The Cézanne taken from the Ashmolean

On the night of 31 December 1999, around midnight, Oxford was watching the millennium fireworks. On the roof of the Ashmolean Museum, a thief was at work. He had climbed the scaffolding of the Sackler Library site next door and crossed the roofs. He made a hole in the glass roof above the Hindley Smith Gallery and lowered a rope ladder.

The Guardian reports, from a police source, that he carried a holdall with a scalpel, tape, gloves, a smoke canister and a small fan. He set off the smoke and used the fan to spread it, so that cameras and guards could not see him. The police source called it “a very clever ploy, a very professional theft”. He was inside for under ten minutes. He took one painting, climbed out and left the holdall behind. The New York Times quotes the museum’s director, Christopher Brown, as saying the thief took the canvas out of the back of its frame and smashed the empty frame. He took only the Cézanne from a room that also held Renoirs, Rodins and Toulouse-Lautrecs.

The smoke set off the alarms. A porter called for help. Police and firefighters arrived at 1.43 a.m. They found no fire, only the remains of the canister and a flashing alarm light near the empty space on the wall. An administrator telephoned Brown, who was in London for the fireworks, at 2.30 a.m. Brown told the Times that guards were in the building but not in that gallery.

The painting is an oil on canvas, 46 by 55 centimetres, signed lower left in red. Paul Cézanne painted it in 1879-80. It shows a hillside of white houses with blue and orange roofs. It was the Ashmolean’s only Cézanne oil painting. The catalogue raisonné, the scholarly list of his work, records the Paris collector Victor Chocquet as an early owner, then his widow in 1891. It next records Bruno Cassirer, who lent it to a Berlin show in 1921. The owners between 1891 and Cassirer are not recorded there. The Ashmolean received the painting in 1980 from the estate of Dr and Mrs Richard Walzer, accepted by the government in lieu of inheritance tax. BBC On This Day says it was bought, but Art UK’s record gives the tax route.

The museum and police put its value at 3 million pounds. The New York Times gave $4.8 million. The BBC says it was not insured against theft. Superintendent John Carr of the Oxford police said the theory was that an art lover had hired a professional thief. Malcolm Kenwood of the Art Loss Register, a private database of stolen art, thought that far-fetched. No evidence of a buyer has been published.

Thames Valley Police, helped by Scotland Yard’s art and antiques unit, led the search. Detective Sergeant Grant Sidey of Scotland Yard warned that such works can take five to seven years to resurface. In January 2000 a painting found in a West Midlands pub proved to be a copy, still wet. Later in 2000 a 17-year-old, who cannot be named, falsely claimed to hold the painting and tried to extort money from Brown by threatening e-mails. He was jailed for 12 months at Oxford Crown Court. The incident room closed in December 2000, though the case stayed open. The thief has never been identified or charged.

The Oxford Mail reported on 21 October 2025 that the Cézanne has never been recovered. In January 2000 the museum hung a Corot in its place.