Book review: 'The Woman Who Stole Vermeer'

 

Rose Dugdale is 80 years old this year and practically an icon in Ireland where she romped and fought the British for years.

Always proud of her participation in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (which often denied links to her criminal acts), she sought to aid revolutionaries who worked to transfer IRA prisoners.

Adopting a new identify to contrast with that of her wealthy background, she used her largesse like a modern-day Robin Hood to benefit those in need, including criminals who were not adverse to violence when they deemed it necessary to achieve their goals, and she joined right in.

Johannes Vermeer, Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, 1670-1671, is one of the paintings Rose Dugdale helped steal. It is featured on the cover of The Woman Who Stole Vermeer by Anthony M. Amore/Wikimedia


Her metamorphosis is the thrust of the book, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer: The True* Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist by Anthony M. Amore, an interesting biography, especially for art enthusiasts, crime  readers, and scholars of feminist history.

Her attitudes were shaped by the 1960s antiwar movement raging in the U.S., a trip to Cuba, and the growing feminist revolution. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University.

Despite her revulsion of and public derision in courtrooms of the wealth and lifestyles of her parents, they never abandoned their daughter, always trying to maintain a relationship, any relationship. Ms. Dugdale took advantage of them, stealing from her own family.

For years she was able to elude police who considered her dangerous and often tried to track her.

She helped drop "bombs" of milk churns on a police station in 1974, the first helicopter bombing attack ever recorded on a police precinct in Ireland. (The bombs failed to detonate.)

In courtrooms, Ms. Dugdale frequently became angry over receiving a lighter sentence than her chums, a reflection, perhaps, of her status.

Her many successful criminal ventures embarrassed the government until she was captured after leaving her driver's license in a stolen getaway car.

She's the only woman to have conducted a major art heist, targeting the Russborough House, reportedly the "longest house" and "one of the finest great houses in Ireland" with one of the finest national private art collections. She knew the place well, better than her comrades who could not identify the priceless works of art, but Ms. Dugdale could. 

The robbers gagged and kidnapped one of the owners who thought he was the target of a homicide. (He wasn't).

Confined for nine years, in prison she gave birth to her only child and, later, after the boy's father, Eddie Gallagher was captured (and sentenced to a longer term), they were married inside the walls, the first recorded marriage of convicts while in prison in Ireland.

For those who follow crime and are continually perplexed by the still missing paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1990), this is a good read. The author, coincidentally, is director of security for the Gardner.

The National Gallery of Art's retired curator Arthur Wheelock, a Vermeer expert, is quoted several times in the book which lacks an index.

* The publisher's web copy of the cover lacks the word "true" while the copy I have includes it.

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