Also from the Short Gallery: an eagle-shaped bronze finial taken from a Napoleonic battle flag. The finial had been cast between 1813 and 1814 and topped a ceremonial silk standard from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. Isabella Gardner had acquired it in 1880. The thieves had tried to take the entire flagpole but could not unscrew it; they took the finial instead. The museum now offers a separate reward of $100,000 specifically for information leading to the return of the finial, recognizing that whoever holds it may not realize its significance.
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## The Blue Room and Manet
The thirteenth and final item taken on the night of March 18 was *Chez Tortoni* by Édouard Manet, painted between approximately 1878 and 1880. This small oil painting depicted a young man writing or resting at a table in a Parisian café—the Café Tortoni, a fashionable establishment on the Boulevard des Italiens.
The Blue Room where *Chez Tortoni* hung was on the first floor. It was the only item taken from that floor of the museum. The Manet occupied a wall beside another Manet portrait—a portrait of the artist’s mother—which had been removed from the Blue Room for cleaning on the night of the theft, leaving a gap next to *Chez Tortoni*.
The detail of the mother’s portrait being absent for cleaning became, decades later, an element of the investigation’s most contentious thread. Some investigators would come to believe that whoever planned the theft had either noticed the gap through surveillance or had been told about it—that the absent portrait was evidence of inside knowledge about the museum’s condition on that specific night.