Vermeer painting stolen from Kenwood House

The Vermeer painting stolen from Kenwood House became an unlikely object in the campaign surrounding Dolours Price and Marian Price’s imprisonment: its theft supplied leverage for a demand on their behalf, while its eventual return followed Dolours Price’s appeal for the artwork to be spared. The episode tied a painting she had once visited in a London house to the sisters’ continuing hunger strike and imprisonment.

The Painting and Its Theft

In February 1974, nearly a year after the sisters’ London bombings, a seventeenth-century Vermeer depicting a young girl plucking a narrow guitar was stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead. Two anonymous typewritten letters reached The Times, demanding that Dolours Price and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland. The writers threatened to burn the painting on St Patrick’s night, and enclosed a sliver of its canvas as evidence that the threat was genuine.

The painting had a personal point of connection for Dolours Price: during a visit to Kenwood House two years earlier, she had stopped to look at this very work. Chrissie Price appealed publicly for whoever had taken it to return it unharmed, noting that Dolours Price, an art student, had made a special plea for the painting. The appeal placed the work not only within a political demand but also within a specific history of attention: it was an artwork Dolours Price had already encountered and asked to be protected.

Recovery in London

One evening in May, a suspicious package was found in a churchyard near Smithfield Market. Wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, it prompted officers to gather at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great amid heightened tension and fears that it might be a bomb. It was not: the package contained the Vermeer, returned just as Dolours Price had requested.

Significance

The painting’s role shifted sharply over the course of the episode. First an artwork taken from a London house, it became the subject of a ransom demand backed by a physical piece of its own canvas; later, its return arrived in a package that initially looked like a possible explosive device. That movement between art object, evidence, threatened target, and recovered work made the painting a material link between the sisters’ imprisonment and the public pressure exerted in their name. The account does not identify who stole or returned it, leaving the object’s passage through the episode visible while its agents remain unknown.