The legal situation has evolved in ways that make recovery more important than prosecution. The statute of limitations on the original theft has expired. Charges could still theoretically be brought against anyone found in current possession of the stolen property—possession of stolen goods is an ongoing offense, not subject to the same limitations as the original theft—but the primary legal leverage is the possession charge, not the 1990 heist. This has implications for negotiation: someone who inherited stolen art from a family member and wants to return it without going to prison faces a different legal situation than someone who participated in the original theft.
The museum has tried to communicate this publicly. The implicit message of the $10 million reward, combined with the indication that the statute of limitations on the original theft has run, is that coming forward with the art is now less legally dangerous for some holders than it has historically been. Whether this message has reached whoever holds the works—or whether it changes their calculus if it has—is unknown.
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## The Unrecoverable
There is one category of loss that no recovery can address: the years themselves.
The Gardner works have been inaccessible to scholarship for more than thirty years. Art historians who want to study *The Concert* up close—to examine Vermeer’s brushwork, to investigate the paintings on the back wall of the domestic interior, to use infrared reflectography to look for underdrawing—cannot do so. The Rembrandt seascape, Rembrandt’s only known painting of the sea, cannot be physically studied. The Flinck, whose attribution changed after the theft, cannot be re-examined in person.