The five Degas pieces taken from the Gardner’s Short Gallery are representative of his working methods rather than his most celebrated productions. Four are small and intimate—pencil and watercolor, charcoal on paper, pencil and sepia wash. The fifth, *Three Mounted Jockeys*, is slightly larger and executed in black ink and oil pigments. None of them is among the most famous Degas works. All of them were in the museum’s flat-file cabinets, which means they were being stored rather than permanently displayed.
The thieves opened the cabinets and took what was there. Whether they knew what they were selecting—whether their principals had specifically requested these five works—or whether they simply took everything accessible in the Short Gallery’s storage system is not established.
*La Sortie de Pesage* is the smallest of the five: a pencil and watercolor showing a horse leaving the paddock, approximately four inches by six inches. *Program for an Artistic Soiree* and its second study are two versions of a charcoal sketch on paper. *Cortège aux Environs de Florence* shows a procession on a road near Florence, in pencil and sepia wash, approximately six by eight inches. *Three Mounted Jockeys* is slightly larger, roughly twelve by nine and a half inches.
Together they represent a significant portion of the Degas holdings at the Gardner. They are gone because they were in the cabinet when the thieves opened it, not because they were specifically selected from among the museum’s entire Degas collection.
**Rembrandt, *A Lady and Gentleman in Black*, 1633**