Storied Rembrandt to Be Shown at the Getty

An early Rembrandt portrait that has not been on public view for more than two decades and has a lively criminal past — it was stolen at gunpoint from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, more than three decades ago — will re-emerge for several months, beginning on Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The 1632 painting, “Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak,” has been lent to the museum by an anonymous New York collector, the museum said yesterday, and will be exhibited through 2008. It was sold at auction to the collector in 1986 by its longtime owners, the heirs of Robert Treat Paine II, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, for what was then a record price for a Rembrandt, $10.3 million.

In 1975 the painting almost disappeared from view for good. It had been on loan from the Paine family to the Museum of Fine Arts for decades when two men purchased tickets to the museum around noon on one April day. They were discovered in the act of removing the Rembrandt from the wall, and when a guard ordered them to stop, one of the men pulled out a pistol and struck him.

As the thieves fled to a waiting car, the armed man fired three shots, hitting no one but adding a movie-scene flourish to what was then thought to be the most expensive art heist in American history.

The painting was recovered by state and federal officials in January 1976 in a cloak-and-dagger meeting in the parking lot of a Boston restaurant, where a man in a ski mask appeared and asked the law enforcement officials for the keys to the trunk of their car. He then told them to enter the restaurant and await a phone call.

When the call came, the men returned to the car and found the painting, wrapped in an old brown quilt. The United States attorney in Boston at the time, James N. Gabriel, said that there had been efforts by “underworld figures” to try to obtain the painting because of the rewards being offered for its return.