The style and technique of the execution serve to date this painting at about 1633. At that time Rembrandt was employing the warm color harmonies and rich textural variations seen here. The agitated expression of the saint is also characteristic of this period when Rembrandt was particularly interested in capturing intense emotions in his subjects.

Saint Bartholomew is shown holding the instrument of his martyrdom, a knife, and looking forward to his grisly fate with a troubled, fearful expression. In two later representations of the same saint, painted by Rembrandt in 1657 and 1661, these violent emotions have disappeared, and Bartholomew is shown calmer, more secure in his faith, and with the profound psychological penetration which is characteristic of Rembrandt's later works.

Rembrandt was born at Leiden but lived and worked in Amsterdam after 1631 or 1632. Unlike most of his Dutch contemporaries, he was not a specialist but worked in virtually every category of painting and in the etching medium as well. In each of these fields he created works which rank with the most impressive in Western art.

Rembrandt van Rijn, circa 1633,
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, 1/23/20
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The Tale of the Heist

Florian "Al" Monday's plot for hitting the museum was as basic as it comes: His team was to steal a car, drive to the museum, park legally, walk in, breeze up to the second floor, remove the paintings (placing them in good-sized bags), exit hurriedly, say nothing, and hurt no one. Monday chose William Carlson, 26, and Stephen Thoren, 30, two "unemployed laborers," to handle the actual theft. He tasked a third member of his gang, a 22-year-old budding bank robber named David Aquafresca, or "Ackie," with stealing the car and being the wheelman for the getaway. Aquafresca boosted a white 1965 Oldsmobile station wagon, a smart choice considering that the paintings, still framed, could then be stacked inside the capacious rear.

Monday now admits he left too much to chance. He told Carlson and Thoren to rob the museum before closing time but said the exact hour was up to them. He chose not to be on hand because he was "too recognizable," owing to his multiple scouting trips in and out. And he allowed the two inside men an unloaded revolver "for intimidation purposes" and "so they couldn't hurt anyone." Predictably, Carlson and Thoren noted the absence of even a single bullet in the gun and balked. Monday knew loading it was a bad idea. He was confident just waving the pistol would send potential heroes scattering. "It would be Barney Fife versus them," he says. But his robbers felt emasculated and complained long and loud, threatening to call off the heist. To placate them, Monday acquiesced by loading the .22 with one round.

The "perfectly planned" heist was flawed from the beginning. One of the thieves was escorted out of the museum for not knowing the smoking policy. But the two returned later bolstered with their pistol and single bullet. So on an overcast Wednesday afternoon, May 17, 1972, Thoren and Carlson arrived at the museum in the late afternoon and strode through the front entrance on Salisbury Street, where the stolen white station wagon sat, parked legally, Aquafresca at the wheel. Just a few dozen visitors roamed the galleries. As the pair made their way to the target area, Carlson encountered two teenage girls. Displaying an astonishing blend of bravado and boneheadedness, he stopped to chat with them. He told them, "I'm gonna rob the place."

As they removed the paintings from the walls, Thoren and Carlson were noticed by a handful of patrons. But because the duo worked brazenly, onlookers assumed the thieves were employees doing their jobs. The robbers placed their paintings in their big cloth sacks and hurried downstairs toward the exit.

At the same time, museum guard Philip Evans was speaking to a female visitor near the main entrance. A veteran security man, Evans was known as a courtly employee who studied the museum's possessions and was eager to answer questions. Now he stood by his front desk, telling the visitor to place her items on a nearby coat rack.

Just seconds after Evans's conversation with the woman, Thoren and Carlson reached the bottom of the main staircase and hustled toward the exit. What caught Evans’s eye was not their awkward loads, but something every staffer watched for as a matter of practice. The two "visitors" had bypassed the rails surrounding the large Antioch mosaic in the center of the Renaissance Court and were walking on its precious 2,300-year-old tiles. It was an amateurish mistake. Signs clearly marked the tiles as off-limits.

"You're not supposed to walk across," Evans called out. The words had no sooner left his lips than he realized the trespassers, who were now wearing ski masks, were carrying two big sacks apiece. As the thieves drew closer, one of them shouted: "Get out of my way! We’re going through!" The unarmed Evans moved to block their departure and grabbed at one of the thieves' waists. Thoren struck Evans with his two bags of paintings, knocking him against a wall. Undaunted, the 57-year-old Evans threw his arms around his assailant's neck. It was then that he felt the sting of a .22-caliber slug in his hip, fired by Carlson.

Evans fell to the floor and the thieves raced toward the station wagon. Evans managed to rise and limp after them. Passersby said the thieves put only three of the four paintings in the back of the getaway car. Comically, and for reasons unknown, Gauguin's Brooding Woman was laid on the car's roof rack while the man in the passenger seat stuck his right arm out the window to hold it down. The Gauguin fell off the roof of the fleeing station wagon at one point. Witnesses recorded the license plate as the Olds sped south on Lancaster Street, then west on Institute Road, toward a rendezvous with a second getaway car parked at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

With their usual disregard for common sense, two of the thieves started bragging about the heist to fellow bar patrons soon after the robbery, which led to their arrest in short order. The 340-year-old Rembrandt spent four weeks in the hands of Monday and various small-time felons and hoods and was even hidden briefly on a pig farm in Rhode Island. All four paintings were recovered by the FBI and Worcester police, who marked Monday as a suspect after one of his handpicked men informed on him. Monday fled to Canada for two years but was tracked down by federal agents, caught, and sentenced, in 1975, to nine to 20 years in prison. He served five.

Evans recovered from his wound.

The heist was the first known use of a gun to rob an art museum.

Rembrandt is one of the most stolen artists of all time, second only to Picasso. (Rembrandt's 'Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn' has been stolen from the Dulwich Gallery in London four times. Go figure.)

The Worcester Art Museum is the second largest museum in New England.

Adapted from "Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists" by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, and other sources.