Pablo Picasso, she said, had personally donated the Cubist painting to the nation in 1949 five years after Hitler’s troops withdrew from the country, inscribing the words “for the Greek people, a tribute.
In that time the paintings were stripped of their frames before being spirited out of the gallery through a smashed balcony door after the alarm system was manipulated to send the sole guard, then on duty, in another direction.
An inquiry subsequently found that the National Gallery’s alarm system had not been upgraded for more than a decade.
The theft appeared so well organised that for years authorities had worked on the assumption an experienced gang was behind the crime.