The thieves spent much of their time in this room.
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## The Short Gallery
The second space where the thieves concentrated their activity was the Short Gallery, a corridor-like room that connected two other galleries on the second floor.
The Short Gallery held a large collection of Degas works, many of them stored in flat cabinets—the kind of archival storage that museums use for works on paper that are too numerous and too fragile to be permanently displayed. The thieves opened the cabinets and took five works by Edgar Degas.
The five Degas pieces taken were:
– *La Sortie de Pesage*, a small pencil and watercolor work showing a horse and rider leaving a paddock, approximately four by six inches.
– *Program for an Artistic Soiree*, 1884, a charcoal sketch on white paper.
– *Program for an Artistic Soiree, Study 2*, 1884, a less finished version of the same composition.
– *Cortège aux Environs de Florence*, from between 1857 and 1860, a pencil and sepia wash showing a procession on a road, approximately six by eight inches.
– *Three Mounted Jockeys*, from between 1885 and 1888, executed in black ink and oil pigments, approximately twelve by nine and a half inches.
These five pieces are notably different in character from the major works taken from the Dutch Room. They are works on paper, intimate in scale, not among Degas’s most celebrated productions. Art historians have sometimes observed that a sophisticated thief operating on commission might have passed these by in favor of the Dutch Room’s oil paintings. The thieves took them anyway.