<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="15"> The agent in the Boston field office wanted to know if the International Foundation for Art Research could print a special bulletin with pictures and descriptions of a dozen priceless masterpieces taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston Sunday -- the biggest theft of old masters in the nation's history.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="44"> One case involving a ransom occurred last year, when thieves stole three paintings by Vincent van Gogh from the Kroeller-Moeller Museum in Otterlo, Holland.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="52"> One such theft occurred in 1983, when thieves stole Italian Renaissance masterpieces, including Raphael's self-portrait, from the Hungarian national museum in Budapest.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="59"> Among them is "one of 21 Dutch Old Masters stolen at gunpoint in a daylight raid on a Zurich gallery, and allegedly transported to the U.S. in a diplomatic pouch".</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="62"> Auguste Rodin's bronze "Mask of a Man With a Broken Nose," stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, turned up under a sewer pipe in the basement of a Philadelphia truck driver, thanks to an anonymous tip.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="64"> A double-sided drawing by Rembrandt "induced gasps of excitement" when it was delivered to the auction house for consignment, but it was later found to be property stolen in 1979 from the Rembrandt House Amsterdam, the IFAR publication reported.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="92"> Perls was a victim of theft in January, when a mobile by Alexander Calder was stolen through a domed skylight.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="101"> They include liturgical objects like a 19th-Century silver chalice stolen in Seraing, Belgium; a 16th-Century Gothic clock taken in Zurich; an Egyptian statue of a standing man stolen in New York, and a 20th-Century Tiffany Studios peony lamp taken last June in Beverly Hills.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="107"> MARCH 18, 1990 -- Two robbers dressed as police officers steal 11 paintings and an ancient Chinese beaker from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="110"> DEC. 29, 1989 -- Eight works by Matisse are reported missing from the Nice apartment where the French artist had lived.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="112"> NOV. 5, 1989 -- Works worth at least $17 million are taken from the home of Picasso's daughter, Marina Picasso, including seven paintings by Picasso, a Brueghel and a bust by Rodin.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="113"> SEPTEMBER, 1989 -- Works worth $3 million, including 81 Andy Warhol lithographs, are stolen from a gallery near Bonn, West Germany.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="115"> AUGUST, 1989 -- Two men steal paintings and three signet rings worth $4 million from a New York art collector.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="117"> JUNE 1, 1989 -- A Braque painting worth an estimated $3 million is taken from the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="118"> MAY 3, 1989 -- Six armed men flashing fake police badges steal $30 million to $40 million worth of paintings, sculptures and tapestries from the Chacara do Ceu Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="120"> APRIL 12, 1989 -- Three armed robbers take 21 Renaissance paintings worth more than $5 million from a gallery in Zurich, Switzerland.</s>

<s docid="LA032090-0091" num="122"> DEC. 12, 1988 -- Thieves steal three paintings by Van Gogh, with an estimated value of $72 million to $90 million, from the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in a remote section of the Netherlands.</s>

<s docid="FT923-1946" num="17"> Recently, a man in a double breasted suit appeared at the counter of Sotheby's with a view of Westminster Abbey by John Inigo Richards, claiming he had bought it in a car boot sale for Pounds 40 and had cleaned it with Fairy Liquid.</s>

<s docid="FT923-1946" num="24"> Recently the Regional Crime squad paid a visit with photographs of two stolen pictures, Charles I and Henrietta Maria, copies of Van Dyke, which had been registered in 1991 by a loss adjustor.</s>

<s docid="FT923-1946" num="28"> The Metropolitan Police logged the theft of several pictures from a private London house with the ALR; six weeks later the City of London police found a hoard of paintings in Jewry Street and, suspecting they must be stolen, came to the register offices with photographs.</s>

<s docid="LA073089-0145" num="63"> But he and a number of dealers across the country failed to detect that numerous cels they purchased last year and this year probably had been stolen from a Warner Bros. warehouse in Toluca Lake.</s>

<s docid="LA073089-0145" num="65"> An anonymous letter received by the Burbank Police Department in April, 1988, tipped off Warner Bros. that several boxes of cels and drawings may have been taken from the warehouse.</s>

<s docid="LA111190-0041" num="20"> For instance, the "Spanish forger" who faked the medieval manuscripts was a highly skilled and clever painter who went to great lengths to disguise his forgeries by using vellum that dated back to the Middle Ages, painting in the style of medieval illuminators and then "aging" his works.</s>

