10 Iconic Works of Art That Are Still Missing

There are many iconic works of art around the world. Some are famous for their artistry, others for the people who created them. But a few are remembered for a stranger reason: no one knows where they are.

Some vanished during wartime looting. Others disappeared in brazen museum robberies, leaving behind ransom demands, Mafia theories, deathbed confessions, and decades of unanswered questions. In several cases, investigators are still actively searching for works that have been missing for longer than many of us have been alive.

Today, we’re looking at ten priceless works of art that are still missing.

Related: 10 Fake Paintings and Sculptures That Turned Out to Be Real

10 Landscape with an Obelisk, Govert Flinck

While it was originally attributed to Rembrandt, Landscape with an Obelisk is now credited to Dutch artist Govert Flinck. The oil painting on wood measures roughly 21 × 28 inches (53 × 71 cm) and depicts a stormy landscape dominated by an obelisk, a fallen tree trunk, and a tiny figure on horseback.

Even before it disappeared, the painting had an identity problem. Isabella Stewart Gardner bought it as a Rembrandt in 1900, and an inscription on the work had once been altered in a way that helped reinforce that attribution. Later scholarship ultimately reassigned the painting to Flinck, one of Rembrandt’s pupils.

The artwork gained global attention for an entirely different reason on March 18, 1990. Two men disguised as police officers arrived at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and claimed they were responding to a disturbance. A security guard broke museum protocol and let them inside. The thieves restrained the guards in the basement and spent more than an hour removing 13 works of art, including Landscape with an Obelisk.

Gardner’s will required that the arrangement of her collection remain essentially unchanged, and the museum eventually rehung the empty frames as placeholders for the stolen masterpieces. More than three decades later, Landscape with an Obelisk is still missing—and the empty frame continues waiting for it to come home.^[1]

9 The Just Judges, Jan van Eyck

The Ghent Altarpiece is a monumental set of painted panels created by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. One of its lower panels, The Just Judges, has been missing since 1934 following a theft from St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.

The crime was discovered after a sexton noticed that two panels had vanished. The thief had forced open the chapel and removed both The Just Judges and a panel depicting St. John the Baptist. A note left behind referred to the Treaty of Versailles and the altarpiece’s earlier removal from Germany. Still, investigators eventually regarded that message as a diversion.

Soon, ransom letters signed with the initials D.U.A. began arriving. The thief demanded one million Belgian francs and eventually returned the St. John the Baptist panel as proof that he possessed the missing works. Negotiations continued, but The Just Judges never reappeared.

Then the mystery took a remarkable turn. Later that year, stockbroker Arsène Goedertier suffered a fatal heart attack and confessed that he alone knew where the missing panel was hidden. Investigators searching his belongings found copies of the ransom correspondence, strongly connecting him to the crime. They, however, did not find the painting.

Goedertier died before revealing its location. Searches have continued for more than 90 years, making The Just Judges one of art history’s most tantalizing missing masterpieces.^[2]

8 Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt

Rembrandt’s 1633 masterpiece Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee was another victim of the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. Rather than carefully removing it, the thieves cut the canvas from its frame before carrying it away.

That loss was particularly devastating because the painting is Rembrandt’s only known seascape. It depicts Christ and his disciples caught in a violent storm on the Sea of Galilee, with the boat pitching between towering waves as several terrified figures struggle to keep it afloat. The dramatic contrast between frightened sailors, churning water, and the strangely calm Christ makes it one of the artist’s most cinematic works.

Unlike Landscape with an Obelisk, whose authorship changed over time, the Rembrandt’s importance was never in doubt. Yet its fame may actually make recovery more difficult. A masterpiece this recognizable cannot simply be placed on the legitimate art market without immediately attracting attention.

Theories about the Gardner theft have repeatedly pointed toward organized crime and attempts to use the stolen works as bargaining chips, but none has produced the painting. Its mutilated empty frame still hangs in the museum, marking the place where Rembrandt’s only painted seascape once weathered its eternal storm.^[3]

7 Poppy Flowers, Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers—also known as Vase with Flowers—has the dubious distinction of disappearing from the same museum twice. Painted in Paris around 1886, the small work shows yellow and red flowers set against a dark background. After Van Gogh’s death, it entered the collection of the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo.

