The FBI and museum continue to accept tips through the museum’s website and through the FBI Boston field office. The investigation has no publicly announced break.
The Dutch Room, meanwhile, is undergoing restoration work. The museum has announced that the room is scheduled to reopen in 2027. When it does, the empty frames will presumably return to their positions—the same positions they have occupied since March 18, 1990.
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## What Credible Sightings Exist
The FBI has indicated that credible sightings—meaning tips that investigators found sufficiently specific and plausible to investigate seriously—exist for a subset of the stolen works.
Credible sightings have been reported for:
– *The Concert*, the Vermeer
– *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee*, the Rembrandt seascape
– The Rembrandt self-portrait etching
– *Chez Tortoni*, the Manet
– The Napoleonic eagle finial
For the remaining pieces—*A Lady and Gentleman in Black*, the Flinck, the five Degas works, and the Chinese bronze beaker—no credible sightings have been reported, or at least none has been publicly acknowledged by the FBI or the museum.
The asymmetry is notable. The works with credible sightings are, without exception, the most famous and most reproduced items in the stolen collection. *The Concert* is probably the most valuable. *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee* is the most historically significant. *Chez Tortoni*, while less valuable, is a well-known Manet. The eagle finial is the most distinctive individual object.
The Degas works are smaller, more obscure, and less likely to be recognized by someone who encountered them without knowing the Gardner story. If they are stored somewhere—in a case or a tube or a flat file box—they might pass decades without anyone who sees them recognizing them as stolen. The same is true of the Chinese bronze beaker, which is one of the oldest objects in the stolen collection but would not be immediately identified as a museum piece by someone without specialized knowledge.