The 1972 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts robbery, sometimes called the Skylight Caper, took place very early in the morning of September 4. Three armed robbers used a skylight under repair to gain entry to the museum from its roof, tied up the three guards on duty, and left on foot with 18 paintings, including a rare Rembrandt landscape and works by (or attributed to at the time) Jan Brueghel the Elder, Corot, Delacroix, Rubens, and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as some figurines and jewellery. The Brueghel, (later reattributed), and one of the stolen jewelry pieces, was returned by the thieves as an initiative to start ransom negotiations. None of the other works have been recovered. The robbers have never been arrested or even publicly identified, although there has been at least one informal suspect (now dead).
Collectively, the missing paintings have been valued at US$ in ; although their value may have diminished since the theft as scholars have called the attribution of some of the works into question. Nevertheless, the Rembrandt alone has been valued at $1.75 million; in 2003 The Globe and Mail estimated it to have appreciated in value to $20 million. The thieves appeared to know what works they were looking for. Many had been part of Masterpieces from Montreal, a travelling exhibition that had been to many museums in the U.S. and Canada prior to Expo 67, as well as some other special exhibits put on by the museum in the preceding years. It is not only the largest art theft in Canada but the largest theft in Canadian history.
Investigation of the crime proved difficult in the early going, since it occurred over the Labour Day holiday weekend, when many of the museum's officials including its director were vacationing far away from Montreal. It was further complicated by continuing news coverage of the Blue Bird Café fire, Montreal's deadliest arson, three days earlier, dominating the headlines; the next day the killings of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Olympics in Munich further dominated media coverage. A sting operation conceived after the thieves returned the Brueghel (later reattributed) and mailed photos of the other works to the museum seeking a ransom payment went awry; a later attempt to negotiate their return cost the museum CDN$10,000 with no results.
The thieves took advantage of weakened security, resulting from the renovations at the museum, which had left the skylight's alarm disabled. The renovations and the security flaws were themselves a consequence of the museum's tightening finances. During the 1960s many of the museum's supporters among the wealthy Anglophone community in Montreal began to leave for Toronto due to increasing concerns over Quebec separatism. The Montreal police, Sûreté du Québec, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Interpol continue to investigate. Theories as to who might be responsible have ranged from the Montreal Mafia to separatists and art students.
Background
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), established in 1860, built its current main building, now the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, on Sherbrooke Street, in the neighborhood known today as the Golden Square Mile, because it was home to many of Canada's wealthiest and most successful families. The museum's patrons were predominantly of British descent, all members of Montreal's Anglophone elite.
At the end of the 1950s, their political and economic domination of the city began to yield to its majority Francophone population, as Quebec separatism rose in the province during the Quiet Revolution. The museum began receiving financial support from the city, provincial and federal governments. In 1957, Bill Bantey, a former journalist who was appointed the museum's head of public relations, began reaching out for the first time in its history to Francophones, and during the next decade the museum finally adopted an official French name, le Musée de Beaux Arts de Montréal (MBAM). But the contributions from newer philanthropists in the city did not yet equal their predecessors, and provincial funds only covered 40% of the museum's annual budget.
As a result, in the early 1970s, going from a strictly private institution to a semi-public nonprofit organization. The museum needed to expand, and to renovate the 1913 William Sutherland Maxwell Beaux-Arts building on Sherbrooke Street. Its many cramped rooms and corridors were unsuitable for a late-20th century art museum. The museum planned to close the Maxwell building in 1973 for renovations.
Previous thefts and attempts
On two prior occasions thieves had taken, or attempted to take, works from the museum.
One night in 1933, someone hidden in the museum overnight passed 14 paintings by Canadian artists, to another person through an open window in the women's lavatory. Later the museum received a ransom note asking $10,000 for the paintings' return. Three months later, the English-language Montreal Star and the French La Presse each received half of one painting in the mail. A note said if a ransom of 25% of the remaining paintings' total value was not paid, they too would be returned in pieces.
The paintings were recovered before that could occur. Paul Thouin, a petty criminal, was arrested after burglarizing a rail freight car. He confessed to the theft and led police to a sandpit near the village of L'Épiphanie, a short distance northeast of Montreal, where he had buried them wrapped in a tarpaulin with newspapers. Thouin, who had killed a police officer attempting to apprehend him in a railroad warehouse, was reportedly terrified at the prospect of being returned to prison for a very long term. He died after poisoning himself with a concealed dose of strychnine in the police lockup that night. A gang of armed robbers attempted to steal some van Gogh paintings during a special exhibition of the artist's work at the museum in 1960. They were foiled and escaped. They have never been identified.