The first theft occurred in 1978. Details remain murky, but the painting resurfaced in Kuwait roughly two years later and was returned to Egypt. That should have encouraged the museum to keep a particularly close eye on it. Unfortunately, history repeated itself.

In August 2010, someone cut the canvas from its frame during museum hours and walked away with it. Investigators soon discovered that the building’s security system was in terrible condition: only a handful of surveillance cameras worked, and the alarms attached to the paintings were inactive.

The confusion did not end there. Egyptian officials initially announced that police had recovered the painting from travelers at Cairo International Airport, only to retract the claim when it became clear they had been mistaken. The real Poppy Flowers was still gone.

Valued in the tens of millions of dollars, the painting remains missing. A Van Gogh disappeared in broad daylight from a national museum because almost none of the equipment meant to protect it actually worked—and more than 15 years later, nobody has managed to bring it back.^[4]

6 View of Auvers-sur-Oise, Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne’s View of Auvers-sur-Oise disappeared from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum during New Year’s Eve celebrations on December 31, 1999. While revelers welcomed the new millennium outside, someone carried out a highly targeted burglary inside one of Britain’s most important museums.

The thief used scaffolding surrounding the building to reach the roof, cut an opening, and descended into the gallery with a rope ladder. Once inside, the burglar released smoke from a canister and used a small fan to spread it around the room, obscuring the surveillance cameras and causing security personnel to initially believe they were dealing with a fire.

The operation took less than ten minutes.

What makes the crime particularly intriguing is what the thief didn’t take. View of Auvers-sur-Oise was the Ashmolean’s only Cézanne, but the same gallery contained valuable works by Renoir, Rodin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. The intruder ignored them all and left with only the Cézanne. Equipment used during the break-in—including a bag, gloves, tape, and tools—was abandoned at the scene.

That precision has long fueled speculation that the painting was stolen to order for a private collector. Its fame makes it extraordinarily difficult to sell openly, yet no trace of it has surfaced. Whoever planned the millennium burglary apparently knew exactly what they wanted—and nothing else would do.^[5]

5 Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, Caravaggio

Traditionally dated to 1609, Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence is attributed to Italian Baroque master Caravaggio. The enormous painting measures nearly 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and depicts the infant Christ lying on straw while Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and saints gather around him. Above the scene, an angel descends holding a banner reading “Gloria.”

Sometime during the night of October 17–18, 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, cut the painting from its frame, and disappeared with it. Moving such a large canvas without attracting attention would have required planning. Yet, no definitive account of the theft has ever emerged.

The disappearance has since become entangled with Sicily’s history of organized crime. Over the decades, informants and investigators have offered conflicting stories: the painting was destroyed in a fire, eaten by rats and pigs while hidden in a barn, cut into pieces, sold abroad, or preserved intact as collateral in Mafia dealings. None has been proved.

The FBI estimates the work’s value at about $20 million and includes it among its Top Ten Art Crimes. A reproduction now occupies the place where the original once hung, but the real Caravaggio has not been seen publicly for more than half a century.^[6]

4 Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud

Artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud maintained an intense friendship for roughly 25 years after meeting in the mid-1940s. They moved within the same London bohemian circles, painted one another, and openly criticized each other’s work despite their very different styles.

In 1952, Freud painted a remarkably small oil on copper portrait of Bacon. Measuring only about 7 × 5 inches (18 × 13 cm), the work captured his friend in profile. Eventually, it became one of Freud’s most personally significant paintings.

The portrait disappeared on May 27, 1988, while on display at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. A photograph taken that morning may show the painting only minutes before it vanished. Its tiny size made the theft disturbingly simple. Unlike a giant Caravaggio or framed museum canvas, the copper panel could easily have been slipped into a coat or bag.

Freud never gave up on recovering it. In 2001, he launched a public campaign involving 2,500 stark “WANTED” posters offering a reward for information. He even requested that reproductions of the missing portrait thereafter appear only in black and white, reserving its true colors for the original.

