The Vermeer taken from Kenwood House

On Saturday night, 23 February 1974, thieves broke into Kenwood House in London and took Vermeer’s The Guitar Player from the wall. The Guardian places the raid on that night. London Walks, a walking-tour company, puts it at about 11 pm. Essential Vermeer, a website on the painter, and Art UK say the thieves broke the shutters and a barred window with a sledgehammer, cut the telephone lines and climbed a 10-foot wall. These are secondary sources. The Guardian says only that the thieves beat the security in a way that “remains a mystery”.

The painting is oil on canvas, about 53 by 46 centimetres, and dates from about 1672. English Heritage, which runs Kenwood, counts it among about 37 known works by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Edward Cecil Guinness, the 1st Earl of Iveagh, owned it. His collection of 63 paintings came to the nation as the Iveagh Bequest and hangs at Kenwood.

The ransom demands began two days later. The New York Times reports that on the evening of 25 February a man with a West Indian accent telephoned Jean Stead, the news editor of The Guardian. He said he would destroy the painting unless food worth 500,000 pounds, about $1.15 million, went to the people of Grenada. On 26 February a caller, thought to be the same man, asked for free kerosene for old people in Highgate. Police would not say whether he was genuine. The Times gave experts’ estimates of up to $5 million at auction. That was an estimate, not a sale. Essential Vermeer reports that the authorities said no ransom would be paid.

A third demand, reported by Essential Vermeer, Art UK and London Walks, was a typed note. It asked that Marian and Dolours Price be moved from English prisons to one in Northern Ireland. The Price sisters, then 20 and 23 according to The New York Times, were convicted on 14 November 1973 with six other people over the March 1973 car bombings in London. The BBC reports that one person died and almost 200 were hurt. They were sentenced to life and were on hunger strike in Brixton prison. The note said the painting would be burned on St Patrick’s night, 17 March. The Guardian confirms that threat and says suspicion fell on the IRA. No source read links the sisters to the theft. The Home Office kept them in England in 1974 and moved them to Armagh prison in March 1975. Essential Vermeer, citing a 2002 book by Anthony Bailey, and London Walks add that a strip of canvas about an inch long was sent to The Times with a typed note.

The painting was found in early May 1974, after an anonymous tip, in the churchyard of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, in the City of London. It was propped against a gravestone, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, damp but otherwise undamaged. The Guardian says it was recovered almost three months after the theft, still on its original stretcher. Sources give the date as 6 May (London Walks) or 7 May (Essential Vermeer). The New York Times confirms only “May”. The frame was found near the house, but sources differ on where.

No one was charged with the theft. The Guardian called the thief’s identity a mystery in 2001. In 2025 a relative of a dead man told a local newspaper that he had taken it. No police or court source confirms this. The painting is at Kenwood.