Five Paintings That Have Been Stolen More Than Once

The Louvre heist of October 2025, with thieves disguised as removal men, a furniture lift scaled against the museum wall and €88 million in French Crown Jewels gone in under eight minutes, made art theft briefly feel like front-page news again. Indeed, the history of famous paintings is partly a history of people trying to steal them, and a surprising number have been stolen not once but repeatedly, as though certain works carry an irresistible pull for thieves across generations. Here are five of them.

1. The Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck (1432)

The Ghent Altarpiece by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck holds the dubious honour of being the most repeatedly targeted work of art in history, having been the subject of over a dozen major crimes. Napoleon’s troops carried off four panels in 1794, a vicar reportedly made off with wing panels in 1816 and the Germans seized further pieces during the First World War. Then in 1934, a single panel — the Just Judges — was stolen with a ransom note attached. It has never been found; the cathedral floor has since been x-rayed to a depth of ten metres in the search for it. The Nazis seized what remained of the altarpiece during the Second World War, though it was ultimately recovered from an Austrian salt mine by Allied forces.

2. Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III by Rembrandt (1632)

Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III earned its entry in the 2006 Guinness World Records as the “Most Stolen Painting” after being taken four times in the space of 53 years — in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983. Each recovery had a peculiar character: once from the back of a bicycle, once from beneath a bench in a Streatham graveyard and once from a luggage rack at a British army garrison train station in Münster. Art historians have suspected the same person was behind multiple thefts, which raises even more questions. It now hangs, somewhat defiantly, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London.

3. The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503–1519)

The Mona Lisa owes much of its global fame to its own theft. When Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with it under his coat in 1911, the painting was not known widely beyond specialists. It took 28 hours for anyone to notice it was gone, and the subsequent two-year manhunt transformed it into a worldwide sensation. During the Second World War, the Louvre’s director secretly evacuated almost the entire collection before the Nazis arrived; the Mona Lisa was moved six times through châteaux and abbeys across rural France, never falling into German hands despite being at the top of Hitler’s wish list. Since its return to Paris it has also been attacked repeatedly — most recently in 2022, when a protestor threw cake at its protective glass.

4. Poppy Flowers by Vincent van Gogh (1887)

Van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers was stolen from Cairo’s Mohamed Khalil Museum in 1977 and recovered roughly a decade later. It was then stolen a second time in 2010, when a thief cut the canvas from its frame in broad daylight and walked out without triggering a single alarm. At the time, only seven of the museum’s 43 security cameras were operational. The painting has not been seen since.

5. The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893)

Two versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream have been stolen, from two different Oslo institutions. In 1994, thieves took the National Gallery’s version and left a note reading “Thanks for the poor security.” It was recovered three months later. In 2004, armed men walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight and lifted another version directly off the wall. That one was missing for two years before being found damaged but intact. Both thefts, on close inspection, are almost insultingly brazen.