Rembrandt’s *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee* is, of all the stolen works, the one with the most specific claim to uniqueness: it is the only seascape Rembrandt ever painted. Every other marine painting associated with his workshop or his tradition belongs to a genre he dabbled in or taught; this one was his single sustained engagement with the subject. It is the only record of how Rembrandt painted the sea. That record is currently unavailable to anyone.
The five Degas works are modest relative to the Vermeer and Rembrandt, but their theft illustrates something about the nature of the loss that applies to the collection as a whole. Degas’s horse-racing scenes and Parisian sketches exist in abundance—he was enormously prolific, and his work has been widely distributed through major collections around the world. The specific five pieces taken from the Gardner’s flat files were not among his most celebrated productions. But they belonged to the museum. They were part of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s specific vision for what her collection should be. Their absence is a gap in that vision.
The Chinese bronze beaker is more than 3,200 years old. It was made during the Shang dynasty, one of China’s first recorded dynastic civilizations, at a time when written Chinese was still in its early development and the political structures that would eventually unify China under the Qin dynasty were more than a thousand years in the future. Gardner acquired it in 1923, the year before her death. It is one of the oldest objects her museum holds. Its theft removed from public view an artifact of genuine antiquity that had survived three millennia to reach the Fenway.