The Stolen Rembrandt at Dulwich

A royal collection with no king

In 1790, the French art dealer Noël Desenfans and the painter Sir Francis Bourgeois were commissioned by Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski, King of Poland, to assemble for him a collection of paintings meant "to encourage the progress of the fine arts in Poland." The two men spent several years on this task — years during which Poland was progressively dismembered by its neighbours. In 1795, following the partitions, the kingdom disappeared and the king was forced to abdicate before he could pay for or receive the works. Desenfans and Bourgeois found themselves in London with a royal collection on their hands and no recipient.

Unable to find a buyer — they approached, in vain, the Tsar of Russia and the British government — the two men kept the collection, selling some pieces, buying others. Desenfans died in 1807; Bourgeois, who survived him, then called on the architect Sir John Soane to build a mausoleum to receive his remains. It is this private collection, born of an aborted royal commission, that a few years later became the founding holdings of a public museum.

1. A building designed for daylight — and for death

On 8 January 1811, Bourgeois died from the effects of a fall from a horse: he refused to have his injured leg amputated and his condition worsened. His will left the collection to Dulwich College "for the inspection of the public," creating in effect one of the first public galleries in Britain. Soane, already engaged for Desenfans's mausoleum, designed the new building: the plans were approved in July 1811, the foundations laid on 19 October the same year, and the gallery opened to the public in 1817. Look up as you enter the exhibition rooms: there is not a single side window. Soane lights the paintings exclusively through a series of roof lanterns, which spread an even, overhead light while freeing the walls entirely for hanging — a method that has durably influenced the design of art galleries built after his.

The mausoleum itself is built into the very body of the building, at the west end of the enfilade of rooms. Its form borrows the vocabulary of the funerary monument — urns on the roofline, sculpted sarcophagi above the doors, altars at the corners — and its light, filtered through amber-tinted glass, is deliberately different from that of the neighbouring rooms: Soane spoke of a "religious light." Desenfans, Bourgeois and Margaret, Desenfans's widow, all three rest there in sealed coffins. Few museums in the world so directly combine an art collection with the tomb of its founders — do not walk through this space too quickly, it is the most singular room on the route.

2. The small portrait that keeps getting stolen

In Room 5 hangs the Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III, painted by Rembrandt in 1632: an oil on oak panel barely 30 by 25 centimetres. It was not, originally, a stand-alone commission: Jacob de Gheyn III and his friend Maurits Huygens had each had their portrait painted by Rembrandt, on panels of identical size, under a pact — whoever died first would leave his to the survivor. De Gheyn died before Huygens; the two paintings ended up reunited. It is this small format, easy to slip under an arm, that made its criminal fortune.

The painting has been stolen from Dulwich four times: on the night of 31 December 1966 (the thieves drill a door open with a brace and bit; the work is found a few days later, abandoned in a bush); in 1973 (a man hides it under his jumper and walks out of the museum, before being caught cycling away with the painting in the bicycle basket); on 14 August 1981 (it is recovered on 3 September when four men are arrested in a taxi, following a police stakeout); and in May 1983 (burglars smash a roof skylight and prise the painting off the wall with a crowbar; it does not resurface until October 1986, in an anonymous parcel left at the left-luggage office of a British garrison station in Münster, Germany). These four thefts have earned the painting an entry in the Guinness World Records as the most stolen work of art, and the nickname "the takeaway Rembrandt" on this side of the Channel. Looking at this modest format, it is hard at first glance to see why it attracted thieves so persistently — that is exactly the question worth asking in Room 5.

A second Rembrandt, never stolen, completes the room: Girl at a Window (1645) shows a servant girl leaning on a stone ledge, one hand at her necklace, her gaze fixed directly on the viewer. The French writer Roger de Piles, who owned the painting at the end of the seventeenth century, recorded that Rembrandt displayed it at the window of his house — passers-by would stop, puzzled that a servant girl could stand still so long, before realising it was a painting.

