EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
An empty frame remains where Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee was once displayed. Picture provided by the FBI showing the empty frames for missing paintings after the theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The Gardner Museum’ s Raphael Room, with its striking red walls and its collection of 15th- and 16th-century Italian Renaissance paintings.
items, nothing has ever been recovered. Christ in the Storm is“ in the wind.” 1
Boston’ s Gardner Museum became the home of Christ in the Storm when it opened in 1903. Gardner and her husband Jack purchased the Rembrandt in 1898 shortly before Jack’ s untimely death. Isabella went on to create her museum in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston not far from Fenway Park. 2
Isabella was the daughter of a wealthy New York steel magnate. Her husband Jack was a wealthy Boston brahmin. The couple travelled the world. Isabella was a passionate art collector who eventually began to focus on acquiring only the greatest masterpieces. Jack, an acquiescent husband, left the collecting to Isabella while he managed the family business.
Isabella’ s dream of building a museum where she could safely display her art treasures to the public began to take shape towards the end of the 19th century. She paid attention to every detail of the museum and left a healthy endowment for operating it after her passing. However, as the value of her masterpieces increased dramatically, the museum failed to properly assess the increased risk of theft. Security was lax. The security guards were poorly paid and poorly trained college students. The security system was lacking, and none of the stolen art was insured.
Ramsey observes that,“ The empty frame is a note from the thief that tells Isabella that though she may want to create something beyond the reach of death, that is not something this world affords. She can dress up the pain all she likes, but nothing she has made will last forever. This is a world where thieves break in and steal. It is a place where beautiful things are destroyed, where precious treasures are sold for a pittance, where talents are buried in the ground, never to be seen again.” It is a world of ever-present risk.
No one understood the history of risk better than Peter Bernstein. His book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk is a classic tale of how humans through the centuries dealt with risk and how the quantification of financial risk in the 1950s paved the way for modern risk management techniques. His key insight about risk is worth restating in full:
The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers
who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.
A rational process of risk-taking … provided the missing ingredient that has propelled science and enterprise into the world of speed, power, instant communication, and sophisticated finance that marks our own age. Their discoveries about the nature of risk, and the art and science of choice, lie at the core of our modern market economy that nations around the world are hastening to join.
Although Christ in the Storm appears on the front cover of the book’ s dust jacket and as an illustration in the chapter on marine insurance, Bernstein never discusses it in the text of the book. 3 This is unfortunate because we can learn a great deal about risk from the artist, from the painting itself and from the 1990 robbery that deprived us of this grand work.
The painting and the artist will be addressed in subsequent columns. The theft illustrates the importance of continual reassessment of risk exposure, especially when assets experience dramatic increases in value. The Gardner Museum, according to security expert Ulrich Boser,“ has also become one of the most wellprotected art institutions in New England.” Nevertheless, the whereabouts of
6 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2025 | www. MoAF. org