by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's security director, Anthony Amore, an ARCA Board of Trustee, will be discussing his book, "Stealing Rembrandts" (co-authored with Tom Mashberg), on BBC's "The World" program on August 12 when the book is released in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Amore, who taught museum security at ARCA's International Art Crime program in Amelia in 2009, has written about the thefts of works by the 16th century Dutch artist, Rembrandt van Rijn. The 245-page volume published by Palgrave MacMillan in New York in July, features heists in Worcester in 1972; Cincinnati in 1973; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1975.

Many other thefts of Rembrandt paintings are covered in the book, including that of a 1933 robbery of the residence of a Stockholm art collector, of which included Rembrandt's Jeremiah Mourning for the Destruction of Jerusalem (1630).  The painting had been "kept from view for years while in the possession of Russian count S. A. Stroganoff in St. Petersburg before the First World War."  The day after the theft, Amore and Mashberg recount, a workman at the residence "led investigators to the masterpiece, then valued at $100,000, which he had stashed in the woods near Stockholm.  Today it resides safely in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and is valued at $100 million." 

You may find more information about the program here on the website of PRI's The World.