3. The Dutch Golden Age around the portrait

The same room brings together several seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters, including Jan Wijnants, who joined the collection notably via the Bourgeois bequest of 1811. His Landscape with a Cow Drinking (DPG114) shows the dunes and sunken lanes typical of his repertoire, almost always without a main figure: Wijnants would hand over the addition of figures and animals to specialists in that genre, a collaborative practice common in Dutch workshops of the period. Look for the raking light on sand and dead trees that recurs like a signature.

Willem van de Velde the Younger, also present in the room with A Brisk Breeze, was the most celebrated marine painter of his day: the painting shows three small cargo vessels battling choppy conditions while warships sail in the distance — a typical composition by this painter, who settled in England from 1672 onward and left a lasting mark on English marine painting. Alongside it, Roman Fountain with Cattle and Figures by Nicolaes Berchem draws on a fountain from the Roman Forum, and A Wood near The Hague, with a view of the Huis ten Bosch by Jan van Kessel — whose attribution was only confirmed by the discovery of a preparatory sketch for the central oak tree — shows the royal palace built between 1645 and 1652 for Amalia van Solms-Braunfels. Four painters, four genres — landscape, marine, pastoral scene, topographical view — shown here in their diversity rather than as a mere foil to the neighbouring Rembrandt.

4. Elsewhere in the gallery: a late Rembrandt, a Cuyp and a Ruisdael waterfall

A Young Man, perhaps the Artist’s Son Titus (about 1668, oil on canvas, 78.6 × 64.2 cm), also in Room 5, emerges from the darkness and turns to meet the viewer’s gaze with a pensive expression; the boldly lit left side of his face pushes forwards from the shadows. A visitor in 1824 thought it one of those portraits of which one says “that must be a likeness.” Both the attribution and the sitter’s identity have long been debated: recent scholarly opinion favours Rembrandt, in his late style of the 1660s (broad brushstrokes, impasto); the sitter has been identified as Titus, but the books faintly visible in the background make a scholar more likely. The head is in good condition; the rest of the figure — particularly the coat — has been abraded.

Aelbert Cuyp’s A Road near a River (about 1660, oil on canvas, 113 × 167.6 cm, Room 4) shows a serene landscape bathed in golden light, with shepherds, a donkey carrying a rider and two figures fishing in the distance. It was probably one of his last paintings: married in 1658 to a wealthy widow with property around Dordrecht, he seems to have retired from painting soon after. His popularity in Britain dates from the last quarter of the eighteenth century; when the market for his works peaked around 1870, nearly three-quarters of all known Cuyps were in British collections.

Jacob van Ruisdael’s A Waterfall (1670-1679, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 83.4 cm, signed; Room 11) illustrates one of his favourite subjects. He probably encountered such waterfalls through the works of Allart van Everdingen, who had travelled to Norway and Sweden in 1644: the painting is a work of the artist’s imagination, yet it conveys rushing water and a wild natural setting.

How much time

The Dulwich route lends itself to a short, dense visit: Soane's building, the mausoleum and Room 5 concentrate most of what makes the place unique, without needing to cover the full 600 paintings on display.

Soane's façade and roof lanterns — 5 minutes.
The mausoleum — 5 minutes.
Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III, the most stolen Rembrandt in the world — 8 minutes.
Girl at a Window (Rembrandt) — 6 minutes.
Landscape with a Cow Drinking (Wijnants) — 5 minutes.
A Brisk Breeze (Van de Velde the Younger) — 5 minutes.
Roman Fountain with Cattle and Figures (Berchem) — 5 minutes.
A Wood near The Hague (Van Kessel) — 5 minutes.
The rest of the collection — 11 minutes.
A Young Man, perhaps Titus (Rembrandt, Room 5) — 6 minutes.
A Road near a River (Cuyp, Room 4) — 6 minutes.
A Waterfall (Ruisdael, Room 11) — 5 minutes.

Sources and verification

The facts, dates and figures below have been checked against the official Dulwich Picture Gallery website, Wikipedia (English and French) and specialist sources on art history and art theft.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Dulwich Picture Gallery website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Continue your visit

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Rubens and his pupil An Antwerp workshop at work, from Rubens to the young Van Dyck. Two fragments of Raphael A dismembered altarpiece, alongside Tiepolo and Guercino.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.

Dulwich: the gallery-mausoleum and its Rembrandt that keeps getting stolen