Despite his efforts, the painting remains missing. One of the most intimate portraits created by one major twentieth-century artist of another simply walked out of a museum—and has not been seen since.^[7]

3 The Danish Jubilee Egg, House of Fabergé

The Danish Jubilee Egg—also known as the Royal Danish Egg—is one of seven missing Imperial Easter Eggs created by the House of Fabergé for Russia’s ruling family. Fabergé produced 50 Imperial Eggs between 1885 and 1916, of which 43 are known to survive today.

Tsar Nicholas II commissioned the Danish egg in 1903 as an Easter gift for his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. Born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, Maria remained closely connected to her Danish royal family throughout her life, and the egg celebrated her heritage.

According to surviving descriptions, the elaborate creation featured blue and white enamel over gold, supported by columns decorated with lions and topped by an elephant representing Denmark’s prestigious Order of the Elephant. At its center was a double-sided portrait of Maria’s parents, King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark, surrounded by precious stones.

Fabergé’s original invoice valued the egg at 7,535 rubles. Its last confirmed appearance came at Gatchina Palace in July 1917, only months after Nicholas II abdicated and as revolution consumed the Russian Empire. The imperial treasures were subsequently dispersed, seized, sold, hidden, or lost.

Some missing Fabergé eggs have resurfaced in astonishing circumstances—including one famously identified after being bought by a scrap-metal dealer. That leaves open the tantalizing possibility that the Danish Jubilee Egg is not destroyed at all. It may simply be sitting somewhere, its owner unaware of what they have.^[8]

2 Portrait of a Young Man, Raphael

Portrait of a Young Man, painted by Renaissance master Raphael around 1513–1514, once belonged to the celebrated Czartoryski collection in Poland. It shared that collection, which includes works by Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, and Rembrandt, Landscape with the Good Samaritan.

Then World War II began.

Following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi authorities systematically seized important artworks from Polish collections. Raphael’s portrait was among them. Its wartime journey took it through German-controlled repositories and eventually into the sphere of Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland and one of the most notorious Nazi officials responsible for plundering the country’s cultural heritage.

Records place the painting in Lower Silesia during the closing stages of the war, but somewhere amid the collapse of Nazi Germany, its trail disappears. Unlike the Czartoryski collection’s Leonardo and Rembrandt, which ultimately returned to Poland, Raphael’s portrait never came home.

More than 80 years later, Polish authorities continue to list it among the nation’s most important wartime losses. Its empty frame serves as a reminder of both the missing masterpiece and the enormous cultural destruction inflicted during World War II.

The painting may still survive in a private collection or forgotten storage space somewhere in Europe. If so, one of Raphael’s greatest missing works has spent eight decades hiding in plain sight.^[9]

1 The Concert, Johannes Vermeer

The Concert by Johannes Vermeer is often considered one of the world’s most valuable missing paintings. Created around 1663–1666, it depicts three figures making music in a quiet domestic interior: a woman seated at a harpsichord, another woman singing, and a man playing a lute.

Its disappearance is particularly painful because Vermeer left so little behind. Only about three dozen paintings are generally accepted as surviving works by the Dutch master, making the loss of even one enormously significant.

Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired The Concert at a Paris auction in 1892 for 29,000 francs, years before she opened the Boston museum bearing her name. Nearly a century later, it became the most celebrated casualty of the March 18, 1990, Gardner Museum robbery.

Two men posing as police officers entered the museum during the early morning hours, restrained the guards, and spent 81 minutes taking 13 works. The Concert disappeared alongside paintings by Rembrandt, Flinck, Manet, and Degas. No arrests have ever resulted in the recovery of the stolen collection.

The Gardner Museum continues to offer a $10 million reward for information leading directly to the recovery of all 13 works in good condition, with rewards also possible for individual pieces or groups of works.

More than 36 years after the robbery, Vermeer’s musicians remain frozen somewhere outside public view. If the painting still survives, recovering it would return not merely an extraordinarily valuable object but one of the very few surviving works created by one of history’s most elusive masters.^[10]