The thieves who cut the canvases from their stretchers caused potential damage that cannot be assessed because the canvases have never been returned for examination. Paint layers crack and flake. Canvas warps and loses tension. The specific risk from cutting a canvas and rolling or folding it is significant—any contact with the paint surface can cause losses that are permanent and irreversible.
Whether the stolen works have been damaged, whether they have been stored in conditions that have degraded them, whether they are in the same physical condition they were in when they left the museum walls on the morning of March 18, 1990—these questions cannot be answered until the works are recovered.
The museum has appealed publicly to whoever holds the art to maintain appropriate storage conditions: correct temperature and humidity, darkness, avoidance of physical stress. This appeal reflects a genuine curatorial anxiety. Masterworks of seventeenth-century Dutch painting are not robust objects. They require care. The possibility that thirty-six years of improper storage has caused serious physical deterioration is real and troubling.
A recovered painting that has suffered significant damage is better than a permanently missing painting. But it is not the same as the painting that hung in the Dutch Room on March 17, 1990.
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## A Record That Cannot Be Replaced
The specific character of what was lost deserves attention in its own right.
Vermeer painted, by conservative scholarly count, fewer than three dozen works. Some scholars set the number even lower. Every Vermeer that exists is known; every painting attributed to him has been studied, reproduced, argued over. The loss of any Vermeer is the loss of a significant fraction of the total record of one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art. *The Concert* was among the most celebrated of them, a domestic interior that had been in the Gardner since 1892.