*Chez Tortoni* is a small oil depicting a man at a table at the Café Tortoni, a fashionable Parisian establishment on the Boulevard des Italiens. The figure is young, well-dressed, apparently absorbed in writing or reading. The painting’s size and subject—an intimate genre scene rather than a large-scale historical or religious composition—makes it easier to transport and potentially easier to display discreetly than a large Dutch master.
On the night of the theft, the wall next to *Chez Tortoni* held a second Manet—a portrait of the artist’s mother. That portrait had been temporarily removed for cleaning. Anyone who had visited the Blue Room in the weeks before the theft, or who had been told about the gallery’s current configuration, would have known that the wall next to *Chez Tortoni* was empty.
This detail became, years later, one of the elements that investigators considered when assessing whether the theft involved inside knowledge. If someone knew the mother’s portrait was temporarily absent—creating an unusual configuration in the Blue Room—that knowledge might have come from inside the museum. Or the thieves might have noticed the gap themselves during a reconnaissance visit. Both possibilities have been considered; neither has been definitively established.
**The Five Degas Works**
Edgar Degas produced thousands of works across his career. He was not only prolific but compulsively reworking—returning to the same subjects (dancers, bathers, horses and jockeys) in different media over decades, producing an output that is distributed across hundreds of museums and private collections worldwide.