Theft of the Vermeer from Kenwood House

The theft of the Vermeer from Kenwood House was an anonymous, politically framed seizure of a seventeenth-century painting, used to demand that Dolours Price and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland. Its disappearance turned a work of art into leverage in the sisters’ continuing imprisonment and force-feeding, while its eventual return followed an appeal made in Dolours’s name.

The Theft and the Demand

In February 1974, nearly a year after the London bombings, a painting by Vermeer depicting a young girl plucking a narrow guitar was stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead. Two anonymous, typewritten letters were sent to The Times demanding that the Price sisters be returned to Northern Ireland. The writers threatened to burn the painting on St Patrick’s night, and included a sliver of its canvas as proof that they possessed it. The threat made the artwork both hostage and evidence: the demand was no longer only a political declaration, but was backed by a piece cut from the missing object itself.

The choice of painting carried an unusual personal connection. During a visit to London two years earlier, Dolours had stopped to look at this very Vermeer. Chrissie Price appealed publicly for the person who had taken it to return it unharmed, noting that Dolours, an art student, had made a special plea for the painting. That appeal placed concern for the artwork alongside the sisters’ demand for transfer, without resolving who had taken it or who had sent the letters.

Recovery and Significance

One evening in May, a suspicious package appeared 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 fears that it might be a bomb. It was the Vermeer. The painting had been returned unharmed, as Dolours had requested.

The episode’s reversal is stark: a work threatened with destruction as political ransom reappeared intact, concealed in an ordinary-looking parcel that first suggested another danger. The narrative does not identify the thieves or explain their precise relationship to the sisters’ campaign. It does establish the painting’s return after Chrissie’s appeal, and the coincidence that Dolours had once stood before the same picture that would later be taken in the sisters’ name.