The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

The story of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

A fishing boat is climbing a wave taller than its mast, the sail is tearing loose, one man is being sick over the side, and in the stern Christ is only now being shaken awake. Rembrandt painted it in 1633, at twenty-seven, and it is the only seascape he ever made. On the night of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and cut it out of its frame. It has not been seen since, and the museum still hangs the empty frame. Rembrandt put himself in the boat, in a blue cap, holding onto a rope and looking straight out at you.

On a wall, this is a tall, dark painting with one blaze of light. The dominant colors are storm gray, deep brown, and near-black water, with a break of pale gold sky on the left and the white of the foam and the sail. It suits a study, a den, a library, a hallway, or a bedroom with dark walls, and it fits traditional, nautical, masculine, and old-world interiors. We offer it up to the Medium at 16 × 19.9 in, the size that lets you find each of the fourteen faces, and the Small at 12 × 14.9 in is right above a desk or a hall table.

Rembrandt's The Night Watch is the same drama on land nine years later. Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave and Homer's The Gulf Stream are the two other great pictures of people in a boat that is losing. More from Rembrandt.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph taken before the theft, which is now the only way anyone sees this painting.