<s docid="LA111190-0041" num="36"> One work in the show, a supposed early 16th-Century "Venetian Renaissance" panel painting of St. George slaying the dragon, was revealed as a 19th-Century fake after the Walters Conservation Lab noticed some suspiciously heavy overpainting on the canvas.</s>

<s docid="LA111190-0041" num="58"> Icilio Federico Joni (1866-1946) was a Sienese painter, restorer, art dealer and forger who specialized in Renaissance paintings.</s>

<s docid="LA111190-0041" num="61"> Then there was Reinhold Vasters (1827-1909), the nearly perfect forger.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="39"> A "Late Medieval" stained-glass panel is a perfect joke.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="40"> It makes no attempt to hide the modern techniques behind its glaring glass and the subject is drawn from a Hans Holbein portrait done in the 16th Century.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="41"> The thing got by because it was made by a Victorian forger for Victorian taste.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="47"> There are those rare counterfeiters skillful enough to vamp the experts.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="48"> A "St.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="49"> George Slaying the Dragon" was once ascribed to an unknown Pietro Carpaccio by the renowned Bernard Berenson.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="50"> It doesn't look so great today but there are works that do, like a gold ground Italian painting by master forger Icilio Frederico Joni.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="56"> A French turn-of-the-century imitator known, oddly, as "The Spanish Forger" did stunning pastiches of late medieval manuscript pages.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="57"> Crafty enough to use authentic vellum pages with calligraphic text, he was also dumb enough not to match the illustration to the story.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="59"> Other common forger's gaffes include making mismatched meldings of differing styles like an "Italo-Byzantine" monumental Crucifixion where Christ is Byzantine to the waist and then goes Romanesque.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="70"> I missed the call on a pair of Sevres-style ormolu clocks, but a gallery representative says everybody does.</s>

<s docid="LA110290-0015" num="71"> If I were a forger, I'd stick to the decorative arts, where it seems to be possible for a copy to be aesthetically superior to the original.</s>

<s docid="LA092489-0079" num="36"> Ironically, it was inspired partly by two ancient Iberian stone heads bought from an acquaintance.</s>

<s docid="LA092489-0079" num="37"> It turned out they'd been stolen from the Louvre.</s>

<s docid="LA112590-0001" num="103"> Fake? The Art of Deception (Mark Jones, ed., University of California Press: $49.95; 312 pp).</s>

<s docid="LA112590-0001" num="104"> does just that, in a fascinating account of the ways in which phony Babylonian inscriptions in stone (an ancient forgery) and trumped-up Vermeers on canvas (a modern hoax) have fooled more than one knowledgeable expert.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="10"> A spurious 6th-Century sarcophagus was exposed only after someone noticed that it depicted a female figure wearing 19th-Century underwear.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="11"> And a bogus marble bust of Julius Caesar, long the most famous likeness of Caesar in Britain, turned out to have been "weathered" artificially, probably by someone pounding on it with a nail-studded piece of wood.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="22"> It turns out, for example, that for all his creativity, Michelangelo was not above a bit of fakery.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="23"> He forged the work of his teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, as a student prank.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="24"> And he sculpted a sleeping Cupid which he is said to have sold fraudulently as an antiquity.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="42"> Giovanni da Cavino of Padua and his son produced such masterful replicas of ancient coins in the 16th Century that some of their fakes are now worth as much as or more than the originals, Jones said.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="43"> The late Tom Keating is considered the most prolific and versatile art forger to be exposed in Britain in this century.</s>

<s docid="LA031390-0138" num="44"> He produced about 2,000 fakes of the work of more than 100 different artists, including Samuel Palmer.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="21"> On June 28, three Van Gogh paintings were stolen from the North Brabant Museum, 55 miles south of Amsterdam, and last Wednesday three paintings were taken from three museums in Paris, including a Renoir that was sliced from its frame in the Louvre.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="22"> "We've been getting calls from museums I have never heard of," Chapman said, adding that they had a similar flurry of calls in March after the theft of $200 million worth of paintings and drawings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="31"> He made several famous art recoveries while with the bureau, including Picassos stolen from a Pittsburgh industrialist (Chapman was made up to look like the industrialist to deal with a thief who demanded ransom) and a group of Paul Cezanne drawings stolen in France.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="46"> Chapman has, however, suffered losses from museums with which he has worked.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="47"> The worst came just before Christmas, 1978, when a call came from the Chicago Institute of Art, for which he had designed a security system.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="48"> Three Cezanne paintings, worth more than $3 million, were missing.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="60"> A computerized inventory check last year resulted in the discovery that more than 100 objects, worth more than $2 million, were missing from the collection of American Indian art at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.</s>

