On New Year’s Eve 1999, with people in the city celebrating the new millennium, thieves broke in through the roof of the Ashmolean Museum and stole a £3m Cezanne painting.
Auvers-sur-Oise has never been recovered, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has the theft on its top 10 list of art crimes. It is thought the painting would now be worth £10m.
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The thief may have used a smoke grenade electric fan to fill the gallery with smoke and avoid being identified by security cameras.
By the time firefighters and police had been alerted, the thief had disappeared among the New Year revellers singing in Oxford’s streets.
The Priceless art blog has since commented on the theft of the painting from the Hindley Smith Gallery.
It said: “The smoke bomb was a pretty clever idea because the thieves knew that they would be setting off alarms and that the museum had security cameras so they used this smoke to confuse any guards on duty and make it more difficult to get a clear shot of them on the tapes.
“They brought with them a small bag that contained a scalpel, tape, gloves, and a small fan. They used the fan to blow the smoke around more which was very effective.
“There were security guards on duty that night and when they heard the alarms going off they checked the cameras, seeing the smoke they assumed that there was a fire in the gallery.
“Playing right into the thieves hands. They didn’t go into the space, as they thought it was on fire, and immediately called the police and firefighters.
“When they arrived at 1.43am they found no smoke in the gallery at all, just the remnants of the smoke bomb, and an empty space on the wall.”
While the art theft at the Ashmolean is perhaps the one everyone thinks of first, there has been a much more recent dramatic art heist.
In March 14, 2020, at about 11pm, thieves stole three valuable paintings from Christ Church Picture Gallery.
Using ladders stolen from the meadows they climbed onto the roof of the gallery, near the college’s Canterbury Gate in Merton Street, and smashed their way in through a skylight.
They removed three paintings from their frames before returning the way they came.
The heist was carefully planned. The paintings stolen, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, Antony Van Dyck’s A Soldier on Horseback and A Boy Drinking by Annibale Carracci, were on two opposite sides of the room.
In April last year, the 17th century painting by Rosa, A Rocky Coast, with Soldiers Studying a Plan, was recovered.
The Italian Baroque landscape was handed in to authorities in Romania and recovered by officers from Thames Valley Police and Jacqueline Thalmann, curator of Christ Church Picture Gallery.
The force then released a fresh appeal for the other two other paintings stolen in the same raid.
