum or where the artworks are, but, you know, details!). At the time of publication, the video had earned nearly 38,000 likes and been reposted more than 2,400 times and shared more than 18,000 times.
Epstein was functioning as a financial fixer for the wealthy, one who quietly moved money in ways that could avoid scrutiny, says Kaplan, adding that artworks have often been used for purposes of money laundering and asset shielding.
She says that one document she came across (which she declined to supply to a reporter) refers to two Gardner works, which are listed as Rembrandt’s Landscape with Obelisk and Portrait With a Plumed (as in a plumed hat, she says). The Rembrandt landscape referred to, as Kaplan mentions, was reattributed in the 1980s to German-born artist Govaert Flinck, who later lived in Amsterdam.
These artworks are among thirteen works that were stolen in 1990, she says, when two men dressed as police officers entered the museum after a Saint Patrick’s Day parade, ultimately making off with pieces by Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Johannes Vermeer, and others.
This doesn’t prove that the paintings were the ones from the museum, she says, or that they were used in trafficking, but it does ask a really important question, she says, about how art was used and whether this is all connected.
Eagle-eyed observers might not want to get their hopes up, noting that Kaplan incorrectly describes the works as both being paintings, when one was a print, and claims the thieves spent “hours” in the museum when they were there from 1:20 a.m. to 2:45, so, not exactly. And the Rembrandt work is titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for the record. The likelihood that the owner of the stolen works would ever enter them into tax documentation, or any written document, ever, anywhere, hardly needs to be considered.
Indeed, the museum has released a statement pouring cold water on suspicions from Kaplan or anyone else that the Gardner works appear in the Epstein files.
“The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still mourns the loss of the 13 works of art that were stolen from its galleries in 1990,” a museum spokesperson told the Boston Herald today. “Among the works stolen were Flinck’s oil painting Landscape with Obelisk and the Rembrandt etching Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which have been misidentified in viral social media video on the recently released Epstein files.”
Not only is the information incorrect, said the spokesperson, it may also be harmful. Since all tips have to be investigated, “misinformation can hinder our active investigation and further delay the safe return of these works.”
Kaplan did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the museum’s statement.
