Kenwood House, in Hampstead, is significant in the account of the Price sisters’ imprisonment because it was both the setting of Dolours Price’s earlier visit to a Vermeer painting and the place from which that painting was stolen in 1974. The coincidence connected a specific work of art, a prisoner’s personal memory, and a campaign demanding the sisters’ return to Northern Ireland; the painting was eventually recovered in London and returned unharmed.

Setting and earlier visit

Two years before the theft, Dolours Price visited Kenwood House during a trip to London and stopped to look at the seventeenth-century Vermeer later taken from the house. It depicted a young girl plucking a narrow guitar. The earlier visit gave the painting a particular significance in the later story: it was not simply one of several valuable objects selected for a ransom scheme, but a work Dolours had actually seen.

That connection was recalled publicly after the theft. Chrissie Price described Dolours as an art student and said she had made a special appeal on behalf of the painting. The detail brought Dolours’s interest in art into a public campaign otherwise defined by imprisonment and hunger striking. Kenwood House thus enters the narrative first as a place she had visited freely, then as the source of an object made part of a political demand concerning her and Marian.

The theft and the demand

In February 1974, nearly a year after the sisters’ bombings and while they were still being force-fed, the Vermeer was stolen from Kenwood House. Anonymous, typewritten letters were sent to The Times demanding that Dolours and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland. The writers threatened to burn the painting on St Patrick’s night if the demand was not met. One letter included a sliver of canvas as evidence that the threat was real.

The theft turned the painting into leverage in a dispute over where the sisters would serve their sentences. The letters linked a cultural object removed from Kenwood House to their imprisonment elsewhere, making the threatened destruction of the artwork a means of pressing for their transfer. The account identifies the letters as anonymous; it does not establish who stole the painting or who sent them. Chrissie Price’s appeal was instead directed to whoever had taken it: she asked that the work be returned unharmed and emphasized Dolours’s plea on its behalf.

Recovery and narrative significance

In May, a suspicious newspaper-wrapped package tied with string appeared in a churchyard near Smithfield Market in London. Police officers came to the Church of St Bartholomew the Great amid fears that the package might be a bomb. It was the Vermeer. The painting had been returned, as Dolours had requested, and was recovered without the threatened destruction described in the letters.

The contrast between the threat and the recovery gives Kenwood House’s place in the episode its force. The painting was removed from its home, made proof of an anonymous threat, and then found abandoned in a London churchyard; meanwhile, Dolours’s earlier visit and her appeal helped make its fate legible to the public. Its return resolved the immediate danger to the artwork, but the episode also shows how the Price sisters’ imprisonment could be invoked through actions directed at something far removed from the prison itself. Kenwood House anchors that chain of events: the work’s original setting gives the theft its point of departure, while Dolours’s memory of seeing it supplies the personal connection that shaped the appeal for its safe return.