The Love Letter by Vermeer Robbery
This is a bit of a rollercoaster. I am going to spoil it for you a little and tell you that the painting has been recovered but how was it able to be stolen and why is a nosey gas station attendant the key to the thief’s capture?
The Love Letter
You didn’t think I would just jump into the story without some background on the painting, did you?? Honestly, I was tempted but I still want to give this work the appreciation it deserves.
Vermeer painted The Love Letter between 1669 and 1670. The painting depicts a maid commenting to her mistress on a love letter that the lady holds. This painting contains a lot of symbolism, this doesn’t really relate to the crime at hand but it’s interesting anyway. The tied-up curtain in the foreground makes the viewer feel like they’re looking on at a very private, personal moment. We know that it is a love letter that the woman is holding because she is also holding a cittern (a form of lute) which represents love and this idea is further cemented by the slippers which appear at the bottom of the painting, a removed slipper was a symbol of sex. The two paintings that we can see above the lady and her maid are also important. The bottom one depicts a ship on a stormy sea indicating tumultuous love and the one above this is a traveller on a sandy road alluding to the man who has written the love letter to this woman.
See, I told you it would be interesting. Ok on to the crime.
The Robbery
In 1971 The Love Letter along with other works was on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the Fine Arts Palace in Brussels as part of an exhibition. On September 23, 1971, 21-year-old Mario Pierre Roymans entered the Palace and without drawing anyone’s attention, locked himself in the electrical box in the exhibition hall. Honestly, this in itself is pretty impressive.
He waited for the Palace to close before coming out and heading for his target. He knew that he wanted to steal The Love Letter by Vermeer. He pulled the painting down from the wall in its frame (of course no security measures were in place to secure the painting to the wall) and headed for the window. Unfortunately, he soon found that the painting in its frame was too big to fit out the window, he tried to get the painting out of the frame but was unable to do so easily so he used a potato peeler to very crudely cut the canvas out of the frame. Then the painting was folded and stuffed into his back pocket. I promise this pains me as much to write as it is to read. Needless to say, the painting sustained pretty significant damage.
Roymans managed to escape out the window and get the canvas home without being followed or identified. He first hid the painting in his room and later he buried it in the forest. When it started to rain he dug up the work and put it in a pillowcase (did he just bury it loose?? No bag?? No nothing??) and hid it under the mattress in his room at the Soetewey Hotel where he lived and worked.
So why did he do this? What was his motivation for stealing this masterpiece? Believe it or not he came up with this plan after seeing TV coverage of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide that involved human rights abuses and disasters across East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War. This was the first time that many people were confronted with images such as these of bloodshed and extreme violence on their TVs at home. Royman, the idealistic waiter, thought that he needed to do something about this and do something for the victims of this crisis. More on this later.
Of course, the robbery immediately became international news once it was discovered that the painting was missing and a hunt ensued.
On the night of October 3, 1971, Roymans contacted a reporter from Brussels newspaper Le Soir. He used the pseudonym Tijl van Limburg after a legendary hero who helped the poor during the Spanish Inquisition, a sort of Robin Hood figure. He spoke with the reporter and arranged to meet in a pine forest near Zolder the next morning. Early on October 4, 1971, the reporter waited for Roymans in his car. He had brought along his camera as instructed. After waiting for about half an hour Roymans appeared wearing a plastic mask. He pushed the reporter over to the passenger side of the car and got behind the wheel. He told the reporter to put on a blindfold and he started driving. When the reporter was allowed to take off the blindfold they were in front of a small church. The reporter waited in the car while Roymans went and got the painting wrapped in a white sheet. He allowed the reporter to take ten photographs of the painting in the car headlights to prove that it was actually the painting. After this, the reporter was blindfolded again as Roymans drove them back. He had relaxed considerably at this point and began to talk about how much he loved the painting and that he would give ten years of his life to keep it but knew he couldn’t. Also that he “loved humanity and felt he had to do something to alleviate human suffering” (Janson, 2021).
One of the photographs that the reporter had taken was published in Le Soir along with Roymans’ demands for returning the painting.
That 200 million Belgian franks be given to Bengali refugees in East Pakistan that had been suffering from famine
The Rijksmuseum should organize a campaign in the Netherlands to raise money to combat world famine
The Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels should do the same
The deadline for all three of these conditions to be met was set for Wednesday, October 6, 1971.
Needless to say, the police were pretty unhappy that the Le Soir journalist had met with Roymans without involving them. They showed up at Le Soir’s headquarters the morning after the publication of this article and confiscated the photographs of The Love Letter and secured the help of art experts to help them verify that this was in fact the stolen painting. The police determined that they were photos of the real painting. However, the director of the Rijksmuseum released a statement saying that these photographs were insufficient to prove that it was the original painting and not a reproduction. This caused a lot of tension to mount around this case. It also caused Roymans to make numerous calls to newspapers and radio stations to insist that it was the real painting.
Surprisingly, the Dutch public received Roymans’ demands very well. There were multiple petitions circulating urging authorities to drop the arrest warrant for Roymans and meet his demands. It also spurred independent initiatives to help Bangali refugees.
Finally, October 6 rolled around and there had been no word on whether Roymans’ demands would be met. He continued to make calls to newspapers and radio stations for coverage and to draw attention to his cause. He made one of these calls from a gas station. He had been riding his motorcycle and pulled over to a BP service station to get some gas and make a call. Before the call, Roymans told the gas station attendant that his conversation was “very private” (The New York Times, 1971). I mean, the second someone says that I am listening harder. Bad move. So of course the wife of the gas station attendant listened in on his conversation with a Belgian radio station and called the police as soon as he drove away.
When Roymans saw the police on the road behind him he panicked, jumped off his motorcycle, ran into a nearby barn and hid behind a cow. Not as good a hiding place as you’d imagine since he was soon apprehended and arrested. To his credit, Roymans immediately lead the police to the room where he was hiding the painting.
The Love Letter was delivered back to the Rijksmuseum on October 8 and was shown to the press on October 11. It had been very seriously damaged so an international committee was formed to oversee the restoration. Even though some people felt that it should be left in its damaged state the decision was made to do a full, faithful restoration of the piece.
The heist itself lasted just under two weeks whereas the restoration process took close to a year.
The painting was put back on display in the Rijksmuseum in 1973 along with about 30 photographs documenting the restoration process so the public could get a sense of the work that went into it. Some think the restored areas in the foreground and doorway look too flat but others think that it is very skilled and faithful work.
Roymans was brought to trial on December 20 and was sentenced on January 12 by a Brussels court to a fine and two years in jail. That’s it, people. After his release, he had a rather sad life. He married and had a child (not the sad part) but he became severely depressed and his marriage fell apart. He began living in his car and on Boxing Day 1978 he was found gravely ill in his car, he was brought to the hospital but ultimately succumbed to his sickness ten days later on January 5, 1979, at 29 years old.
At least here we have a happy ending for the painting (kind of) but a pretty bleak life for Roymans.
Works Cited
Janson, Jonathan. “Vermeer Thefts: 1971 - The Love Letter”. Essential Vermeer. 2021. http://www.essentialvermeer.com/fakes_thefts_school_of_delft_lost_sp/vermeer_theft_01.html
“Vermeer Recovered after Belgian Theft”. The New York Times. 1971. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/07/archives/vermeer-recovered-after-belgian-theft.html