At the same time, London is the most important art-trading centre in Europe and stolen art pours into Britain for sale.So what’s actually being done about it? Interpol acts as an international communications centre on art thefts; it receives notifications from the police forces of member countries and circulates them around the globe. Once every six months, it issues posters featuring the six “Most Wanted Works of Art”. These posters mix world-class museum items indiscriminately with junk-shop decorations – it seems no one in Lyons knows the difference. A typical selection of Interpol’s “Most Wanted” art works is illustrated here.Then there’s the Art Loss Register, a private UK company run with the aim of returning a profit to its shareholders, which include Sotheby’s, Christie’s, the British Antique Dealers’ Association, the London Society of Art Dealers, Lloyds of London and a swathe of insurance companies. It has offices in New York, London and Australia, and employs eight young art historians. The ALR runs a database of art stolen worldwide, classified according to sensible art-historical criteria, and including good photographic images. The art historians check through auction catalogues searching for a match and comb caches of art seized by the police.

Over a period of six years they have found some 850 stolen items.There is also Trace magazine, published monthly out of Plymouth with photographs and descriptions of recent thefts. Trace is now part of the Thesaurus Group, which runs a computerised search service of art on offer at provincial auctions. If you want to buy a particular type of artwork, they’ll keep you posted; equally, they’ll search the auction catalogues for your stolen art. And in February, the Oxford greetings-card publisher Duns Tew will be launching a new line of cards featuring stolen art. “Some of them will be famous thefts and others the kind of thing you might spot in a little auction in Banbury,” says managing director Christopher Woodhead.

Send a greetings card and help nail a burglar! !Above: The Crucifixion by Pieter Lastman (Dutch 1583-1633). Stolen from the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam on a hot sticky night in July 1994. Lastman was Rembrandt’s teacher and the museum contained two paintings by him, this and The Lamentations of Abel. The theft took place at around 2am on a Sunday, while the cafe at the other end of the street was still making a lot of noise. The thieves forced the double-sided 17th- century oak door, grabbed the paintings and left. The police arrived within three minutes but there was no sign of themRight: Sybil of Cleves by Lucas Cranach the Younger (German 1515-86).

This belonged to the Margrave of Baden Baden and was included in the sale of treasures from his ancestral castle organised by Sotheby’s in October 1995. She was lotted up with a companion portrait of her husband, Johann Friedrich of Saxony, and the pair were estimated to fetch DM50- 70,000 (pounds 20-28,000). They were exhibited with other paintings in a Perspex box in a room with a security guard; during the packed pre-sale exhibition someone lifted the box and took SybilLeft: Precolumbian pottery figure, found at the Sinu archaeological site in Columbia and stolen from the National Museum in Bogota in 1995. This is a run- down old museum that would be easy to steal fromAbove: an untitled abstract of 1923, composed mainly of geometric shapes, by Vassily Kandinsky (Russian 1866-1944).

This framed watercolour, signed in the lower right-hand corner with a monogram, was taken from a parked car in Nijmegen, Holland – it was on its way to a commercial art gallery. Interpol gives it a value of 450,000 Dutch Gilders (pounds 156,000). Kandinsky is regarded as the father of abstract painting and his works, whether in oil or watercolour, are seldom on the market, most of them being in the hands of museumsAbove: a typical Interpol poster advertising `The Most Wanted Works of Art’. A new poster is issued twice a year, always illustrating six items that have recently been stolen. It is up to the police forces of member countries to request the inclusion of an item on an Interpol poster.