<s docid="LA070990-0048" num="66"> Because the Smithsonian has periodic inventories, strict policies on the movement of art objects and a pervasive electronic security system, said Danzenbaker, who is now chief of security systems for all the Smithsonians, the museums have not suffered a serious loss due to theft since 1981 when someone made off with a set of George Washington's false teeth.</s>

<s docid="LA031289-0123" num="21"> The painting's disappearance led to the prosecution of the Keck family butler on a grand theft charge last year.</s>

<s docid="LA031289-0123" num="123"> It turned out that the century-old painting, "I Fria Luften," (In Free Air) a nude of a mother and child by Swedish master Anders Zorn, had fetched nearly $500,000 at a Swedish auction that spring.</s>

<s docid="LA091389-0057" num="11"> Only hours after being bolted onto a seaside bench, a city-installed artwork entitled "Ddumbbell"was stolen over the Labor Day weekend.</s>

<s docid="LA102190-0073" num="28"> He first saw it in 1962, when it was offered to him by a secretive Swiss book dealer, and he would have bought it on the spot had he not feared that the spectacular book had been recently stolen from its monastery home.</s>

<s docid="LA082190-0102" num="11"> "I figured I'd better come see it before they steal the rest of it," said Steve Kaplan, a Santa Monica attorney viewing the "Images in Time and Space" collection at a Third Street Promenade gallery.</s>

<s docid="LA082190-0102" num="12"> The burglaries followed a heist last summer in which three holograms -- lifelike three-dimensional images captured on film with the use of a laser beam -- were stolen while the exhibit was on display in San Francisco.</s>

<s docid="LA031989-0222" num="22"> The painting's disappearance led to the prosecution of the Keck family butler on a grand theft charge last year.</s>

<s docid="LA031989-0222" num="106"> It turned out that the century-old painting, "I Fria Luften," (In Free Air) a nude of a mother and child by Swedish master Anders Zorn, had fetched nearly $500,000 at a Swedish auction that spring.</s>

<s docid="FT933-2068" num="14"> Keating became famous in 1976 for forging Samuel Palmer's paintings.</s>

<s docid="FT933-2068" num="15"> But he also forged over 2,000 others.</s>

<s docid="FT933-2068" num="16"> These 'Sexton Blakes', slang for 'fakes', as he called them, included Degas, Goya, Modigliani, Rembrandt, Sisley, Van Gogh and Vuillard.</s>

<s docid="FT933-2068" num="17"> But he was best at JMW Turner, another consummate professional who was capable in a visit to Venice of turning out 300 sketches in three days.</s>

<s docid="LA081790-0069" num="12"> They pulled and twisted the statue of the girl, but it just wouldn't come loose.</s>

<s docid="LA081790-0069" num="13"> As a result, the thieves who stole two of three bronze figures at a Beverly Hills park this week now possess some impressive, but virtually worthless, art works.</s>

<s docid="LA081790-0069" num="27"> Two other Salmones sculptures were stolen from public buildings in Texas during the last few years, but there appears to be no connection between the thefts except that the works were all on public display, gallery officials said.</s>

<s docid="LA062290-0062" num="8"> Anthony Gene Tetro, who is described by investigators as one of the nation's most prolific art forgers, pleaded not guilty to one count of grand theft and 67 counts that he faked reproductions of the works of artists Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Norman Rockwell and Hiro Yamagata.</s>

<s docid="LA062690-0167" num="10"> ithograph by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, stolen from an Oslo art gallery in April, has been recovered, news reports said today.</s>

<s docid="LA062690-0167" num="11"> The print, Madonna, worth about $231,000, was among four works by Norwegian artists recovered at a house in Drammen, near Oslo, newspapers said.</s>

<s docid="LA012989-0023" num="63"> A few years after "Destino" was laid to rest, the storyboard sketches disappeared in a theft.</s>