Labour Day weekend 1972 in Montreal
In Montreal, Labour Day weekend of 1972 began with two major news events, neither of them well received. On the night of Friday, September 1, four intoxicated men who had been refused entry to a downtown country-and-western bar retaliated by setting the club's steps afire; the ensuing blaze killed 37, the worst act of mass murder in the city's history. On the following evening, the Soviet national hockey team defeated a team of Canadian National Hockey League stars 7–3 in the first game of the Summit Series at the Montreal Forum. Canadians consider hockey integral to their national identity, a sentiment particularly strong in Montreal, where some of the earliest hockey games were played. They had expected their team to overwhelmingly defeat the less-storied Soviets. Fans in Montreal were eagerly looking ahead to the next game in the series, to be held Monday evening in Toronto.
At the museum, the board president, director, and director of security were all on vacation in either the United States or Mexico for the holiday weekend. Bantey, the public relations director, was the most senior official in charge.
Robbery
Shortly after midnight on September 4, police believe, a group of three men went to the museum's west wall, between it and the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul on Sherbrooke Street. One of the men, who wore a pair of the pick-equipped boots used by utility-company workers to climb telephone poles, went up a tree next to the museum and got on to the roof. From it he lowered a ladder to the other two. They went to a skylight covered by a plastic sheet in the course of some ongoing work. No alarm sounded when they opened it as the plastic sheet had rendered it inoperative. The men then lowered a nylon rope to the museum's second floor and slid down.
Around 1:30 a.m., one of the three guards on duty was walking to the kitchen to get some tea when he encountered two thieves. Their faces were covered by ski masks but their long hair was visible; both about tall. One fired a shotgun into the ceiling to get the guard's attention and made him lie down on the floor. The other two guards were quickly overpowered. All three were taken to a lecture hall where they were bound and gagged. The captive guards recalled hearing, but not seeing, a third thief speak to others in French.
In the lecture hall, one robber stood guard while the other two removed paintings, jewellery and figurines from their displays and brought them to the museum's shipping department. The thieves originally seemed to have planned to leave via the same skylight, but eventually concluded it would take too much time to put together a system of pulleys to get themselves and the stolen artwork out. After finding that one guard had a set of keys to one of the museum's panel trucks, they fled that way.
However, this alternative also went awry. They instead exited through one of the museum's side entrances, setting off an alarm. Leaving half their take behind, they fled on foot down Sherbrooke. Back at the museum, one of the guards freed himself an hour after the thieves left. He called Bantey, who told him to call the Montreal police (SPVM). Bantey arrived shortly after the police, along with Ruth Jackson, the museum's curator of decorative arts. After surveying the broken frames, smashed display cases and general disorder the thieves had left, they found that 18 paintings and 38 other pieces had been taken.
Works stolen
All of the stolen paintings were by European artists from the 17th through 19th centuries:
Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle, attributed at the time to Jan Brueghel the Elder but later reattributed to his students (subsequently recovered) Landscape with Buildings and Wagon, Jan Brueghel the Elder La rêveuse á la fontaine (The Dreaming Woman at the Fountain), Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Jeune fille accoudée sur le bras gauche (Young Girl Leaning on Her Left Arm), Corot Landscape with rocks and stream, Gustave Courbet Head, Honoré Daumier Lioness and Lion in a Cave, Eugène Delacroix The Sorceress, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz Portrait of Brigadier General Sir Thomas Fletcher, attributed to Thomas Gainsborough but possibly by Joshua Reynolds An anonymous copy of Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life: Vanitas Still Life with a Fish, de Heem La barrateuse (Young Woman Churning), Jean-François Millet Portrait of Madame Millet, Millet Portrait of a Man, possibly a self-portrait, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta Landscape with Cottages, Rembrandt van Rijn Head of a Young Man, Peter Paul Rubens Portrait of a Lady, François-André Vincent Portrait of a Man, Vincent
Most of the paintings taken were small works around 32 centimetres (12.5 in) along their longest dimension; the three smallest (the Brueghels and Millet's La barrateuse) were less than , smaller than a standard letter-size piece of paper. The largest was the Courbet, at ( × inches), with the Gainsborough and Corot's Dreamer close behind. It was possible that when the thieves ran away each of them held a batch of smaller paintings in one hand and a larger one in the other.
The thieves also took 39 pieces of jewellery and figurines. Among the former pieces were an 18th-century gold watch once owned by the wife of Jacques Viger, Montreal's first mayor; a 19th-century French blue enamel latch box set with diamonds and two 17th-century Spanish pendants. The value of the stolen work was estimated at around US$2 million, ($ in ) In 1992, on the 20th anniversary of the theft, a Radio-Canada story reported that the insurance companies now valued the paintings at $12 million.