Three works taken from the Whitworth

At about noon on Sunday 27 April 2003, staff at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester found bare patches on a wall of the Margaret Pilkington Room. Three works were missing. The Manchester Evening News reports that Greater Manchester Police were called at about 12.30pm. The gallery belongs to the University of Manchester. The thieves had come after it closed on Saturday evening. The exact hour is not known.

The works were all on paper. They were not oil paintings. One was a Vincent van Gogh, The Fortifications of Paris with Houses, painted in 1887 in watercolour, gouache, chalk and pencil, about 40 by 54 centimetres. The others were Pablo Picasso’s Poverty, from 1903, in pen and ink and watercolour, and Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape, made between 1891 and 1893. Some 2003 reports misprint the Van Gogh date as 1878. The Guardian put the value of the three at about 4 million pounds. That is a press estimate, not a sale price.

The Guardian reports that the thieves appear to have forced steel-covered doors at the back of the building. They took the two pictures nearest the door and a third from the end of the wall, and unscrewed them from their frames. The frames were never found. The two CCTV cameras in the room may not have seen them. A detective chief inspector from Greater Manchester Police called it a well-planned raid and “not a chance burglary”.

Shortly before 2am on Monday 28 April, an anonymous woman telephoned the police. The works were rolled together in one cardboard tube, with the Van Gogh sticking out. It lay by a disused public toilet block at the edge of Whitworth Park, about 200 metres from the gallery, in heavy rain. The press named the spot the “Loovre”. A note was with the tube. Written in dark blue ink in a childlike scrawl, it said the aim was not to steal but to show the gallery’s poor security. Reports differ slightly on the exact words. The police released a picture of the note on 29 April and asked the public to recognise the handwriting. The detective chief inspector said it suggested a “noble cause, however unfounded”. The gallery’s development director replied that it had CCTV, alarms and outside patrols, updated two years before and checked by police six months earlier.

The works came back damaged. The Van Gogh had a tear in one corner, creases and some paint loss. The Art Newspaper gives the tear as 12 centimetres, and other outlets give other sizes. The Picasso and Gauguin had small weather marks and needed new borders. The gallery’s paper conservator repaired the Van Gogh. She humidified and pressed it and mended the tear with Japanese tissue. The three works went back on the wall of the same room on Monday 19 May 2003, with better security.

No one has been charged. The Art Newspaper wrote in November 2023 that no one had been charged in 20 years. The Manchester Evening News wrote on 18 January 2025 that the thieves had never been identified. The sources found do not report any later development. The motive is also unknown. The Art Newspaper says it is a mystery whether the thief meant to expose weak security or found that the works could not be sold. The Van Gogh is still at the Whitworth. It was lent to the Royal Academy in London for the show Impressionists on Paper, which ran to 10 March 2024.