Rembrandt’s *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee* is the only Rembrandt seascape. Its market value, were it ever to be publicly sold, would be determined by this uniqueness among other factors. But the financial valuation, again, is not the primary measure of the loss. The loss is the inaccessibility of a unique document of how Rembrandt painted the sea—a document that existed once, in this painting, and is currently missing.
The five Degas works, the two other Rembrandts, the Flinck, and the Manet add to the aggregate figure but also represent individual losses of works that had been accessible to scholars, conservators, and the public for decades at the Gardner and, before that, in the various collections through which they passed.
The eagle finial and the Chinese bronze beaker represent different categories of loss: historical artifacts rather than fine art paintings, objects whose significance is material and historical rather than aesthetic. The finial was part of a specific military-historical context—the Napoleonic Imperial Guard—that is documented in multiple other ways, but this particular object has its own place in that history. The bronze beaker is more than three millennia old and has survived to the present through a chain of preservation that the theft interrupted.
Together, the thirteen objects represent a loss whose full dimensions cannot be expressed in a single dollar figure. The figure exists and is cited because it conveys something about the scale of the loss. But what was taken on March 18, 1990 is not primarily a financial loss. It is a cultural one—the removal from public access of objects that had been available, in the Gardner’s galleries, for the better part of a century.