This is one of my favorite paintings of all time, and like everyone my age, i never had the chance to stand in front of it... To understand why, you have to go back to one night in Boston in 1990. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and the city is loud, crowded, and distracted. At 1:24 a.m., a car pulls up beside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and two men in police uniforms press the buzzer, saying they are responding to a disturbance. The guard breaks protocol and lets them in. Minutes later both night guards are handcuffed and duct-taped in the basement, and one of the thieves says, almost politely, "Gentlemen, this is a robbery." They are inside for eighty-one minutes. They leave with thirteen works of art, and the greatest of them is this one... A small fishing boat is being torn apart by a black sea. The mast strains, the sail has ripped, and a wave has crashed over the bow, tipping the whole vessel onto its side. Above, the sky is a wall of storm broken by a single shaft of light. The boat is crowded with panicking men: some haul on the ropes, some clutch the rigging, one is being sick over the side, and at the stern, the rest turn to Christ, begging him to save them. It is the moment from the Gospel of Mark, seconds before he stands and tells the wind to stop. Rembrandt painted it in 1633, at twenty-seven, just after arriving in Amsterdam and eager to prove what he could do. He never painted the open sea again. It is the only seascape he ever made. Now do something with me: count the disciples. There should be twelve. Look again, and you'll find thirteen. The extra man, gripping a rope with one hand and clutching his hat with the other, is the only one who has turned away from the storm. He is not watching the wave, or reaching for Christ. He is staring straight out of the painting, directly at you. That face is Rembrandt's own. He put himself in the boat, in the middle of the terror, staring out of the canvas across four centuries at whoever happens to be standing in front of it. Which is the cruelty of this whole thing: the thieves took a knife and cut the canvas out of its frame, and the rest of us have not laid eyes on it since... The theft remains the largest property crime in US history, and it has never been solved. The FBI has said it believes it knows who did it, and still, thirty-six years on, no-one has been arrested and not one of the thirteen works has come home. And the thought that some collector, some heir to a banking fortune, may be sitting in a private room at this very moment looking at this painting, while the rest of us cannot, is almost unbearable to think about. In the Dutch Room, where it hung, the Gardner keeps the frame on the wall exactly where it always was, empty, ragged at the edges where the canvas was cut away. The museum has explained why: they hang there, it says, "as symbols of hope awaiting their return." So the frame waits, and Rembrandt waits somewhere out there, still gripping his cap, still looking out of the storm at a world that is no longer allowed to look back…

This is a bookshop in Portugal