A Rotterdam museum burglary has netted paintings by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and others – but it is not the first time that a number of famous multimillion-dollar works have gone missing.

Midnight in Paris

Henri Matisse – Pastoral, 1905

Pablo Picasso – Pigeon with Green Peas, 1911

In May 2010, in the small hours of the morning at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, a masked intruder took advantage of a broken alarm system, clipped a padlock, smashed a window and stole a Picasso, a Matisse and three other masterpieces worth €94 million. Fifteen minutes later, the intruder slipped back into the night unnoticed, leaving behind nothing except empty frames. Though his movements were caught on one of the museum’s functioning cameras, the three security guards on duty overnight said they “saw nothing”. The case remains unsolved.

The Swiss job

Paul Cézanne − Boy in the Red Vest, 1894-1895

Claude Monet − Poppy Field Near Vetheuil, ca 1880

Zurich police called it an “entirely new dimension in criminal culture”. In February 2008, three men, wearing ski masks and dark clothing, entered the Buehrle Museum half-an-hour before closing on a Sunday. While one used a pistol to force museum personnel to the floor, the two others went and collected four paintings by Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth €124 million. The van Gogh and Monet paintings were recovered in 2006.

Edvard Munch – The Scream, 1895

Broad daylight

In August 2004, two Edvard Munch masterpieces, The Scream and Madonna, were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, by three men wielding firearms in a daylight raid. The thieves forced the museum guards to lie down on the floor while they escaped in a car, later found abandoned. The paintings, insured for €107 million, were recovered with little damage two years later.

Rembrant − The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633

Appearances can be deceptive

In March 1990, two thieves dressed in police uniform fooled staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to pull off the biggest art theft in US history. The pair gained entry at night by posing as Boston police officers and stating that they were responding to an emergency call. Once inside, the thieves handcuffed the two security guards and took them into the basement, where they were secured to pipes and their hands, feet and heads duct-taped. The thieves made off with some €229 million in art, including works by Dutch masters Vermeer, Rembrandt and French painter Manet. The paintings remain missing. Now, 22 years on, the Gardner robbery remains the largest single property theft of all time.

When Mona Lisa was not smiling

Leonardo da Vinci − Mona Lisa, 1503-1506

This theft helped create the celebrity status that Mona Lisa wields to this day. In August 1911 Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic masterpiece was taken from Paris’s Louvre Museum. Pablo Picasso was among those detained and taken in for questioning by investigating police.

The Louvre mourned because it thought the painting had been lost forever. It took two years to discover the real thief: art historians say a Louvre employee had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom cupboard and walking out with it hidden under his coat when the Louvre had closed for the day.